Chapter 16
Austrian Recovery
Saalbach, Austria
FABIO
Saalbach greets us in fifty shades of dirty snow.
The van noses into the hotel parking lot through grey slush, wipers dragging across a windscreen filmed with salt.
Nobody rushes to get out. Boots thud onto the tarmac one by one, the usual joking and shouting cut down to a low murmur.
Kranjska Gora is still sitting on all of us, the Podkoren slope, and the burn it caused to our legs.
I haul my race bag out of the back and shoulder it without thinking about the weight.
Skis off the roof, stacked into the rack by the entrance.
Someone makes a half-hearted crack about “Baier checking if the nets are softer here,” and I manage a grin, but it dies quickly.
There’s no energy left for a performance today.
Inside, the lobby smells like wet wool and stale coffee. I collect my key, nod at the receptionist, and take the stairs instead of the lift, more out of habit than virtue. A single room, the other guys usually share, I prefer to spend nights alone.
In the room, I drop the bag on the floor, unzip it, and start laying things out with automatic precision: boots against the wall, race suit over the back of the chair, base layers on the radiator.
TV on for noise, volume off. It’s all movement without much thought, like my body knows the routine even if my head is somewhere else.
The reminder on my phone buzzes at me: meeting with the team head-guy for the mind stuff. I stare at it for a second. I could ignore it. Say I forgot, say I needed more stretching, say anything. Instead, I swipe it away, grab a fresh T-shirt, and head back down.
***
The room they’ve given him is one of the small conference rooms off the lobby, the kind we use for video analysis.
No projector today, no slides about line choice.
Just two chairs set at an angle, a bottle of water on the table, blinds half-closed against the grey outside.
No incense, no candles, no “relaxing ambiance.” Just a man, a notebook, and me.
Julius Strasser looks more like an accountant than someone who’s supposed to crawl into my brain and rearrange furniture.
He stands when I walk in—mid-forties, lean, neat beard, glasses that fog a little from the hallway air: no tracksuit, no team logo, just a dark sweater and jeans. If I didn’t know better, I’d expect him to start the meeting with a PowerPoint about tax reforms.
“Fabio,” he says, offering his hand. Grip firm, not crushing. “Thanks for coming.”
“Didn’t have a choice, did I?” I say, dropping into the chair opposite his. “If I ignore the head doctor, they send physio after me next.”
One corner of his mouth lifts. “They send me to physio when I ignore my stretches, so it’s fair.”
I huff out a breath that’s almost a laugh. “You do stretches, too?”
“Occupational hazard,” he says. “I spend a lot of time listening to people’s worn joints.”
That’s… weirder than it should be. I glance at the empty notepad on the table. No laptop, no recording device. Just paper and a pen.
“Look,” I say, shifting in the chair, “I’m not totally new to this.”
His eyebrows tip up a little. “Not new to what?”
“All the head stuff,” I answer. “Autogenous training, imagery, breathing. Since my first World Cup year, it’s been ‘scan your body, relax your jaw, see the line.’ I could probably run the rookie workshop on that.
” I half-shrug. “So I’m not sure what else there is you can offer…
but if anyone’s supposed to help with this, it’s you, right? ”
He doesn’t bristle. Doesn’t write anything down. Just nods once, like I’ve given him the weather conditions.
“Okay,” he says. “So why are you here?”
“Because I have a problem,” I say, and stop.
He waits. No rescue.
“And you obviously want me to name the problem, right? But isn’t that like… your job?”
“It is,” he nods, smiling benignly. “After you tell me what you think the problem is.”
“I lose focus,” I start and try to ignore the dull pressure in my forehead, like whatever is hidden in my head just doesn’t want to get out. Not through my mouth at least. “I mess races. It used to be easy.”
Yeah, that’s it, that’s what I came here to say.
I wait a moment, hoping for him to help me, but he doesn’t speak up. Obviously, that’s how this whole therapy shit works—let the idiot stew and then fish out the meat when it’s ready. And cut it into pieces.
I sigh, rub a hand over my face. “Winning, I mean. My life has always been a mess off the hill—parties, girls, family drama, all of it—and it never touched my skiing. I could still show up, switch on, and go. Now it’s not easy anymore. Same crap, same tools, different result.”
Julius doesn’t rush to fill the silence. He just shifts back in his chair, folds his hands loosely.
“I’m not going to argue with you about the breathing exercises,” he says.
“If you’re still on the World Cup at your level, you know how to use them.
So let’s leave the tools alone for this session.
And let’s go deeper, since that’s why you came here.
” He tilts his head. “Tell me about a race where it felt easy.”
“Easy doesn’t exist,” I say automatically, then stop. That’s not quite true. “There were days when it felt like it, though.”
“Pick one,” Julius says.
“Alta Badia. First year,” I answer. “Second run, bib… thirty-something. Snow was trash, knee-deep ruts. Nobody expected anything from me. I just… went.” The memory is right there: the burn in my legs, the way the skis finally did what I wanted.
“I was chasing the big guys. If I blew up, it was just one more kid blowing up. They were there to bring the points.”
“And one from this season?” he asks.
I pick at a loose thread on my pants. “Adelboden. Second run. Last out because I’m leading. Cameras in my face, everyone already talking about the streak, about the globe. If I blow up, I lose serious points and tomorrow’s headline is ‘Baier cracks.’”
“How did it feel in the start, those two days?” he says.
“In Alta Badia?” I don’t even have to think. “Light. Like… if I nailed it, great. If I didn’t, no one had to change their plans. Worst case, I was the funny slow-mo in the highlights.”
“And Adelboden?”
Is he really asking that? Every athlete knows that racing with the nation's expectations weighing you down is harder than being a rookie. I don’t need a shrink for that. But I make myself answer anyway.
“Heavy,” I say. “Like there was a rope tied around my chest and everyone was on the other end, pulling. Like I owed them something before I even left the wand.” I hesitate, then add, “And if I crashed, it wouldn’t just be a meme. It would be people in offices asking what’s wrong with me.”
He’s quiet for a beat. “So in Alta Badia, a mistake meant… what?”
“That I was twenty-one and stupid,” I say. “That I’d try again next week.”
“And in Adelboden?” he asks.
I stare at the carpet. The answer sits in my throat like a stone. “That I’m… not who they think I am,” I say finally. “That may be. I just had a good month. That they backed the wrong guy.”
Julius nods slightly. “Same hill, same sport,” he says. “But the story attached to a mistake has changed—from ‘young and learning’ to ‘fraud exposed.’ And you’re still asking your old routines to carry that new story.”
“I’m not,” I say, sharper than I mean to. “Even with Luca in front of me, even back then, people in Austria expected things of me. I’m not new to expectations. I get that it’s harder to play the favorite than be the rookie.”
“Fabio,” he says calmly, “let us talk for a minute about what I want to know, okay? You can keep the comments for later.”
“Okay,” I nod, not even trying to look convinced.
He’s quiet for a moment, then says, “So back then, your job was to surprise people. Now your job is not to surprise them.”
I let out a humorless laugh. “Yeah. Now my job is to be exactly as good as they think I am, every weekend.”
“And inside,” he asks, “which job are you still geared for?”
“How the hell am I to know?”
“Who else is to say, though?” His eyebrows lift; Julius looks me straight in the eyes.
“You mean to say,” I go on slowly, “that I haven’t made the… transition into the favorite’s role? That I still think like the rookie?”
“That’s what a journalist would say,” he shrugs. “I’m only saying that if you cannot describe your mindset around winning and points, then your head cannot be where it should be when it counts.”
“I thought focus is what I need to keep my head where it should be,” I admit.
“Yeah, focus,” he nods. “Breathing exercises, meditation, visualization… only it doesn’t work this season, does it?”
“It doesn’t,” I admit. “Why not?”
“I don’t know,” he says flatly.
“What do you mean you don’t know? Isn’t that why I came here?”
“To get all the answers?” He shrugs again. “I’m afraid it doesn’t work like that.”
“You’re not even going to tell me what you think?”
“I think,” he says slowly, “that you don’t handle the role of the senior racer with enormous expectations on your shoulders, particularly well.
That the pressure weighs you down. But I don’t know why that happens, and why it happens this season.
I cannot say that after one session. I can only give you tools to find that out yourself. ”
“You mean I should… meditate on it?” A smirk escapes me.
“Are you a little green alien with big, cute eyes and pointed ears?” he asks.
“Ehm, no?” I say confused.
“Then you don’t need to meditate on it,” he says flatly. “Master Yoda meditates; for humans, simple journaling is enough.”
“Journaling,” I repeat. “Like I open a little notebook and write ‘Dear diary’ every evening.”
“You just write down your ideas, your thoughts—not just about racing, but about everything around it—as they come,” he says. “Make a habit of it. And when the time comes, you’ll see the connection. It clicks.”
“Simple journaling…”
“Never heard of it?”