Kristian Ghedina, we celebrate the birthday of a myth of the descent: "50" as ... no one

NeveItalia launches the "GhedoDay": a full day to retrace the career of a great Italian skier, including videos, memories, testimonials ...

Wednesday 20 November 2019 8 minutes reading time

Kristian Ghedina does ... 50! A birthday to be celebrated, on this November 20th, for a myth of the descent, a man who knew how to give a show even before thinking about collecting successes. They were 13 in the World Cup, of which 12 in the discipline they had in their veins since childhood, with a passion transmitted first and foremost by their mother Adriana, a ski instructor who tragically died on the snow, when Kristian was only 15 years old. The "Ghedo" was great, always on the edge and often beyond, since that wonderful year 1989/1990 that made him known to the whole world, with the first two victories in the World Cup obtained in the season finale at Are e, 40 days before, on his Cortina Olympia delle Tofane. He has always only loved the "Pearl of the Dolomites", never abandoned in half a century of life and now accompanied, as ambassador and symbol of a country that is in the history of winter sports, at the 2021 ski world championships (precisely in these days Ghedina is in China, together with the representatives of the Italian-Chinese Chamber of Commerce, to promote the event that will arrive one year before the Beijing Games 2022) and at the Milan-Cortina Olympics 2026. Think about it, what Kristian would have given to run the Games on snow at home, after closing his career in Turin 2006; considered the "madness" of the subject in question, we would not exclude it 100% ... Talking only about numbers and the palmares would mean belittling a champion of a class and an exceptional stature, capable of winning the great classics (Kitzbuehel, Wengen, Chamonix, Val Gardena ... only Val d''Isere and Garmisch are missing) and gamble on every type of terrain and situation, even if some called it a "sledge". He has touched at least twice a world title of descent that he would have deserved (silver in Sierra Nevada ''96, bronze in Sestriere' '97, opening his palmares at the world level with silver combined with Saalbach 1991), while at Giochi has always had little luck, especially in Nagano '98 when a mad race was run and conditioned by the mega-fall of Hermann Maier, with the 6th final place that clearly represented a disappointment, in the third of his five Olympics to which he has taken part. He deserved, and how, and above all, a World Cup downhill, lost spectacularly in the finals of Bormio 1995 (mocked for 11 points by Luc Alphand) and again two years later (to then finish 2nd also in 2000 behind Hermann Maier ), still in favor of the Frenchman, one of the many rivals he has beaten several times on the track. "Ghedo" passed from Zurbriggen and Heinzer, to the Alphands and to the Kjus, to then face the invincible Austrian army of the late 1990s and the beginning of the new millennium; 33 overall podiums in the maximum circuit, of which 29 downhill, also two quarter turns in the general classification of the World Cup (1997 and 2000), with an extraordinary competitive longevity, despite a passage to say the least dramatic of a career that seemed destroyed, when in April 1991 the new blue ace of speed crashed on his Wolkswagen Passat, in the heart of Milan-Turin while he was headed for the end-of-season races in Courmayeur. Three days in a coma, but above all a very long recovery due to the brain damage reported, so that Ghedina told how, after months, the reflexes were totally "out of phase", and on a bicycle he felt "a child to whom the wheels had been removed ". Over three years later, the rebirth and triumph of January '95 on the Wengen Lauberhorn, one of the unforgettable pearls together with the Kitzbuehel gem of January 24th 1998, when the ampezzo wrote the history of the blue ski becoming the first Italian to take the descent on the Streif, then enter definitively (but it was already ...) in the myth, six years later, with that split on the final jump of the temple. Those jumps "at the Ghedina", so much so that one will be dedicated to them on the new "Vertigine" of Cortina, or the roe deer who joined him, always in that 2004 so special in the last years of his career, in the end of his Saslong, if we think that in Val Gardena has won four times. And then again the passion for cars and a new career in various roles, including that of coach of the Croatian national team and of Ivica Kostelic who became almost downhillist with Ghedo at his side. The 12 downhill victories achieved by Dominik Paris last March in Soldeu seem to represent an ideal handover, in the history of the blue jet men that starts from Zeno ColÃ², passes for Herbert Plank and, after the Ghedina era, arrives at â€œ Domme ". Today I am 50: thank you, mythical "Ghedo"!