Beijing Olympics, Lara Gut and the year of grace: from Cortina to Beijing she has always won

From the Cortina Olympia to the Beijing Olympics. In twelve months she has taken everything that was still missing from an already special career. Lara Gut-Behrami, thirty-year-old from Ticino with Italian blood, won the Olympic super-G, closing the open account with the Games, she who in Vancouver 2010 had to forfeit due to a hip injury; she who in Sochi 2014 she had taken the bronze in the descent, but only 10/100 from the gold of Tina Maze; that in PyeongChang 2018, returned after the knee crack of the previous year, she had missed the bronze always in super-G for 1/100 and the gold for 12/100. In short, the Olympic title seemed bewitched. Until today, after the prodigious recovery in the second heat that on Monday gave her the bronze in giant, she finally took the five circles.

A year of triumphs

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A year ago, at the Cortina World Cup, he had already made peace with the World Cup, in which he presented himself with 5 medals around his neck, but not even one gold. She arrived at the foot of the Tofane and dominated the super-G and then the giant (mocking Mikaela Shiffrin for 2/100), with the addition of the bronze in the descent. Now her career, in addition to a certainly not enviable sequence of injuries, has practically everything, because in the collection of the girl from Comano, the 2015/16 absolute World Cup, three super-G cups and the beauty of 34 successes, which make her the ninth most victorious woman in the top circuit.

Uphill season

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And to think that this year things hadn’t been going very well for the Ticino blonde. Before her the scary fall in the super-G in St. Mortiz, the day after the first victory of the season, then the positivity at Covid, which got her out of the way for three weeks. She returned on January 8 to the giant of Kranjska Gora, seven days later she was already back on the top step of the podium, in the Zauchensee descent, that of Sofia Goggia’s first fall. And there it was understood that at her Olympics her name could not have been excluded from the lot of favorites for at least one race between super-G, downhill, giant and combined.

A little bit of Italy

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A Ticino father (Pauli, her mentor-manager) and an Italian mother (Gabriella Almici, from Brescia from Zone, a small town-terrace on Lake Iseo), Lara is married to the footballer Valon Behrami, a midfielder of Kosovar origin and former holder of the Swiss national team , who coincidentally from this season – after experiences in Lazio, Fiorentina, Napoli, Udinese and Genoa – plays in Brescia (Serie B), the team of his wife’s maternal origins. And when she is not around the world, the couple live in Udine, where she said she wanted to go and live when she closes her career. Meanwhile, however, her career is far from over.