Sawt Falasteen - Olympic freestyle champion Gremaud says passion for skiing carried her through dark times

The Swiss star beat China's Gu into second place in the slopestyle competition in Beijing for years ago, denying her rival a third gold medal at those Games.

The 25-year-old Gremaud has faced multiple challenges since topping the podium in China, including the death of her aunt and a split from her manager.

On the eve of Saturday's slopestyle qualifying competition in Livigno, one of the sites for the Milan-Cortina Olympics, Gremaud outlined her struggles.

"Some phases I was really down -- it's like up and down but most of the time I enjoy skiing like 80 percent of the time and 20 percent of the last four years were a bit tough," she told AFP.

The two-time slopestyle world champion said the death of her aunt towards the end of 2023 was the final straw that "pushed me down".

"I pushed through the season and then I was just like done. And then it took about a year to recover and then in this whole thing was a lot of troubles with my previous manager."

Gremaud said she had been "scared to go outside the house" in April 2024 due to anxiety but returned in style with a World Cup win in the big air event at the start of the new season later that year.

"I was like, 'Skiing is really not the hard thing for me, all the rest is'," she said. "I could still do a lot of great things and I had a lot of great days, but the period was darker than sunny."

- Split with manager -

The turning point was a split from her manager in January 2025.

"I would say he destroyed my confidence pretty hard and thankfully not my skiing confidence but my human confidence and that was really tough," said Gremaud.

"And that took a long time to build back up and also get rid of all the things that he kind of put in my head and that I was starting to believe."

Gremaud took a break from the sport to de-compress after she decided the "process was not over at all".

"After three weeks of competing I was like, 'I have to go home, I have to take a break. I have to be with my parents for two weeks.

"'I have to not go in my apartment and be by myself.' That was pretty cool and that helped a lot."

The Swiss, who also won big air bronze in Beijing and is competing in that event in Italy, said she had learned coping mechanisms.

"Every time you solve the problem the next challenge occurs and I really work hard to accept that and that could be an injury, or it could also be lack of motivation."

But Gremaud said she had never lost her love of skiing despite the tough periods.

"Sometimes you have to put some wood in the fire so the fire is burning even more," she said.

"The love of the sport is always here just sometimes it's bigger, sometimes it's smaller, and sometimes you have to dig deep to remember what it's supposed to feel like."

Gremaud, whose Olympic career started with silver in the slopestyle at the 2018 Pyeongchang Games, does not want to get "ahead of myself" before her events in Livigno.

"I have a great team around me, everyone is really supportive and my parents are coming for the first time in a long time," she said.

"All this kind of stuff is really motivating. I'm defending Olympic champion. I've never started an Olympics without ending on the podium.

"So there's so many great things that have happened already. I'm going to try my best to keep this track going."

Z.Ramadan--SF-PST