Found an error?
Report nowFor Tanja Frieden, the joy of winning Olympic gold in 2006 turned to heartbreak while she was still in Turin. Her relationship with Seth Wescott, also an Olympic champion, fell apart. “We were overwhelmed,” she admits.
A medal—even an Olympic gold medal—has two sides. What might sound a bit trite is especially true for Tanja Frieden. There’s the glamorous side, the sophisticated one. You get invited to galas and shows. “I call that my Cinderella phase,” says the 50-year-old Olympic champion on the talk show “Legend for Eternity.” Not least, you earn a lot more money than before and have usually achieved your life’s athletic goal. But other things end up on the dark side.
After her gold-medal run, she found herself caught in a dilemma—between joy and constant media attention. And ultimately, her success took a toll on her personal life as well: her relationship with her longtime boyfriend, the American Seth Wescott, fell apart. He, too, was a snowboarder; he, too, was successful; he, too, won Olympic gold in Turin in 2006—exactly one day before Frieden. It was all too much for the two of them. “We were both overwhelmed,” says Frieden. And he even more so than she was.
Frieden and Westcott vowed to stay loyal to each other before the Games began. “We wanted to make it through the Olympics together.” In the end, however, the hype was too much; both were swept up by the public. “But it wasn’t just the medal that drove us apart,” says Frieden. Things had already been rocky before that.
Still, she regrets how things turned out back then. “It’s true: Sometimes I would have preferred to give my medal back and have my relationship back instead.” And yet she had to accept the realities. “You don’t become an athlete because you want to be in the public eye.” But that quickly becomes part of the deal.
But life went on—even in her personal life. The media were Frieden’s constant companions, publishing and commenting on everything she did. This was especially true when she was dating Stefan Abplanalp, then the speed coach for the Swiss women’s team at Swiss-Ski. The two were a couple for five years, until 2012. Their breakup was also widely covered by the media. Did she fail to protect her private life enough? Frieden: “Breakups are very difficult situations; I didn’t want to make a spectacle of it. But I also didn’t want to hide away, because then I wouldn’t have been able to live my life.”
Frieden has been married to Marc Ramseier, a kitesurfer from the very beginning, for exactly ten years. The couple has a son who will soon turn ten: Luam Kai.
15.07.2026, 18:35
