One last time in search of lightness: Lara Gut-Behrami starts her last ski season

The final drive to Sölden, the final bib draw, the final guessing about pre-season form. Stop! Ski racer Lara Gut-Behrami immediately puts such thoughts to rest. "I hope we don't end up talking about what I'm doing for the last time at every race," she said a few weeks before the start of the Ski World Cup season. "Yes, it's my last season, but I'm not nostalgic."

Next spring, Gut-Behrami will end her career at just under 35 years old. She has spent more than half her life in the Ski World Cup; this winter, she will not be able to avoid questions that cast a glance back at the past. Her career was too long and too formative, too extraordinary – both in terms of her successes and her personality. Looking back 17 years to Gut-Behrami's first start in Sölden, it's not just her who has changed. The same applies to skiing.

When she made her debut in Sölden in 2008, she was 17 and had already amazed the previous winter with a third-place finish in the downhill in St. Moritz. In Sölden, she finished fifth in the giant slalom, scoring points for the first time. She won 45 points – more than the entire Swiss women's team combined in this discipline the previous winter. Switzerland was behind Austria in the national rankings at the time, with less than half the number of points.

Lara Gut-Behrami's emergence caused a minor earthquake at Swiss Ski: a young, carefree teenager who, until recently, had trained exclusively with her family. And now she was setting personal bests and attracting all the attention. Her father, Pauli Gut, was already talking about winning the overall World Cup, and the family had clear ideas about what Lara needed to achieve this. First and foremost, this applied to herself. Eventually, the Guts founded a private team outside of the association, and from then on, the teenager Lara Gut financed family life. She tried to find her way amidst the new expectations from all sides.

Since then, Gut-Behrami has often spoken about how stressful she found the time when she was expected to play the role of the ski darling in the public's eyes. And how devastating the reactions were when she didn't. Over the course of her career, viewers also accompanied her through her development as a person – how she discovered, after an injury, that there was more to her than skiing, how she lost and rediscovered the joy of skiing, and how she found a spouse in former footballer Valon Behrami who understood her. She recently said in a podcast on the Ticino television station RSI that they both had a tendency to always take the complicated path.

After what appears to be a strenuous journey to self-reflection, Lara Gut-Behrami is at peace. She says she no longer wastes as much energy on sideshows. This isn't always true, though; she excluded "Blick" from her media engagements this winter because she was annoyed by its coverage. But she handled the media marathon before the first race with great ease, enjoying the fact that she's still healthy and riding fast at the end of her career.

Before the races in Sölden, she also talks about how skiing has changed since the beginning of her career. She says the demands on young skiers today are extremely high. From a sporting perspective, with developments in both fitness and technique leading to increasingly direct and sharp lines. "On top of that, they have to market themselves, tell their own media story," she says. "Before, you were an athlete; today you sell yourself as a celebrity, even though you've hardly won any races."

She criticizes the trend that a pretty face and a pleasant demeanor are so important. And she longs for athletes like Tina Maze and Janica Kostelic, who "showed their true colors" and didn't sugarcoat a tenth-place finish.

Since the summer, she's been challenging herself in a new role: She joined the Swiss company Ka-Ex, which produces a nutritional supplement for recovery, as an investor and strategic advisor. Gut-Behrami had wanted to start this during her career, "so that the transition isn't so difficult." The company's logo now also adorns the front of her helmet, after she raced without a head sponsor last winter.

Gut-Behrami takes skiing no less seriously. In her 18th World Cup season, she could add to her list. A fourth triumph in Sölden would make her the sole record winner. A somewhat less realistic scenario is that she catches up with or overtakes Vreni Schneider in the number of World Cup victories and becomes the most successful Swiss skier. To achieve this, she would have to add seven more victories to her 48. She has only achieved that many in one winter – in her best season, which wasn't that long ago, 2023/24.

She won the overall World Cup for the second time back then; an effort that consumed a great deal of energy. She recently described the final week of the season in March 2024 as a "path of suffering" at the RSI. It took her months to process the success. She said she was still tired at the start of the 2024/25 season, and on top of that, she developed knee problems after a blow during preseason training.

She withdrew from the 2024 Sölden race shortly before the start, crying because she didn't feel ready yet. As the season progressed, things went better and better, and she culminated in winning the last giant slalom in Sun Valley and her sixth discipline globe in the super-G. "The season was complicated for me. Not in a technical sense, but emotionally," she said in the podcast. "In Sun Valley, I rediscovered the joy of skiing I had as a child. Suddenly, everything was easy."

The pursuit of this feeling of lightness on skis, of joy, was Gut-Behrami's guiding principle throughout her career. And ultimately, it was also the reason she continued skiing for so long—something she would never have thought possible in her younger years.

Now, on Saturday, she'll be competing in Sölden for the last time. It's an opportunity for a last look back at the finish area of ​​the 2008 race, when the Ticino native stormed to fifth place with bib number 37. "Whether third, fourth, or fifth, it doesn't matter. I just wanted to be in the top 30," she said refreshingly directly. Or: "At 17, I have to be relaxed; I can be serious at 30." And finally, in response to the NZZ's question about when the Swiss competition should start to fear her: "As soon as I strap on my skis."

Nothing has changed in these 17 years.