“DURING THAT TIME I actually COMMUNICATED WITH MY KNEE” Did you become a more patient person during this time? I tried. What I learnt from that period was to listen to my body. What do you mean by that? I actually listened to my knee. You could say that during this time I communicated with my knee. As in, “Good morning knee”? Almost. You pay extremely close attention to feedback, any twinge, any sign that an exercise was going too far. Have you talked to your knee today? No. Since summer there’s been radio silence. Since I played tennis for the first time without problems, my knee has become a completely normal part of my body once again. Tennis puts far more stress on your knees than skiing. Your left turns, where the right leg takes more of the weight, were stronger than your right turns before the crash. True or false? True. But that didn’t have anything to do with the knee, rather the mobility of my hips. In any case, it’s hard to do nothing but left turns in training [laughs]. In purely medical terms, are both knees now equally strong? There’s a one per cent difference. Maybe your right knee will make up the extra one per cent. [Laughs.] No, no, after the rehab and the muscle training my right knee is even stronger than my left. You spent spring and summer in rehab instead of training. What does that mean for the 2013/14 season? The first downhills are in late November, early December. By that time I want to be up to winning races again, but my goal is the Olympic Games, they’re in February and that’s more than enough time. You’ve already won gold at the Olympics, at world championships and the World Cup, but winning in Sochi
would be the greatest success of your career. Would you agree? Yes, definitely. To win gold after this injury, personally that would be my greatest success. The accident was the lowest point in my career. Gold in Sochi would be the highest. There’s another issue: the Austrian skier Annemarie Moser-Pröll won 62 World Cup races. You’ve won 59, so if you stay fit you’ll soon have the record for the most women’s World Cup victories in history. I hope this doesn’t sound arrogant, but I think I will, yes. Ingemar Stenmark of Sweden has the all-time record with 86 wins. I’ve already been thinking about that. My current plan is to keep going until the 2015 World Cup. Then I’ll see how far away I am from that number and then I’ll decide what to do, whether I’ll keep going in every discipline or maybe just downhill and Super-G and concentrate on that record. Are records really that important? Absolutely. Records are the only thing which remains of an athlete. The only thing that people will remember. That sounds a bit sad. Because it is sad. But if I want to ensure that people don’t forget me, I can only stop once I’ve set the bar as high as possible for anyone coming after me. That means that as long as I can keep winning, I’ll keep skiing. Essentially it’s about what I leave behind and that means statistics, records. Recently in The Red Bulletin, Andre Agassi said exactly the opposite: as long as he was only playing to win, he was unhappy. He only became happy once he was able to use his tennis wins for other causes, in his case for a school. Don’t forget, Agassi was forced into the sport as a child. He didn’t enjoy playing tennis. Your father was also very dominant in your career. But it wasn’t like it was with Andre. I’ve read his book. I never had it that bad. I always enjoyed skiing. I was not pushed, I was guided. When you were 11 years old, your family moved a thousand miles from Minnesota to Colorado so little Lindsey would have better training facilities.