Sometimes it’s the little things that give you courage. However, Lena Dürr has already achieved something very big on Sunday in Copper Mountain, probably the greatest thing that a ski racer can achieve in slalom at the moment, because there is one that cannot be missed. Seen this way, the German didn’t pay much attention to the details after her second place. The words flowed out of the athlete from SV Germering, who is usually not prone to exuberance. She was “incredibly happy” and spoke of a “cool slope” and a “nice weekend”, which had already started very well for Dürr on Saturday with sixth place in the giant slalom and thus the best career result in this discipline.
But much more surprising things happened in Colorado, in this slalom at around 3,000 meters altitude, and in more ways than one. For the first time, Mikaela Shiffrin was not the fastest in a slalom run this Alpine World Cup winter. She still won by a generous 1.57 seconds, but she had already gained a large part of it on Dürr in the first round. The feat of being better than the American was achieved by the young Caitline McFarlane from France, who benefited from a worse first run and therefore an earlier starting number on the weakening slope. It took 18 hundredths of a second from Shiffrin. So it’s possible to beat the record-breaking woman, but maybe only in one round. Dürr was at least better than Shiffrin in two sections.
“Leap forward made”
Dürr then took care of the other astonishing event. Finally she was better in the second run than in the first. “I’m happy that I’ve once again taken a leap forward and not backwards,” she said. The fact that her coach Markus Lenz set the course in the second run may not have been a disadvantage, but Dürr attributes it more to her driving style. “In the first round,” she admits, “it didn’t really come together.” You, the rather soft slopes and the skis. In the final everything came together, Dürr defied the difficult conditions and improved by seven places. She last made similar progress in Courchevel at the beginning of the year. She also made it onto the podium in eighth place.
If Dürr has sometimes had to accept criticism over the past four years, after she finally made it into the podium ranks at the age of 30, it was because she too often missed a good starting point. Even at very important races like the Olympic Games in Beijing. As the leader, she missed the medal by a few hundredths of a second after the first round. It is this experience in 2022, this “probably the most intense day in my life” that drives her now at 34 years old. She has made peace with Beijing and looks back on it “with a lot of positive emotions,” she says again and again. But in Cortina d’Ampezzo next February she wants to do better. An Olympic medal would be a perfect finale to a long but lately successful career.
And she has done a lot in preparation so that she can compete in medal form at only her third Winter Games. It was about “new stimuli,” as head coach Andreas Puelacher describes it. When an athlete like Dürr has been there for so long, sometimes something has to be changed, the Austrian explained. And she herself said that in the summer she “always had concerns” about “whether I can save it into the next season.” The form, the motivation, the good feeling on the skis and for the snow. She also noted: “The field in the slalom is becoming increasingly dense.”
So Dürr and Lenz did not travel to South America with the rest of the team in August, but to New Zealand. For the first time in six years, since she lost squad status and prepared for the season on her own, she was away in the summer without colleagues. To do this, she trained with ski racers from other nations, for example the Americans. She not only benefited from the comparison on snow, but also from “seeing what the others are doing to get something out of themselves” in order to improve.
In the first two slaloms it didn’t look as if the effort was actually worth it. Fourth place in Levi and seventh in Gurgl were decent, but not good enough for their requirements. Now Lena Dürr seems to be back. In the circle of the best behind Shiffrin.
