Looking for new challenges

Anna Schaffelhuber aims high. Following her triumph at the 2014 Paralympics in Sochi, when she won gold in all five competitions: slalom, giant slalom, super-G, sitting downhill and in the combined, she found it hard to motivate herself again at first. “I thought: what comes next?” The challenge and the challengers were missing. “When you’re the hunter, you always have a face in front of your eyes. And then suddenly it’s you you’re up against.” However, she did not want to quit at the age of 21, especially since she had planned to do a four-year teaching degree. So she set herself new goals. She had not yet won gold in the sitting downhill event at a world championship. When she achieved this, she then started preparing for the next Paralympics. In Pyeongchang where she was accompanied by her parents and boyfriend, she confirmed “that my success four years ago was no coincidence” – and again won two gold medals.

It certainly takes courage. But I’m not afraid. I prefer to say I have respect.

Anna Schaffelhuber loves speed. On her monoski-bob she reaches up to 130 kilometers an hour on a downhill run and is thus only slightly slower than the best non-disabled alpine racers in the world. The Para Sportswoman of the Year 2016 is fascinated “by testing the limits skiing downhill”. She admits: “It certainly takes courage.” Sometimes she finds it difficult to throw herself down the steep slope in her monoski-bob. “But I’m not afraid. I prefer to say I have respect.” And that’s Important “in order to be able to assess the course correctly.”

A matter of trust – equipment

It is important to trust the equipment, in particular the ski-bob, which at 14 kilograms is the lightest ski-bob in the Para World Cup, but also the mono-ski, which is mounted under the apparatus. The ski must have a certain length and a minimum radius, and there are also regulations for the height of the binding plate. All this is checked before every race. By the way, Anna’s ski had previously been used by Olympic champion Mikaela Shiffrin as a training ski.

The ski-bob requires just as much tinkering. For Anna Schaffelhuber, there is no perfect equipment but only “perfect tuning”. Since 2012 she has been skiing on the same model with which she was so successful in Sochi and with which she has also started in Pyeongchang. The multiple paraplegic Paralympics winner Martin Braxenthaler developed the ski-bob but, says Anna Schaffelhuber, “it took two or three years before I could say that it now fits as perfectly as a shoe.”

She realized just how important the ski-bob was in 2009, half a year before her first Paralympics. She woke up one morning, aged 16, and found she could no longer walk with the aid of crutches, as accustomed. Neither could the doctors understand why, from one day to the next, she lost the residual function of her legs. Mentally processing this fact was as much of a challenge for Anna as the steepest pistes. Furthermore, her monoski-bob had to be modified, resulting in a different skiing experience, which she had to get used to in a short period of time.

Anna Schaffelhuber managed this and won her first medal in Vancouver, just as she had managed a lot in her life – with optimism and courage. Disability is not a problem for her, she just doesn’t like talking about it. “I have this physical condition just as others are taller or smaller. I can do everything, although some things just a bit differently,” she says. She pushes herself out of her monoski-bob with her strong upper arms, slides effortlessly into the adjacent wheelchair and makes her way swiftly to the ski room.