ZAGREB, 20 January 2005 — Janica Kostelic played on the slopes of Mount Sljeme as a child and made her first tentative turns on skis on its snow.
Two decades on, Kostelic is the popular favorite to win Croatia’s first World Cup race on the mountain near the capital on Thursday when tens of thousands of devoted fans are expected to turn out to cheer her.
The Zagreb native can take the overall World Cup lead as well, just by staying sufficiently ahead of closest slalom rivals Tanja Poutiainen and Anja Paerson.
The race, under floodlights on artificial snow, will be a family affair for the 23-year-old former World Cup champion.
Brother Ivica, who will defend his world slalom title in Italy next month, will be one of the forerunners and parents Ante and Marica have only a short distance to cover from their house at the foot of the mountain to watch the race.
When Kostelic returned to Zagreb after winning three gold medals at the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics, some 300,000 fans turned out to welcome her.
“People were standing all the way from the airport to the city centre, which is about a 10-kilometer route,” recalled Ivica who was with his sister.
“There were helicopters with banners and everything. It was something amazing, a real one-off -- like when a Roman emperor has come back from some big war to be greeted with crowds throwing rose petals.”
Kostelic has made a remarkable comeback since losing the whole of last season to a succession of knee injuries and surgery to remove her thyroid gland. She won the season’s opening slalom in Aspen and has been on the podium on four other occasions.
One legacy of the thyroid condition is increasing short-sightedness and Kostelic has been having tests on her eyes this week.
“I have contact lenses and will wear them for the slalom in Zagreb. They do not bother me for the slalom. At the end of the season we will make more tests and decide -- surgery or something else,” she told the newspaper Jutarnji List.
In the overall standings Kostelic is second, just nine points behind Austrian Renate Goetschl, who will not race the slalom.
Like Goetschl, team mate Michaela Dorfmeister, lying in third place, is a speed specialist, so the only other women capable of using Thursday’s technical event to seize the lead in the standings are Finn Poutiainen and defending champion Paerson of Sweden.
The two women share fourth place on 706 points, 83 points behind Kostelic. One hundred points are on offer to Thursday’s first Zagreb winner, with 80 for the runner-up.
Paerson won the slalom and giant slalom World Cups, as well as the overall title, last season but has good reason to be nervous of the Croatian fans alongside the race slope who are expected to number 24,000.
Two years ago, when Paerson was leading after the first leg of a slalom in Maribor, in neighboring Slovenia, Croatian fans threw snowballs and set off flares as she took her second run.
Paerson beat Kostelic despite the distractions but her slalom form has not been so good this season and she has not been on the podium since November.
The in-form slalom skier of the moment is Austrian Marlies Schild, who has won the last two races in the discipline. Schild was runner-up behind Kostelic at the last world championships in 2003.
