Professional skier and snowboarder Ester Ledecká isn’t content with being a double threat—she wants to add ice hockey to that list, too. Ledecká, 29, shared a funny video of herself wearing black joggers and a blue and white sweatshirt, pretending to play hockey while cleaning up a cow barn with a broom. “I’m still working on the farm and waiting for a call from @nhlbruins 😁,” she captioned the post. Here’s how the Olympian focuses on her many sports, and lives her best life.
Ledecká worked hard to excel at both skiing and snowboarding but admits it’s difficult. “Inside, I still feel like [I am] half snowboarder and half skier,” she told Olympics.com. “The thing is that we wanted to see what is possible for me in the overall rankings in skiing… But the problem is that when I want to try it, it’s even more difficult to fit the snowboard racing schedule because it’s at the same time. And if I want to compete in both, then I have to cancel some ski races, and that means that I lose a lot of points in the overall rankings.”
Ledecká can’t decide between snowboarding and skiing. “Inside, I still feel like [I am] half snowboarder and half skier,” she told Olympics.com. “I can still do a triple or even a quadruple. There is still a lot of space for improvement… It depends on my feeling in that exact time of the season. And if I just feel that if I want to go snowboarding, I go snowboarding and nothing is going to stop me. And it’s also the other way around!”
World Cup champion Mikaela Shiffrin is a big fan of Ledecká. “She’s an incredible athlete—obviously she has to be to compete in both sports so well,” Shiffrin told Powder. “I think she has a really natural feeling for speed and really great technique. Watching her ski, I wonder what everyone else is doing.”
Ledecká jokes about the competition between skiers and snowboarders. “As long as I’m having fun and doing it for myself, I think I’m in a good way,” she told Powder. “Sometimes, I want to stay in bed (in the morning), but as long as I’m on the hill, I feel like I’m at home.”
Ledecká is improving with every single training session. “It’s not like going to the top and then back, like that one race in South Korea,” she told Olympics.com. “But when you see [all of the results], I was improving that season too. I just wasn’t on that level that I would be able to reach [the podium] more than once through the season. Then the next season, I [took] a step a little [further] and then more, and more. So, I feel I’m going in [the] right direction, for sure. Even though I am now a much better skier, and I have much more experience, I still [don’t have the] experience, which I would consider is enough for me to be able to win every race.”