Skiing
Marvellous Marcel has earned a place among the GOATs
How Marcel Hirscher, who announced his retirement at a packed media event on September 4, earned his place in the pantheon of sporting greats.
For almost a decade, Marcel Hirscher has been one of the most dominant athletes of his time – a once-in-a-generation serial winner whose achievements are worthy of a place among the all-time greats in any sport: the likes of Michael Jordan, Roger Federer, Jack Nicklaus, Tom Brady.
Yet to the outside world, the Austrian has often seemed to be a reluctant hero, always prepared to swat aside the idea that he was some sort of natural-born genius of the winter wonderland.
Hirscher would often protest that he wasn’t necessarily more gifted than his opponents but maybe had a better set-up with his team, his ski equipment and preparations. Modestly, he would make it sound as if his winning habit wasn’t down to his own ability but rather that it owed most of all to meticulous planning.
Marcel Hirscher at the world champs in Åre
© GEPA pictures/Red Bull Content Pool
Yet, of course, this could only ever be part of the story.
Hirscher has been the overall World Cup winner – Alpine skiing’s season-long all-round world champion – for eight years in succession and this didn’t happen just because he prepared better than anyone else.
This was a monopoly that told of a freakish ability too. His technique, honed and refined religiously down the years, was as immaculate as the sport has seen.
Then there was his understanding of how to attack a gate and when to hold back – an ability that came not just from years of dedicated professionalism but also from his innate feel for the mountain and the snow.
In action in Val d'Isère in 2017
© Erich Spiess/ASP/Red Bull Content Pool
And he possessed a perfectionist’s streak that meant he was always famished for success, never sated. We are talking of the complete racing package.
If you want to gauge how good he has been, you just have to listen to those who, like him, have featured in the debates about who’s the greatest ski racer of them all.
Ingemar Stenmark, the Swede who won more World Cup races than any other man (86 to Hirscher’s second-best 67), said, when asked to compare himself with the Austrian: “I would have had no chance against him. He has it all. So strong; his physique, the spirit, and he is strong in the head.”
"We've never seen such a perfect ski racer before"
© Erich Spiess/ASP/Red Bull Content Pool
Another great of that 1970s and '80s generation, Hirscher’s compatriot Annemarie Moser-Pröll, who once dominated women’s ski racing in a similar fashion, watched him surpass her record of 62 World Cup race wins with the acknowledgment: “It’s just incredible what he does. We have never seen such a perfect ski racer before.”
Surely, she’s right. Stenmark won three overall World Cup titles in a row, the same as greats like Gustav Thöni and Hermann Maier; Moser-Pröll did it five years in a row, a feat many believed might never be topped. Yet eight on the bounce? That’s an achievement that demands Hirscher’s name be up in lights alongside the finest of athletes, whatever the sport.
“We have Roger Federer in Switzerland,” noted one of Hirscher’s rivals, Daniel Yule, after losing yet another duel with him in January. “Yet I definitely see Marcel in the same category. No-one else occurs to me who’s dominated his sport and with such a consistency. He's probably one of the best athletes of this century, if not of all-time. He has moved so many limits.”
Remarkably, his last two seasons have been his best, with 22 World Cup victories in total coming over that period, as well as the last of his world championship golds in Åre in February and the two Olympic golds in PyeongChang last year which were taken in the face of almost intolerable pressure back home.
He came to occupy that rarified position attained by only a very few elite sportsmen and women who inhabit a different world to the rest – those who are so good that only when they lose does it seem to be big news.
Put simply, Marcel was a marvel, the likes of which global sport will not see again any time soon.