When Janko Zwitter came aboard as Canada’s ski jumping coach in 2021, he faced a choice.
With the final ski jumping hill in Canada closed, the team could either integrate with the Americans south of the border or centralize itself in Slovenia for training.
Zwitter pushed for the latter, won out, and saw immediate dividends with a surprising mixed-team bronze medal at the 2022 Beijing Olympics.
Now, less than one year away from the Milan Olympics, the team remains in Slovenia — but plenty has changed.
“Every year, you’re facing new challenges. Bringing them together was the easiest at the beginning. Now to hold them together is the next challenge.
“And to represent the country, which should be really competitive at world champs, at Olympic games and stuff like that, will be the next challenge,” Zwitter said.
Next, the Canadians will head to Trondheim, Norway, for the Nordic world championships, where ski jumping competition begins Thursday and runs through March 9.
In the time since the Olympic breakout, Alexandria Loutitt became a world champion and climbed 10 World Cup podiums, winning two gold medals. Abi Strate has captured five World Cup medals, the latest of which was a bronze on Sunday. Zwitter said he may be most pleased with Nicole Maurer, who’s risen from outside the top-50 into the top-20 at some events.
WATCH l Loutitt tops podium with second career World Cup victory:
Alexandria Loutitt won her second career gold on the FIS ski jump world cup circuit finishing first in Sapporo, Japan with a score of 266.4.
The coach said he expects to once again compete for the podium at worlds.
“We will fight for medals for sure. … As in every top sport, you can’t promise anything, but if everything runs smooth, if everything is the way I think it will be, we will definitely be competitive,” Zwitter said.
Challenges beyond the hill
Given all the success, it might appear from the outside that the Slovenia centralization has been all smooth-sailing.
But the challenges for Zwitter go beyond the hill — as coach, he must manage each individual athlete who made the choice to uproot their life and fully commit to high-performance training in pursuit of Olympic glory.
While the team originally came to Slovenia with the same goals, the varying successes of Loutitt, Strate, and Maurer has chipped away at some of the togetherness.
“Medals and success are basically dividing the team because it’s getting challenging for those who haven’t won the medals. Why they don’t win it, why others win it, why others get better sponsors, why others are treated better in media,” Zwitter said. “The challenging thing is to hold the team together.”
Like Zwitter, Gartner originally hails from Austria but has lived in Canada for 38 years. In a strange coincidence, both coaches attended the same ski academy back home.
Gartner said it can be tough for Canadians to consistently be competing away from home, especially as each athlete’s career takes a different path.
His main advice has been to get to know each athlete on a personal level.
“There’s no one magic thing. It’s just to continue to be observing and making little tweaks here and there to keep that team unit going, because that’s the advantage that you can create, [that] you can squeeze out of this whole thing. So, it’s just a journey. There’s never a destination. You never really arrived,” Gartner said.
The ‘Calm Canucks’
Gartner joined the Canadian alpine program for the tail end of the Crazy Canucks’ heyday in 1982.
While he said it is tough to draw direct comparisons between that group of athletes and the current ski jumpers, Zwitter said he hoped to adopt the team’s spirit.
Perhaps people will remember the current generation of Canadian ski jumpers as the ‘Calm Canucks.’
“The ski jumpers might be similar. The basic idea was to make them calmer for ski jumping, because ski jumping is not about being crazy to go down this jumping hill, but to feel the air. So that is totally the opposite. You have to be as long as possible in the air. It has nothing to do with violence. It has nothing to do with being crazy. It has more to do with being romantic,” Zwitter said.
Patricia Chafe, the director of winter sports at Own The Podium, said Slovenia has been the ideal place for the ski jumpers to train, grow and succeed outside of Canada.
“In Slovenia, ski jumping is like hockey is in Canada, right? It is a national sport in the winter and Slovenians love their ski jumpers and really support the sport broadly,” she said.
Moreover, the national culture means there are plenty of hills for Canada’s athletes to train on, while the U.S. is mainly limited to Park City, Utah, or Lake Placid, N.Y. The cost of living in Ljbuljana also helps allocate funds properly.
Plus, Chafe said the team has gone about the move in a “safe, healthy, and holistic” manner.
“I think they’ve really managed really well. I like to think that if you’re moving to Slovenia to train 90 per cent of the year, you’re making a life choice. … And certainly they’ve made a life choice and, and they have matured into that life choice,” she said.
Elevated expectations
Chafe added that Own The Podium has targeted ski jumping as Olympic medal candidates in two events — large hill and normal hill.
In Beijing, the organization tabbed the ski jumpers with top-eight potential — and they went out and won bronze.
“We’re very, very optimistic that these athletes are going to be able to show up with the skills and preparation to be able to sit on that start and know that they’ve done everything that they need to do to be able to be in a position to try to win,” Chafe said.
Chafe isn’t the only one thinking that way, either.
With Gartner’s guidance, Zwitter has kept the team moving in the right direction both on and off the hill.
“What this program has done under Janko’s leadership is just the starting point, right? The belief of the athletes just grew and they kind of saw, ‘Oh my God, there’s some real potential,'” Gartner said.
“I think he’s really taken these women on the journey that they believe they can be in the best in the world.”
