What if I prove I’m not a real racer after all?
It’s ridiculous. I know exactly how much work I’ve put into this season. Early mornings, edge tuning, Saturdays in the mountains instead of bars. He knows it too. Max wouldn’t be here with his wax if this were a joke.
Still, the old voice is resourceful. It uses any opening.
I breathe out, slow, the way my therapist drilled into me, and reach for the line Fabio fed me in Stubai when he set a training course for me, and I wanted to impress him so badly I almost forgot how to ski.
“You don’t have to win the whole hill in the first turn,” he’d said at the start, gently bumping my shoulder with his. “One gate at a time, Zlata. Get the first one right. Then the next one.”
The memory drops into place like a good edge set.
One gate at a time.
“Five seconds,” the starter says.
I settle into my stance. Hands forward, hips over my boots, eyes on the first blue. The rest of the hill fuzzes out.
“Three… two… one…”
Beep.
I push through the wand.
The first gate comes faster than my training brain expects. My edges bite anyway, catching in that familiar spring-slush chatter,and my whole body remembers what it’s here for. Pressure into the outside ski. Hands quiet. Look ahead, not at the tips.
Blue. Red. Blue.
The world narrows to color and impact. The panels slap my shins, the sound hollow and satisfying. Snow splashes up in little bursts; the course flicks by. My legs burn in the good way, lactic acid sitting just under the skin, promising to make things interesting if I get lazy.
There’s a delay gate in the middle—a weird flat bit between two steeps where, in training, I either went too straight and panicked or too round and lost all speed. Today, I manage something between the two. Not perfect, but committed. I hear somebody whooping from the fence. It might be Fabio. It might be some random dad. I don’t have the brain space to care.
By the time I cross the finish, lungs on fire, the whole run has smeared into one long sensation in my body. My skis slide to a stop in the soft snow, and I look up at the timing board like all of this is real.
It is.
My time pops up in red, then settles into the list. Tenth in category. Not podium. But not the disaster my night-brain can always invent.
A laugh bubbles up in my throat, half relief, half hysteria. I let myself have it. Tenth. With a little mistake at the delay and a line I know I can sharpen.
I can do better.
And for once, the thought doesn’t land like self-hatred. It lands like… opportunity.
***
Between runs, the hill goes soft and lazy. Kids’ categories run, old guys in retro suits take their turns, somebody falls spectacularly in front of the finish banner, and gets up grinning. There’s a smell of grilled sausages from the Ganslerhütte near the finish, and the sun has settled into that late-afternoon angle that makes everything look like an Instagram filter. The spring lets us all know it's here, and we sit there in our race suits unzipped, cooling ourselves with snow and ice like we want to bathe in it.
We find a bench just off the side of the finish area, half in the sun, half sheltered by a snowbank. I peel off my helmet, and my hair explodes in damp, tangled waves under my beanie. My face is hot, my nose is burnt, and my legs are starting to remember that I am not twenty.
Fabio drops down beside me, thigh bumping mine. He’s holding two plastic cups of iced tea and a packet of those terrible dry biscuits they hand out at every Austrian race.
“For you, race queen,” he says, passing me a cup.
“Stop it,” I say, but I take it. The tea tastes like boiled water and paper. It’s perfect.
We sit in silence for a minute, watching some man in a skin-tight lime-green suit argue with the starter about his time. I know he’s going to say something about my run. He also knows I know. We let the expectation stretch until it’s almost funny.
“Well?” I say finally, without looking at him. “Coach?”
