Lena Dürr was considered a great ski hope, but at some point she stood there and waxed her skis herself. It was a turning point. Now Dürr could rewrite the story of her career – if only it weren’t for the second runs.
In a moment of great disappointment, Lena Dürr distanced herself, at least linguistically, and maybe also from herself. “You just know you can’t push your thing through like that”, said Durr. She said one, and also meant herself. It was about risk and balancing, about slopes with and without furrows, and about second passes where the first are last. She spoke of a reversal of things.
That was on Saturday, it was day one of the World Cup slalom in Levi, Finland, and Dürr started the second run as the leader. But then something happened that has happened to her recently. Which should be repeated on Sunday, the second day in Levi.
Dürr drove well, but not as well as in the first race. Others drove very well, including Mikaela Shiffrin, she won on both days. Dürr finished fourth, of course it wasn’t a bad result, but it was almost a disappointment.
Dürr and the darn second rounds
Maybe she had avoided the risk in the second run, maybe she had to struggle with the pitfalls of a rutted track as the last and penultimate driver. Such a descent is a complicated matter, sometimes a course looks like a very dark forest of poles. In any case, for Dürr it was once again a darn second round.
At the end of the second day, Dürr was supposed to judge her World Cup start. she found him “not good and not bad”, and she said: “The ending has yet to be written differently.”
Artificial snow, tears, ski wax
It happened to her at times last season when she was first in three races after round one but never won. When she was already considered an Olympic champion, but Dürr, 31, ended up sitting in Beijing’s artificial snow and crying. When the medal on the neck glittered silver and not gold.
The story of the skier Lena Dürr is one that tells of talent and the ups and downs of an athlete who was considered a German ski hope a decade ago when she won bronze with the team at the World Championships. Who suddenly quarreled, doubted, even changed the equipment supplier. Missed the Olympics in Sochi. “Things only went uphill for years”said Dürr once, “now all of a sudden not anymore”.
When Dürr had to wax her own skis
The Süddeutsche Zeitung once wrote about the time that followed that Dürr was working “like a pilot steering an airplane into even greater turbulence with each maneuver”. And Dürr maneuvered diligently, sometimes in this direction, then in the opposite direction. At some point it was enough for those responsible around the then head coach Jürgen Graller, they withdrew Dürr from squad status for six months.
Dürr no longer had any squad training and no one to take over the organization of her sporting existence. So sometimes she stood there herself and waxed her skis, she found a training group and thought about it. Dürr once said that she didn’t really understand the measure at first. Today she says: “That made a positive impression on me.”
Dürr says today: “Winning the World Cup is the big goal”
And indeed, skier Dürr has probably never skied better than this year. Most recently, she sometimes talked about what the past season had done to her. It was the season in which Dürr often led after a first round but never won. You now have one “different feeling”she no longer doubts, says Dürr. “A World Cup victory is the big goal.” It would be a first in her career.
In general, this is now a phase in which the skier Lena Dürr has the opportunity to add a few chapters to the story about her career. A few years ago this would hardly have been thought possible.
They could be about the late success of an athlete who has always been talented, someone who has long been considered a ski hope but has fallen deeply. Dürr could thus fulfill a wish, she would rewrite the ending. It would be a reversal of things.