Alpine skiing: starting with three question marks

The weather forecasts are dazzling. At the weekend, 18 degrees and sunshine are announced for the rear Ötztal, and for the Rettenbach glacier at the top of 3000 meters, there are still six degrees. Plus. When the Alpine Ski World Cup starts the new season on Saturday, as it does every year at the end of October, high above Sölden, the cameras will, as is so often the case, provide picturesque pictures.

Other forecasts are harder to make, and there are three major uncertainties that have been affecting the ski scene in recent days. Who will become the heir to the throne of Marcel Hirscher? Who takes on the leading role in the DSV team after Felix Neureuther in year one? And how does skiing continue in the long term in times of climate change?

The fact is that with Hirscher, Neureuther and the Norwegian Aksel Lund Svindal in the men not only three successful racers, but above all extremely charismatic personalities have ended their careers. A vacuum that needs to be filled. From a sporting point of view, Svindal's compatriot Henrik Kristoffersen and Frenchman Alexis Pinturault are the first contenders to succeed Hirscher, who won the overall World Cup eight times in a row.

"A normal process"

But if they are going to get involved as real guys, too, as edgy characters with great aura? A question that sees Wolfgang Maier rather relaxed. "That was in the past always so," said the DSV sports director a week ago in a conversation with the SPIEGEL.

"Every time a charismatic character ended his or her career, the lamentation was great and it was said that such a person would not be able to keep up," says Maier. "If someone had said after Hermann Maier, there's an even better guy like the Hirscher, who wins the World Cup eight times, he would have been called crazy, some of them stop, new ones grow up, a normal process. "

Also the resignation of the DSV-Neuduther figurehead, which is on Saturday for the first time as an ARD expert in use, rated Maier as a possibility for a new beginning. "I see it rather positively that after the resignation of the leader Felix for the young runners a chance emerges to develop themselves and fill the gap."

Hinder / DPA

Felix Neureuther makes his debut as a TV expert

Sporty are the goals in a season without World Cup and Olympics clear: The recovered after his cruciate ligament tear eleven months ago, Thomas Dreßen to assert himself in the top ten of Abfahrer, Stefan Luitz in the Giant Slalom in the top five, maybe even more in it.

But whether they also establish themselves in the external presentation as seasoned personalities, because they say edgy and uncompromising their opinion and like to offend besides the successes such as Neureuther as mature athletes? Fritz Dopfer? Josef Ferstl? Who has what it takes to become a figurehead of German skiing? At the moment there is still room for improvement.

Viktoria Rebensburg with the biggest potential

From a sporting point of view, Viktoria Rebensburg would have to be the leader in the German team. For a decade, the absolute world champion, Olympic champion 2010, twice World Cup silver, to 17 World Cup victories and another 30 podiums.

But the 30-year-old concentrates entirely on the sport. She does not give away much of the colorfulness of her private life, which is perfectly legitimate, not everyone has to be as offensive in public as Maria Höfl-Riesch once did, on the contrary. Rebensburg simply has little ambitions to present herself dazzling and full of glamor, she wants to do what she does well, namely skiing.

But how much longer is that possible? To ski? World Cup race in Central Europe? Climate change is affecting and dividing the Alpine community. There were heated discussions not only because of the absurd-looking pictures of the 60-meter-wide ski slope for amateur runners prepared by Kitzbühel from old snow a week ago.

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DPA

Peter Schröcksnadel, the enterprising president of the Austrian Skiing Association, is even on the subject of global warming, because "a lot of panic". And that he was convinced that the ski sport would "get no difficulties".

What not only Felix Neureuther sees very differently: "According to Donald Trump and Peter Schröcksnadel, there is no climate change and you can not see it anywhere better than on the glaciers." And Wolfgang Maier also contradicts the ÖSV boss: "The topic occupies us all intensively, one can not and should not talk away climate change away." The extent to which the glaciers go back is frightening. "

The ice melts away

The Rettenbachferner alone, on which the Ski World Cup has been wintering since 2000, has shrunk significantly in recent years, sometimes only five per year, in other 30. As the US ski star Ted Ligety came here a year ago the gondola drove up the mountain, he thought he had arrived in a "moonscape".

The outlook for Solden on the weekend: bright sunny. For the ski sport of the future: doubtful and rather gloomy.