Manuel Feller: balancing White Circus madness with time out in the wilderness

In their home country, Austrian Alpine skiers cannot walk down the street without being recognised, such is the popularity of the sport.

The media follows their every move, fans ask for selfies at inopportune moments and pundits demand winning ways, a bit like football stars, says a man who knows, Manuel Feller, but there's a big difference:

“I can walk outside of Austria and Central Europe without anybody recognising me,” Feller told Olympics.com in an exclusive interview in October, “so you can't compare this to football… it's a world sport and if you take like, Lionel Messi, he could walk through Africa and everybody is recognising (him) so it's definitely not comparable with stars like this.”

Nevertheless, Alpine skiing is Austria’s national sport, which a look at the Olympic Winter Games medal table in the discipline makes only too clear.

Austria has won almost double the amount of medals of any other nation in Alpine skiing at the Olympic Winter Games, with 121 medals, including 37 golds. The next closest are great rivals, Switzerland, who have 66 medals, 22 of them gold.

With this weighty backstory of success comes pressure to perform, especially as one of the legends of the sport, winner of three of those Austrian Olympic medals, Marcel Hirscher retired after PyeongChang 2018. The seven-time world champion was unable to walk the streets of Salzburg without being mobbed by fans by the time he left the sport in 2019 at the peak of his career.

Feller is one of those who has stepped into the hot seat vacated by Hirscher and is one of Austria’s hot tips for a medal in the slalom and giant slalom disciplines come Beijing 2022.

Already a world silver medallist in slalom in 2017, Feller is also an Olympic silver