At the beginning of the week, biathlete Felix Leitner surprisingly announced the end of his career at just 28 years old. In an interview, the Austrian revealed exciting background information about his decision and reported that he had “lost the joy and fire for the sport.”
Felix Leitner revealed in an interview with “Sport1” that hanging up his skis was “not a short-term decision”: “I thought about it for a long time. That’s why it fits the way it is now. I had an operation on my intervertebral discs two weeks ago, and from that point on it was actually clear.”
As a result of a herniated disc, which became noticeable again at the end of August, training had been “out of the question” since August, the 2018 individual European champion continued to tell the TV station: “A few days before, I was still thinking about what would happen next.”
The Tyrolean was long considered his country’s most promising biathlete. He became youth and junior world champion three times, and in 2018 he also won the European singles championship title. But Leitner was subsequently unable to establish himself at the top of the World Cup. Recently, Leitner was no longer even included in the ÖSV squad.
Biathlon: Leitner misses the trust of the ÖSV bosses
“Because I didn’t have the environment in Austria in which I was supported, in which I felt comfortable and noticed that everyone wanted the best for me, I gradually lost the joy and fire for sport over the last few hard years,” the biathlete expresses clear criticism of the association: “That’s what you need in competitive sports to be successful.”
He suspects that the fact that he wasn’t even nominated for the B or C squad was a “defiant reaction” from the ÖSV: “I started spending my summers away from the association two years ago and only rejoined the rest of the team before the winters. Apparently that wasn’t welcomed.”
This has “already hurt him somewhere,” reports Leitner, and adds: “There’s just a lot going on in Austrian biathlon at the moment. I don’t want to go into that any further. I don’t want to pillory any individual people and it’s not my job to improve things within the ÖSV.”