Although it was said that there was nothing possible due to the wind, Marcel Hirscher unpacked the speed ski again the day before the combination. As his coach Michael Pircher told us, they had to go through with it because there was still too much time left after the training sessions. The effort was worth it, Hirscher won his first Olympic gold medal in Jeongseon thanks to his excellent downhill run.
“A hell of a descent! With number two and a wind line, which is atypical. That was not so easy for us. We have already had to take a good look at the precursors to see exactly which line to choose. It was a tremendous increase for the training, from 3.6 to 1.3 seconds behind,”Pircher cheered. It was all basically a set-up thing, he said.
Five laps on Monday, Aksel Lund Svindal and Hannes Reichelt were still training on long battens,”We had two good sparring partners and tried different set-ups again. And found a pretty reasonable one we have used today. That’s why this perfect descent came with a short time lag,”explained the coach of the six-time overall World Cup winner and world champion.
Pircher clearly stated what Hirscher would never have said:”Our goal was gold, not silver. The starting situation was quite good after the descent. Alexis Pinturault also drove a very strong downhill, but we knew that we could catch up the three tenths. However, there is also a need for a certain risk in the slalom, tackling was no longer called for.”
But he drove a huge slalom, unbelievable, even there the set-up was not easy. Today, even tears have run down my eyes, although I am such a cool dog,”Pircher confessed with shiny eyes.
The fact that the Olympic gold medal was already gone after the combi meant that the very big goal, which one still had, had been achieved.”What else can come? Our target was a golden, not three silver ones. We have one of them, now Marcel can ride in giant slalom and slalom without any problems. And I don’t give a shit what happens now. We wanted one. What’s yet to come is surrender. We now have everything in our pockets that he has planned for his career.”
Pircher hadn’t seen the new Olympic champion at this time and congratulated him personally. He’ll greet him with the words “you maniac!”.