Dressed in black suits, the men sat stiffly on uncomfortable benches while a woman with a statement hairstyle and wearing a pink evening gown asked them questions. And when the spotlights went out and the evening came to an end, at least one of the men was left thinking, “What a disgrace”.
Meet Iouri Podladtchikov, a snowboarder who can be difficult at times. Although “snowboarder” does not cover it exactly, but we will get to that later. And “difficult” isn’t really the right word either, as we will soon see.
Podladtchikov felt that something had gone seriously wrong that night. A television show watched by hundreds of thousands of viewers at prime time on a Sunday evening – and Podladtchikov, an icon of the snowboarding scene, crowned world champion for the second time in the season that had just finished, had not even been voted into the second round by the audience and had not even come close to being named Swiss Sports Personality of the Year? This was too much for him to get his head round, especially as he had taken a break from training in the US to attend the event, flying eleven hours each way and subjecting himself to the difference in altitude between Breckenridge, Colorado, at 3,000 metres above sea level, and Leutschenbach in Zurich, at 400 metres above sea level – not to mention the jet lag.
An utter disgrace – in his eyes, at least. And yet he had simply been himself – or was it precisely because he had been himself that it had happened?
In the round of questions before the audience vote, Steffi Buchli, the presenter with the eye-catching hairstyle and the evening gown, had wedged herself between Podladtchikov and the man sitting next to him, cross-country skier Dario Cologna, and chatted breezily to him about a halfpipe semi-final in Breckenridge the day before where, she thought, he had been eliminated: “I was pretty alarmed when I saw the results online.” As if she were concerned about his being on form for the Olympic season, and using the formal form of address, she asked: “I suppose you were just putting on your poker face?” And he replied: “You can’t read.”
As a matter of fact, Podladtchikov had reached the final round, albeit by the skin of his teeth.
Nothing could give a clearer picture of Iouri Podladtchikov than this Sunday evening show where he stuck out like a sore thumb; the voting results that went against him; and his reaction to the presenter’s incorrect question. He is a man of extremes, not someone for the masses. He is an athlete who can transform the most prosaic of moments into a work of art – but sometimes into one that only he can appreciate. He is an extrovert who can do nothing in moderation, pulled in one direction and then in the other by total self-confidence on the one hand and total vulnerability on the other – hence his inability to comprehend that he did not make it beyond the list of ten nominees at the Swiss Sports Awards in December. Half of him strives for recognition from everybody, and on occasions like the Swiss Sports Awards he forgets that winning everybody’s applause would mean renouncing the other half of his personality. Half of him craves love, while the other half is terribly selective about who he shares it with. Half of him, the proud half, declares to the world that he wants to become an Olympic champion, while the other half, the vulnerable half, which can have just as much sway over him, means he gets into a huff if someone interprets second place as a defeat – or misreads 16th place in a semi-final as an elimination.
For Podladtchikov, there is a direct link between the public’s expectations and his success. When he shows off, he does so very deliberately. If he did not stoke the public’s expectations, he says, he would have given it all up a long time ago. “I would have abandoned my goals a long way back, as the road to reaching them is long and arduous.” He creates pressure in order to subject himself and his actions to external control.
But he cannot actually stand being controlled by anyone but himself. Iouri is a control freak, say his parents Yuri Podladtchikov, a professor of geophysics, and Valentina Podladtchikova, a mathematician. They have had to learn that he is not someone who can be talked into things. “Any hint of an attempt to influence him is counterproductive,” they say – even if it is just about what car to buy. “But if we want to buy a car,” says his mum, “he’s the first to try and interfere.”
They tell an anecdote from his childhood. His father always insisted that certain things in life had to be done, and school in particular was one of them. So Podladtchikov was given a fair degree of freedom, as long as he never came home with less than a grade B in maths. But he was at a sports school where he was given special privileges, and to this day his father cannot shake off the suspicion that his son told his teachers at Sport-Gymnasium Davos about this rule of his parents, and that the school arranged for him to never receive less than a grade B so that he could get on with his training.
Podladtchikov is a headstrong character who can get so worked up about seemingly trivial things that you can’t help but wonder how he can expect to concentrate when things really do matter – such as at 9:30 pm local time on 11 February at the Olympic halfpipe final in Sochi. The answer is simple. He hopes that he will be ready precisely because he has taken himself so seriously – down to the last detail.
Take the time in September, for example, when he found a picture of himself in the online edition of Swiss newspaper 20 Minuten, sticking his tongue out while snowboarding on a halfpipe. He contacted the journalist and said: “There are a thousand good photos of me and you use one where my tongue’s sticking out. You just don’t do that!”
Or a couple of days later, when he saw on the NZZ website that the caption on a photo of him had the wrong name, Louri Kotsenburg, and sent a text message saying: “Are you guys taking the piss?”
And then there was that time in December, at the tournament in Breckenridge, when the presenter from NBC Sports, the event’s official media partner, dashed towards him, her harassed cameraman in tow and, although she had been covering the event for years, shouted: “Please say your name into the microphone, yeah? I still don’t know how you say it!” And he replied: “You should know it by now.”
On the other hand, he is over moon when things do go right for him – when he has what he calls a “me moment”, such as the YOLO Flip, an incredibly complex trick. He became the first halfpipe snowboarder in the world to accomplish this move last spring at the Winter X Games Europe in Tignes, France – a spin-off from X Games Aspen, the most important event for freestyle winter sports athletes.
YOLO is the name that Podladtchikov gave to the trick and stands for “You only live once” – or should it be “You only fly once”? Podladtchikov went straight on to bungle the jump that was supposed to follow his YOLO Flip. But that no longer mattered. At the foot of the halfpipe he ripped his helmet from his head and threw it, along with his goggles, into the audience. He flung his board in the other direction, thrust his head back, got down on his knees and wrapped his arms around himself, and then hugged the television presenter. He was completely overcome with happiness and wanted everyone to celebrate with him.
“I’d also crack up laughing if I saw myself celebrating like that,” he says.
“Why do you freak out like that?”
“It just happens.”
“Or is it because you want to make sure people appreciate the magnitude of the moment?”
“You can think that about me if you like. Everyone in the public eye likes revelling in their achievements. Everyone who stands for something and wants to make something of themselves wants to see the effect of what they do. And anyone who says any differently is lying. Why should you not want to share something you see as defining your life with the world?”
Sometimes the world shares in other parts of his life, too. In December 2011, almost two years after he reached fourth place in the Olympic Games in Vancouver and almost one year after winning his first World Championship medal (silver), the Swiss evening newspaper Blick am Abend published a photo of him stark naked at a machine in a petrol station, with just a hat protecting his modesty. “World Championship hero naked at petrol station”, said the headline. Podladtchikov was on the road in Graubünden with his best friend Ruben Cassiano and they were having a laugh in the car. Cassiano posted the picture on Instagram – he was not necessarily to know that anyone from the media was following his profile. But it turned out that they were and the image, published in Blick am Abend, made the rounds and was seen by all and sundry – including Podladtchikov’s parents, who keep a close eye on media coverage of their son to this day. When this photo appeared in the press, back in December 2011, his father called his mother: “Darling, have you seen the papers today?”
“Is there something about Iouri?”
“Yes. But don’t worry. It’s actually quite nice – a nice photo. You don’t need to look at it.”
Of course she did anyway and she was very upset – not because her son had been fooling around but because a journalist had picked up on it: “That was the day I realised that he had become a public figure. I told him he should try to keep certain things private from then on.”
And Podladtchikov said: “There are also videos from that night. It’s a good job no one’s seen them.”
Sometimes he can’t help being what many would call difficult – and sometimes he’s happy being that way, as everything he does goes towards developing the right mood to get him to the Olympic Games. In these cases, “difficult” really does not cover it at all; he would be better described as a hunter chasing after good feelings.
Even a picture showing him naked at a petrol station can, at the right moment, make him feel good – but when this good feeling comes under threat, then the hunter becomes the hunted. He begins to act like a bear that’s been shot – as on that evening at the Sports Awards – or like a rabbit that slips off to hide in its burrow – as on a certain November evening in 2013. On that night, the NZZ was joining him for one of the many skateboarding sessions he had been doing in the run-up to Sochi, and the cameraman asked him if he could do a few tricks. “It won’t take long, I have an exact idea of what you should do,” he said. Big mistake. Freestyle athletes don’t like being told what tricks to do, as outsiders have absolutely no understanding of which tricks can be carried out under which conditions. A row broke out, in which both Podladtchikov and the cameraman said things that they would later regret.
Podladtchikov said that the cameraman could just point and shoot as he did the tricks he wanted to do, and the cameraman offered an apology, but it was too late. The mood had gone sour. At that moment, Podladtchikov was a real pain as far as the cameraman was concerned, and the cameraman, in Podladtchikov’s eyes, was completely clueless.
Podladtchikov stomped off and there was a sense that he was not just annoyed with the cameraman, but also with himself and the fact that he had let himself be dragged down. And perhaps he was even a little ashamed because he had shown a side of himself that he does not want the world to see. But by the next day he had forgotten all about it and a couple of days later he had such a long lunch with the NZZ that he missed his scheduled trampoline training session. His coach, Marco Bruni, was a little annoyed, but he got over it. He knows by now that sometimes there are things more important for Podladtchikov and his Olympic preparation than training – such as talking about himself. Or the Sports Awards in mid-December, which he travelled a long way to attend, a move every sports scientist would of course advise against. And when Podladtchikov does not get the motivational shot in the arm he was expecting, nor the level of public adoration he was hoping for, then he takes what is at worst a commonplace defeat to be an utter disgrace.