Alpine Skiing: Sexual violence in the Ski World Cup: former racer racer raises accusations

Now the #metoo debate is also reaching the Alpine Ski World Cup. The former world-class runner Nicola Werdenigg (formerly Spieß) raises serious accusations against skiing in the 1970s.

“There have been assaults, sexualized violence. From trainers, from supervisors, from colleagues, from service people. I was a teenager who saw strange things among adults,”says the fourth of the 1976 Olympic downhill race in Innsbruck.

In concrete terms, Werdenigg talks about a rape that happened to her in 1974:”When I was 16 years old, two men drunk me, one of them raped me,”says the 59-year-old today. The culprit was a male team mate,”That’s what kept me down for years. I didn’t talk to anyone about it because I was so ashamed. Because it was a teammate, too. I blamed myself, as young women often blame me for getting drunk.”

Other women have not fared much better in the World Cup team. A team colleague secretly filmed sexual intercourse with a ski racer:”The video was played to the team shortly afterwards. It was a joke back then. Nothing happened to him, she was ashamed and threw the sport away. The woman was ruined. It was cruel, but that’s the way it was back then.”

Another group of ski racers were lured into a hotel room under the pretext of advertising shots, where pornographic material was subsequently created. Bulimia was a widespread disease in this environment. An older girl has started it, and we in the women’s team have copied it. “For ten years I have maltreated my youthful body by wildly refilling and emptying.”

In addition, Werdenigg reports on a horrible experience in the ski secondary school when she tried to rape a school colleague while at the same time the director of the home watched as she was masturbating:”The act of rape was missing, I was able to defend myself with a childish survival strategy at the time. Screaming didn’t help, the kick in the abdomen did. The fact that the man who staged this action out of contempt for women experienced satisfaction in front of my room door was the first major shock in my life,”says the daughter of Erika Mahringer (Austrian athlete of the year 1951).

The famous ski high school in Stams explicitly excludes Werdenigg from these accusations:”Stams was a refuge. I’ve never seen anything suspicious there. I never found a trainer or teacher there strange. This school offered me a completely new form of socialization.”

Anna Veith recently emphasized at Sport am Sonntag that she was not confronted with assaults in her career. It is quite possible that the hideous practices of the 1970s are now a thing of the past. However, Werdenigg still takes a critical view of today’s image of women:

“I hear people in the inn talking. Anna Veith is smart, so is Michaela Kirchgasser, and only Lindsey Vonn. But what kind of horse is that? And how ugly does she look? That sound is normal, and who’s gonna bump into it? Just a moral activist. But I have hope the next generation will do better. My son is more feminist than I am.”