With six victories and twelve additional podium places in the World Cup, winning the big crystal ball and two World Championship silver medals, Eva Pinkelnig became the best ski jumper in the world last winter. The Austrian now reveals in a podcast interview what success has done to her life, how she deals with her new role as number 1 in the world and what goals she still has at 35.
Eva Pinkelnig’s biography is undoubtedly extraordinary: the lively Austrian only started ski jumping at the age of 24, and ten years later she became the overall World Cup winner. But the Vorarlberg native’s life wasn’t always all uphill: three serious falls and some life-threatening injuries, such as a ruptured spleen in December 2020, paved her way.
But since the end of last season on March 24th, Pinkelnig can rightly call itself number 1 in the ski jumping world. Not surprisingly, the time in between was one “in which a lot of things were new. For me personally, but also from the outside,” as she now says in an interview with Ski jumping podcast “Flugshow” declared.
In addition to a new coaching team, the 35-year-old had to deal with a flood of media appointments. “That was the thing that took up the most time. There were also a lot of cool things, like ‘Welcome Austria’. The effort involved in all the travel was very big,” she reported.
That’s exactly why, in coordination with the new head coach Bernhard Metzler and his assistant Thomas Diethart, with whom she has a close relationship of trust, she decided against taking part in competitions in the Summer Grand Prix series in order to “use the remaining time to train in peace and well.”
Ski jumping: “tongue-in-cheek seasonal goal” for Eva Pinkelnig
Her win rate in the summer is still 100 percent, because she only competed at the Austrian large hill championships and won gold there.
And that, even though the training focus was completely different: “We focused on the basics, like the previous summer, and jumped a lot on the normal hill. I only went to the Austrian championships in Bischofshofen with very few large hill jumps But I saw that the system works there too.”
This is exactly what she wants to achieve over a magical mark in the coming season: “My tongue-in-cheek goal for the season is the 200 meters that I still want to fly in Vikersund. That would be really cool.” However, like every season since her World Cup debut in December 2014, she doesn’t want to be tied down to a concrete goal for the season, so the “jump by jump” approach remains her credo.
Eva Pinkelnig: Austria’s first female ski jumper to be named Sportswoman of the Year
On October 12th, Eva Pinkelnig was the first ski jumper ever to be voted Austria’s Sportswoman of the Year, which “still gives me goosebumps.” A month later, she still gets emotional when she thinks back to the moment when she accepted the award from Alpine skiing icon Marlies Raich: “When I turned towards the audience, I saw that the whole hall was standing. It was a moment of incredible appreciation.”
Shortly after the gala in Vienna, Pinkelnig flew on vacation to California. There she was able to process her successful and emotional last twelve months “by sitting at the sunsets by the sea with tears in my eyes, out of sheer gratitude for everything I was able to experience.”
However, despite her fabulous season, she doesn’t see herself as a star or team leader. There is a flat hierarchy within the strong Austrian women’s national team, which wants to defend the Nations Cup. “We communicate at eye level and with appreciation and respect – no matter how old or tall you are or what you have achieved in sport. We know about each other’s strengths and skills and can always get help when we need it,” she said Reigning overall World Cup winner.
She had already been confronted with this title win before the World Championships in Planica at the end of February, which was “quite normal” and the job of the reporter. She also found the questions about the possible win of the large crystal ball to be an “incredible appreciation” because “these experts trust me, little Eva with all her injuries and scars, to have this crystal ball or ‘this stupid glass cup’, as Marcel Hirscher once called it But mentally I always placed the ball with those who had already won it, like Marcel Hirscher, Mikaela Shiffrin, Lindsey Vonn, Thomas Morgenstern and whatever they were called.” Only after the last competition in Lahti on March 24, 2023 did the moment come when she accepted the idea and also the title win and “said: ‘Now you’re with me’.”
Eva Pinkelnig experienced the only big negative moment of last season at the World Championships in Planica on the day of the individual decision on the large hill. Before that competition, she cried in her hotel room at lunchtime. “There are things that are prescribed in being a top athlete and that you cannot change. And then there are things that are ignored. Like when I as a woman say ‘I can’t do it anymore’ and in Planica it was exactly that these moments,” she said of the events.
After eight days of a full program, she “simply didn’t have the air to breathe, the surroundings were too much. Then you make statements that you regret afterwards. But we worked through it well and that’s what counts in Trondheim in a year and a half avoid.”
She made it clear in the “air show” that this episode did not change her satisfaction with her results with silver in the team jumping, fourth and sixth places in the mixed team and on the large hill, but especially the individual silver on the normal hill : “But I was always aware that the individual silver was great and I don’t want to exchange that. Not even for gold, because Katharina Schmid simply deserved it.”
Her German competitor took second place in the overall World Cup rankings last winter. From December 1st, the German-Austrian duel in Lillehammer, Norway, will enter a new round on the two friends’ favorite ski jumps – and Pinkelnig may be writing the next chapter of her extraordinary biography.
Luis Holuch