Winter sports: Report on the delivery of Swiss equipment

Hey, Simon Ammann… Hey, that face, I’ve already seen it somewhere, it must be doing biathlon. Ah, Mathilde Gremaud! Oh, Kylian Peier! And then here Marco Odermatt, there Corinne Suter. And who is he again? Strange, this comeback of the mullet cut all the same. Well, the mustache seems to be losing popularity across Sarine.

When you go for the first time in your life to the traditional team presentation at the start of the season, it’s Christmas. Almost as much for the journalist as for the skier, the cross-country skier or the beginner snowboarder who comes to collect his first free clothes. All this without telling you about the stands for glasses, nutrition, poles, and others… and the big packages with “On” brand clothing, not to mention the Roger shoe that goes with the lot. Besides, when you gather all the athletes around a table after a while, that quickly adds up to a lot of very expensive shoes in a few square meters, well.

The skiers also have work, because if Tuesday is reserved for the media, they have to be on deck all week or almost. Enough to satisfy the various sponsors and shoot promotional clips, take photos and so on. As a result, there is also a makeup and hairdressing workshop at the entrance and it is always full. Like the line to eat the most Swiss-German meal in the world (cornettes, minced meat, applesauce), at the most Swiss-German hour in the world. At 11:20 a.m., the first people jumped on it. 11:20 a.m.!

Well, the problem when you’re a novice is that apart from the few faces that regularly appear on television and on the podiums, it’s not easy to tell the difference between the head of a Swiss-German skier with a helmet that going at 130 km/h in the descent from Wengen and the head of a Swiss-German skier with a helmet going at 130 km/h in the descent from Wengen… Too bad not to have put a little label on each one with his name, it would have been devilishly practical!

But after we started to get out of the fun (this big rally starts at 8 a.m., so when we come by train from Lausanne, it stings a little at first), we start to see the diversity that can count winter sport in Switzerland. Not in terms of origins or colors, no, skiing is still a sport a little too expensive for segundos or tregundos (personal neologism given to the third generation). But in purely physical terms: tall ones, short ones, very thin ones, a little chubby guys… And that’s delightful for someone like me.

We are also forced to observe one thing, after all the best French-speaking people went on a platform to speak to the press. The skiers on this side of the Sarine are undoubtedly the most multilingual athletes I know. With cyclists, approx. The press briefings by Daniel Yule, Loïc Meillard and Marc Rochat were held very neatly in French and Swiss-German. But also in Italian, a language too often left aside by certain other major federations. Hat! Or rather hat!

And then in the middle of the day, the moment of intense emotion… Wendy Holdener returned, cameras off, for one last time, to the death of her brother Kevin, last February. The man who managed the Schwyzoise died of cancer and the pain is still terrible. “There are now days when I don’t cry,” explained the champion during a touching speech. But I still miss him.” Damn dust in the eye.