Most successful Beijing Winter Paralympics athlete Pedersen fears China has wasted legacy of 2022 Games
- Norwegian Jesper Pedersen won 4 golds and a silver in alpine skiing at the Games last year, while China’s athletes won 61 and topped the medal table
- Pedersen says there were no Chinese competitors involved in this season’s World Cup circuit, and fears the country’s athletes will go backwards
The most successful athlete at the Beijing Winter Paralympics has questioned whether its legacy has been wasted when it comes to China’s skiers.
Norwegian Jesper Saltvik Pedersen, who won four golds and a silver at the 2022 event, said he had not seen a single Chinese competitor on the World Para Alpine Skiing World Cup circuit this year.
On Saturday, the country reported it had achieved a surplus of 350 million yuan (US$52 million) from its organisational budget for the Winter Olympics and Paralympics.
And Thomas Bach, the president of the International Olympic Committee, said the IOC would put its US$10.4 million share of the surplus towards supporting the development of sport in China.
“Young people engaging in winter sports will greatly benefit from this contribution of the IOC,” Bach said.
But Pedersen is not convinced the gains China made last year, when the likes of Zhang Mengqiu and Liang Jingyi were winning gold, silver and bronze medals in the country’s table-topping tally of 61 four years after leaving Pyeongchang with one medal, has carried over.
“It was nice to see and I hope more people have a better life because of it, but I’m afraid, for this [World Cup] season that we just finished, there were no Chinese representatives, so I’m afraid they have turned down all the programmes and now they’re back to where they were before.
“But of course I hope that we could have change over time, but I kind of doubt it, although I do hope so.”
Pedersen described his performance at the Beijing Games, where he dominated the sitting classification in slalom, giant slalom, super G and super combined, as a “dream come true” and said the realisation of what he had achieved only came afterwards.
The 23-year-old has not rested on his laurels, winning the World Cup overall title again this year for the sixth time in a row. And with the next Winter Paralympics in Milan Cortina in three years, he has no intention of slowing down.
“Alpine skiing is my sport because you can always do something a bit better, you can always evolve, and the day you think you’re the best you can be then you have to quit because then everybody else is going to come after you,” he said.
“To be able to win season after season is also a big thing for me. Because it’s cool to have won once, but then you know everybody wants to beat you, so to be able to have that continuity there is a big thing for me.”
Already one of his sport’s most successful athletes, Pedersen’s achievements over the past year earned him a nomination for the Laureus World Sportsperson of the Year with a Disability Award.
In Paris for Monday evening’s ceremony, Pedersen has his sights set on making more history in his sport and wants to match the achievements of Marcel Hirscher, considered the greatest able-bodied Alpine skier of all time.
“I’ve currently won the World Cup overall six years in a row, Marcel Hirscher, from Austria, he did eight on the able-bodied circuit, so I would like to show we are doing the same things and put my six globes up to his eight, so if I am able to go past him in alpine skiing that would be something,” he said.
