Paris (AFP)

With two big crystal globes, an Olympic title and three gold medals at the Worlds, Anna Veith bowed out on Saturday at 30, after being slowed to the top of her game by a serious injury in the fall of 2015.

Between September 2019 and May 2020, Austrian alpine skiing saw its two flamboyant headliners from the 2010s stop: on Saturday, it was Anna Veith, Fenninger at the start of her career, double winner of the big crystal globe ( 2014 and 2015), who announced his retirement from sport just eight months after Marcel Hirscher, eight-time winner of the Alpine Skiing World Cup (2012-2019).

"My dreams for the future have changed in recent years, which is why I want to end my skiing career," said Veith, in a half-hour interview with Austrian public television ORF.

Born in June 1989 in Hallein near Salzburg, Anna Fenninger went through the sport-study of Bad Gastein, which notably saw the birth of Hermann Maier. She also shared the same class as Marcel Hirscher, on the school benches in Bad Hofgastein.

Her prowess among young people propelled her to the rank of great Austrian hope, deprived of crystal while the American Lindsey Vonn or the German Maria Höfl-Riesch shone in the late 2000s and early 2010s.

The first title of world champion in 2011 at Garmisch-Partenkirchen in combined suggests a golden career, but it is slow to confirm.

-The apotheosis of Beaver Creek -

It was during the winter of 2013/14 that Fenninger's career took off: at the Olympics in Sochi-2014, she won gold in super-G and won the general classification of the Alpine Ski World Cup for a few weeks later.

The following season is the apotheosis: two world titles at Beaver Creek (giant slalom and super-G), a silver medal in downhill and a new big crystal globe. Austria hopes to finally have the female counterpart of Marcel Hirscher, who has crushed the competition since 2012 for men.

It was without counting on a serious injury in October 2015, three days before the opening of the season. On the Rettenbach glacier of Sölden in Austria, Fenninger's right knee gives way: rupture of the anterior cruciate ligament, the internal lateral ligament and the patellar tendon.

The Salzburger will take very long months to try to return to its best level, in vain. At the Pyeongchang Olympics in 2018, she occupied the head of the super-G until the passage of the Czech Ester Ledecka, specialist in snowboarding, among the last competitors, which passed her for a hundredth. "The most emotional moment of my career," she said on Saturday.

The two following seasons are complicated, with a new injury in January 2019 (again the anterior cruciate ligament of the right knee), which deprives her of the Worlds in Are (Sweden). A decline in the world hierarchy then begins.

"I have lived my childhood dream. Now is the right time to stop," she said.

© 2020 AFP