50th birthday on the day of the opening ceremony Olympic champion Tanja Frieden: "My life is like a Bircher muesli right now"
The death of Ueli Kestenholz and then her 50th birthday on the opening day of the Olympic Games. A lot is coming together for Tanja Frieden at the moment. "I'll be celebrating life in the summer," she says.
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- Tanja Frieden is celebrating her 50th birthday on the very day of the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games and 20 years after her Olympic victory.
- "I think it's a bit magical," she says. However, she has not planned a big celebration until the summer. "Then I want to do something big, with lots of people. We'll celebrate life then."
- At the moment, her life is like a Bircher muesli, she says, "it has a bit of everything in it." On January 11, she lost her good friend Ueli Kestenholz, the former snowboard star was killed in an avalanche.
"Life is like a Bircher muesli right now. There's a bit of everything in it," says Tanja Frieden in the talk "Legends for eternity" on blue Sport. Most recently, fate struck mercilessly. Ueli Kestenholz, Swiss snowboarding legend and Frieden's companion for decades, died in an avalanche accident in the Lötschental valley; he was just 50 years old. She was paralyzed for days, says Frieden, "I still haven't come to terms with the tragedy."
"Celebrating life"
But as painful as Kestenholz's death is, Frieden is still trying to see the positives. For example, February 6. That's when the Thun native celebrates her 50th birthday - and the day also coincides with the opening of the Olympic Games in Milan and Cortina d'Ampezzo. "I think it's a bit magical that my 50th birthday falls exactly on the opening ceremony," says Frieden. At the last Winter Games in Italy, in Turin 2006, she celebrated her greatest sporting success: the gold medal in boardercross - the snowboard discipline that celebrated its premiere at the time.
She won't be celebrating big just yet. "There's a lot of things coming together right now," says Frieden. There will be "a small get-together". But she wants to make up for the party in the summer. "Then I want to do something big, with lots of people. We'll celebrate life then," says Frieden. Struggling with getting older - does she know that? "No," she says firmly and laughs.
