Cornelia Hütter is ready to defend World Cup downhill crystal globe at Birds of Prey

It doesn’t really matter if it’s a race car or a downhill — Cornelia Hütter has a need for speed.

But if the three-time Austrian Olympian has learned anything throughout her 13-year World Cup career, it’s that true happiness requires something else, too: balance.

“I think I have a lot of stories around me,” Hütter stated. “I’m not only a ski racer.”

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Rally car rides and redemptive racing

Hütter grew up around rally car racing. Even as a 5-year-old, she’d often hound her dad as he worked on cars.

“I was always prepared when the car was ready: ‘can we go for a run to check everything?'” she said before admitting, “Yeah, I like the speed.”

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Rally car racing might be Hütter’s most interesting storyline, but rallying (no pun intended) back from injuries might be the most significant.

In 2017, she tore her right ACL in a training run crash in Saalbach, Austria, missing the remaining two months of that campaign. Two years later, after returning from an injury that put her out for five weeks, Hütter again tore her right ACL and calf muscle crashing in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany. She was forced to miss the world championships in February. The next month, she suffered a left knee injury in the World Cup Finals downhill in Soldeu, Andorra.

Everything looked bleak.

“When I was at home, not everyone, but a lot of people tell me it’s over. I almost felt it myself,” she said. “For me it was really almost done because it was not that fun anymore. I was really scared.”

More bad luck was in store for the Austrian, who injured her left knee again during a training run in Reiteralm in March of 2020. An MRI later revealed she’d torn her left ACL; all told, she missed all of 2020 and most of 2021.

While surgeries fixed things, “it’s not like before,” Hütter said. “And I thought, ‘OK, you do the rehab, you go back to skis, you go back on the snow, and when you feel something, you go on. You’re starting again — your second career. And when you feel nothing, you stop. That was in my mind.”

Hütter regained her form in 2022 and found redemption in Garmisch-Partenkirchen — the site of her injury three years prior. She took third in the downhill on Jan. 29 and won the super-G the following day. In 2023, she found the podium four times and won her first world championship medal, a super-G bronze. Last year, she claimed seven podiums — the most since she accumulating eight in 2016 — en route to winning the downhill crystal globe, her first discipline title.

It turns out balance, not speed, was the key to resurrecting — or at least reinventing — her career.

“The most important thing for me was to have fun,” she said. “Don’t stress all the time just for ski racing. It’s for sure my life, it’s everything, but it’s only ski racing. It’s not the whole world.” 

Finish lines and farms

Saturday’s Birds of Prey downhill won’t be the first time Hütter has put a bib on in Beaver Creek. She was 15th in the downhill and fourth in the super-G at the 2015 World Championships and also competed in the super-G and downhill at the 2013 World Cup. Both of those races, however, were on the Raptor course.

“Here it’s something different,” she said after Wednesday’s training run on Birds of Prey, a course she feels tests every aspect of a skier’s on-snow skills and decision-making abilities.

“The flat parts, the steep parts, the rollers, the big jumps — I think everything is in and you have to push on every part on the right way,” she continued. “I think it’s going to be a nice race weekend.”

Growing up, Hütter — who tried on her first pair of skis under the Christmas tree when she was 2 — would travel far away from home with her family find snow during the holidays.

“It was always the best holiday of the year,” she said of her childhood trips to the mountains. Upon returning, Hütter would often ask her dad if they could sell their house in Graz and move to a place with snow. Now, she relishes returning to her parents’ farm every spring. The 11 horses and Scottish highlanders don’t satiate her hunger for speed. Instead, they satisfy her soul, providing the equilibrium which is elusive during the unrelenting World Cup circuit.

“It’s so nice because when I come home there’s nothing with skiing. There’s nothing with racing,” Hütter said. “It’s just another world for me.”