Zurbriggen, Heidi

Heidi Zurbriggen was born March 16, 1967 in the commune of Saas-Almagell in the canton of Valais , Switzerland . She was trained at the local ski club SC Saas-Almagell, trained with her older brother Pirmin , who later became the Olympic champion and four-time world champion ^[1] .

Already in the 1984/85 season, Heidi entered the main team of the Swiss national team and made her debut in the World Cup. Then she visited the World Junior Championships in Czechoslovakia, from where she brought four awards of various denominations: one gold and three silver.

In 1987, she started at the home world championship in Crans-Montana , where she showed the fourteenth result in the downhill program. Two years later, at the World Championships in Veil, she finished fourth in downhill, took eleventh place in giant slalom and twelfth place in super giant. Two years later, at similar competitions in Saalbach-Hinterglemm, she became the sixth in combination.

Thanks to a series of successful performances, she won the right to defend the country's honor at the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville - in the downhill she closed the top ten, in the other disciplines she did not show any result.

In 1993 at the World Championships in Morioka she took 21st place in giant slalom, 24th place in downhill, while in the super giant she finished ninth.

Being among the leaders of the ski team in Switzerland, it successfully passed the selection for the 1994 Olympic Games in Lillehammer - in the final protocol of downhill skiing it was located on line 22, in the supergiant, left the race.

After the Lillehammer Olympics, Zurbriggen remained in the main team of the Swiss national team and continued to take part in major international competitions. So, in 1996, she won the first time at the World Cup stage, beat all rivals in the downhill at the stage in Norway. In addition, she successfully performed at the World Championships in Sierra Nevada , where she won a silver medal in the super giant program, skipping ahead only the titled Italian Isolde Costner . The following season, at the world championship in Sestriere, she became a silver medalist in downhill skiing, this time losing to American Hilary Lind .

In 1998, she went to represent the country at the Nagano Olympics - here she showed the sixth result in giant slalom, the twelfth result in downhill, took 21 place in the super giant. Soon after the end of this Olympics, she decided to end her career as an athlete.

Over the course of her long sports career, Zurbriggen got 82 times in the top ten of the various stages of the World Cup, including 17 times on the podium: she has three gold medals, seven silver and seven bronze ones. She never managed to win the Crystal Globe, but in one of the seasons she was on the second downhill. The highest result in the overall classification of all disciplines is third place. She is also a four-time Swiss champion in alpine skiing.

Subsequently, she married Damian Andenmatten and, together with her husband, is managing a small hotel in Saas-Almagell ^[2] .

• Heidi Zurbriggen - Olympic statistics at Sports-Reference.com
• Heidi Zurbriggen - statistics on the FIS website
• Heidi Zurbriggen (English) - Page in Alpine Ski Database