The former junior skier and now journalist Helen Scott-Smith reported in a report with the standard according to Nicola Werdenigg as the second, known by name woman about a rape in the alpine world cup circus. A serviceman of an Austrian skier is said to have raped the Swiss woman, as Werdenigg was born in 1958, in Aspen in 1993.
Scott-Smith, who for decades has also been reporting about tennis for Austrian media from the alpine world cup circus and for some time now, told us about an “unculture” among Austrian coaches in the 1970s. Scott-Smith knows the world cup ski circus from two sides: as a young athlete and still today as a journalist.
The British Ski Federation became aware of the daughter of a Briton and a Swiss woman when the 15-year-old downhill and giant slalom specialist hit it off very well at a FIS race in Wengen. She accepted the offer to train with the British team and to fight for a place on the starting grid for the 1976 Olympic Games in Innsbruck.
“We, the British, had two Austrian coaches. We were at the British National Championships in Scotland, in Aviemore. I flew there when I was 16 years old from Geneva alone, that was an adventure. There were no cell phones, I didn’t have a credit card, just a few pounds in my pocket. My father had already paid for my room in the team hotel in advance,”said Scott-Smith in the “Standard”. When she arrived late in the evening, she was told that the coach had the room key.
“The coach then came and said that the association had not booked enough rooms, but I could sleep in his room. In his room! This was my room, my father paid for it. I was really shocked,”says Scott-Smith. She then managed to get a room elsewhere at short notice.
Also in the 70’s many Austrian coaches were working abroad, also to help non-skinations. Helen Scott-Smith would not have made it into a national team either in Switzerland or Austria at the time. The coaches shared the 15-? to 20-year-old girls’ fresh meat’ (fresh meat, note) they called them, and they helped themselves,”Scott-Smith described and added:” This was really a story of the Austrian coaches. It was an Austrian culture, an unculture. Of course not all Austrian coaches were like that, but they weren’t just individual coaches, they were more. Before, when I was driving in Switzerland with the Swiss coaches, everything was fine.”
In the English team with the Austrian coaches she was “scared”:”One of them kept asking me if I would go to dinner with him. Just you and me, he said. It was clear that he wanted to go more than just eat. There was always power and desire. In autumn 1975, the coaches told me that I was not on the Olympic team for Innsbruck,’ You didn’t do everything we wanted you to do,’ they said. And I knew what they meant by that.”
Looking back on this time, she is proud to have been strong enough not to want to be part of the team at all costs. Others, she says, have done and have done everything in their power.
It is a cruel irony of this story, however, that she was not able to defend herself as a woman twice as old as she was:”It wasn’t until years later that something happened to me, when I was already a journalist. Scott-Smith returned to the Ski World Cup in 1987 as a freelance journalist who supplied newspapers, radio stations and TV stations. She also moderated press conferences for various race organisers – or translated them.
As one of the few women in the journalist at that time, she made sure that she was perceived as being serious:”I was always nice, was always serious, I never walked around half-naked, everyone knew I was only interested in business. I was often with the service people, and they told me the best background stories. Decisive questions are which driver gets which ski and why and how the ski is prepared. I went where other journalists didn’t like going. That’s how I got stories that I could sell well.”
At the US races in Colorado, what she had been afraid of 20 years earlier happened to her “When I was 34 years old, I was raped. From the serviceman of an Austrian skier. After the races in Aspen in March 1993, the team stayed in Denver, all of them staying in the same hotel to fly back to Europe the next day,”said Scott-Smith. Shortly after midnight there was a knock on my hotel room door and I opened it. He attacked me, it didn’t take more than two or three minutes.”
She also has to put up with the question why she did not react immediately:”Who would have believed me? I opened the door, my mistake, my fault. It hurt like crazy, it still hurts now. Thank God I didn’t get pregnant.”
In retrospect, rape in the present is less of a nuisance to her than the pressure she was subjected to at 16.17. Scott-Smith may be risking difficulties in her current field of work in the ski circus with this outing. If the ski sport should react negatively, she might leave it behind. She turned more towards tennis anyway.
“I’ve wanted to tell you this for a long time, I wanted to get rid of it. I just didn’t want to be the first. It is good that Nicola Werdenigg has brought this courage to bear. I know that there are many women in skiing who have been through a lot. Many of them have been through far more than I have.”