Ski racer Matthias Iten makes a poor start to the new year

Matthias Iten from Zug has long arrived in the European winter. Even more: he’s right in the middle of a period where hundredths of seconds count for the European Cup and important FIS points. In Vaujany in France, for example, not far from Grenoble and north of the Alpe d’Huez, the 20-year-old from Zug competed in a European Cup slalom on Sunday and Monday. But with little success: Iten was eliminated in the first run in both races. ”It’s bitter, I caught the gates twice. I simply cannot repeat my training performance in a race,” says Iten. But he promises that he won’t let himself be discouraged, and will continue working in training, thereby encouraging himself.

Iten’s competition winter started much earlier. more specifically in August 2019, in the Coronet Peak ski area in New Zealand, about 18,700 kilometres from Grenoble. Iten took part in a total of eleven races in New Zealand and Australia. In the last race, the Cardrona slalom, he finished as the winner in the same time as the Norwegian Sebastian Foss-Solevåg. Matthias Iten achieved this success while carrying an injury, but only found out after returning to Switzerland that this would then severely restrict his training for six weeks. Due to the pain in his hand, he had it examined more closely, whereby a clean, undisplaced fracture of the scaphoid was diagnosed. “I was injured in early August in a fall on the Pump track in Magglingen. The first x-rays showed nothing unusual, so I travelled to New Zealand a few days later.”

The subsequent training sessions had to be reduced and be adapted to his hand injury, before Iten was able to compete on European snow in mid-November. He landed on the podium in two FIS slaloms In Kabdalis, Sweden, once as the winner, and scored European Cup points for the first time in a slalom with a 22nd position in Funesdalen. "It was a good result in a race in which a number of World Cup skiers also competed."

Although he feels good in himself, Matthias Iten is still not doing well in races.

Disappointment followed two weeks later in Italy. Iten did not finish the second run in the European Cup slalom in Val di Fassa. “It was definitely not great. But I'm basically happy with the winter so far. Things are going well in training. I now have to repeat my training performances in the European Cup races,” said Iten on Saturday.

Matthias Iten regrets that the FIS races in Sörenberg, which were planned between Christmas and New Year, could not take place. In this winter, he wants to concentrate primarily on slalom and giant slalom. On the one hand, many well-known faces from among his family and friends would have travelled to Entlebuch for his “home races”, and, on the other, he had good memories of the event as the winner and runner-up of the two races in 2018. "The positive side is that I was able to switch off to some extent during the festive season, and was able to enjoy the time with the family," says Iten. Playing ice hockey with the brother, among other things, was on the programme. But his return to racing life was not entirely as desired: due to the weather being warm for the season, the conditions for really good training were not ideal. On Friday and Saturday, Iten and his colleagues were preparing for the first races of the year 2020 in Anzère and La Fouly. “I’m now looking forward to racing again, and I’m highly motivated,” said Iten on Saturday.

And now that he’s been able to do without the support rail on his injured hand, he has his freedom of movement again. The anticipation was clearly clouded on Monday after the two unsuccessful races in France. But: “I know that I’m actually in a pretty good condition. I now just need some success in the races …”.