Taking the Final Fall: A Life after Professional Skiing

The passage to entering a career in professional sports usually forces a set of commitments at a tender time in a young life. Any professional athlete most likely started noticing their ability during their adolescent years, at a key junction in their physical and personal development. Achievements in academics at school may have taken a back seat while sporting success took on an amplified importance. No ambitious young athlete really lives the typical teenage life of going out, partying and drinking. Unlike the interests of their peers, sport becomes a burning passion, pretty much the athlete’s only focus in life.

This post summarises how my athletic career got started and points out some of the difficulties I experienced when I had to accept its end. During my teenage years, all I wanted to do was ski and snowboard. Being on snow made me happy. My parents quickly realized I had talent and paid for me to attend a sport school so I could spend more time on the snow training and competing and less in the classroom. At the age of fourteen, I got my first sponsors and about three years after I was selected to go to Junior World Champs.

Beyond high school, I decided to study law but after a year of successful studies, I had to conclude that full-time studies just didn’t allow me to push my skiing career hard enough. I quit my law studies in 2003, entering the FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany where I graduated with a Bachelors in Business Administration and Economics in a part-time study over a period of seven and a half years.

Throughout these studies, I was mainly focused on competing, training and travelling globally on the professional circuit. But I was always confident that through my studies, languages (Swiss German, German, French, English, Spanish) and palmarès (2nd X Games and US Open 2008, 1st Dew Tour 2009, 2nd Dew Tour 2011, 3 World Cup Podiums, Sochi Olympics, 3rd World Champs 2015), it wouldn’t be a problem for me to find work once I retired from skiing.

Most people that completely change their occupations do so because they want to try something new and are not enjoying where they are in their career. The unfortunate thing with being a retiring athlete is that you still love what you do, but you get older and rookies are racing ahead to take your spot in the sport. Also, the cycle of picking up injuries, probable surgery and months of rehab followed by competitive recovery start to add up.

After my third knee surgery in the Spring of 2012 I started to question everything, started to ask myself if freeskiing was really an activity worth destroying my body over. All the injuries started to get me thinking about retiring for good. I guess I was trying to prepare myself, trying to face the fact and trying to figure out when the right time would be to admit the end of my competitive career.

Figuring the way out

I knew I wanted to compete in the Winter Olympics in Sochi in 2014, the first time freeskiing was featured and so I thought I’d wait until they were over and then figure things out. During this time, I did however discover my passion for hosting. I loved being in front of a camera or on a stage in a major event. I also got a few opportunities to host some stuff but couldn’t get more involved in it because time on the slope didn’t leave much for the shots on the screen.

At the time, the contracts which were paying my bills were due to run out in Spring 2014. I thought that this would be a great time to retire: do the Olympics and then move on, start something new. Once the Olympics were over though, I felt empty, lost, lonely, depressed and miserable. It felt like I had been living in a different world all this time and got kicked down to earth into a “real” life which was foreign, something I never knew or lived before. Going into the Olympics I was so focused — the qualifying process started about 18 months before the actual event — so I didn’t have time to think about a solid plan for my retirement.

As mentioned, until then I always thought I had my plan, that opportunities would come my way. I had my studies, my languages, my travel and living abroad experience, my palmarès, my other passions, the hosting and much more. I considered that being an ex-athlete would be an advantage because people are supposed to know that you are determined, strong-willed, hard-working etc. Well it wasn’t quite so simple…

It so happened that in Spring 2014, I had no clue what to do or how to earn money. I applied for a few jobs but didn’t get any of them. I didn’t really want to ski anymore because my body hurt and my motivation to train was not what it used to be. I still got offered new contracts so I decided to ski another year because it just seemed so natural to me, the life I knew and what I was good at. By this point though, I wasn’t as keen on skiing anymore but it was still fun, so I thought “Why not?” This also left me more time to really think about what I wanted to do.

Adding another season was a great decision because I won the Bronze Medal in Kreischberg, Austria at the World Champs in January 2015 and knew at that point that this was it, I was done for good! This was the perfect moment to put an end to my 12-year skiing career. It’s a gift to be able to end a career at the top of the game and my heart and body were clearly telling me it was time to move one.

Out of a pipe dream

I then officially retired from professional skiing in March 2015. It hit me, this time I was out for real. I now realized that I had lost everything that I had been working for so hard all my life, and a bit more. I lost my identity. I lost my friends. I lost my passion. I lost what I loved most. I was done and now a whole load of question peppered this aftermath: Who am I without skiing in my life? What am I worth without skiing? Am I even worth anything at all? No more fame for winning medals, no more winning meaningful medals at all. No more sponsors — they all dropped me. No more attention from the press. Are my fans gone as well? What will fulfil my life now? Will I ever find something I love as much as skiing again? Nothing could make me happy anymore — even though I had so much to be happy about. What could possibly replace skiing for me?

I woke up every morning during that Spring and all I could do was cry in bed, for weeks. I had never felt that empty and useless ever. I knew it was the right decision to stop but it hurt. I did feel relieved because the big step of retiring which I was so afraid of was done but I wasn’t prepared for the emptiness that followed it. This wonderful journey was over. I had to fill in a huge blank. I really had no clue who I was without skiing.

My whole identity in a previous life had been taken away from me and I started to question my future. What do I get up for in the morning now? How will I get a job as presenter? Skiing was my passion, my hobby and my job, all rolled into one. While the identity of an average individual is usually multi-faceted, the one of an athlete is most probably singular, making retirement even harder. I realized it wasn’t all that easy…

A new resolve

Once again I sent out applications for all kinds of work because I needed money and wanted to get on with my life, but these efforts weren’t fruitful. Companies said I had no work experience and I got it: who wants to hire a 32-year-old ex-athlete who has never worked a normal job before when you can hire a 25-year-old for less money and with working experience? This made me doubt my abilities even more and made my retirement even harder to stomach. I felt like nobody understood what I was going through and I didn’t blame them — my problem didn’t have many obvious remedies.

It was only then that I started to understand why so many ex-pro athletes struggle with retirement. Even if you have a plan as I did myself, you take a fall. Nobody thinks about all the ones that don’t or didn’t prepare themselves for it.

The biggest newspaper in Switzerland, Blick, finally gave me a chance. They saw something in me that others didn’t. I now work for them part-time as a presenter for their online TV shows, the rest of the time I’m still self-employed. I resurrected my modelling which I stopped when I was 20-years-old because of skiing, and I try to push my dream of becoming a known and respected presenter/hostess. I absolutely love what I do even if some months are better than others but I’m trying to live my dream again. In the end I decided to do what I love over an office job, something that I would most probably not be stoked about. I got lucky and was given a chance to prove myself and I’m really thankful for that.

It hasn’t even been a year since I retired and I’m still trying to manage “real” life every day. How do I feel about skiing today? Do I still miss it? I miss the traveling, the adrenaline, my friends, the freedom I felt when I was skiing. The happiness I experienced when I did well in a competition and skiing simply for what it is. I definitely don’t miss the pressure of performing and I don’t miss the risks I took — I absolutely love that I now have an apartment where I actually spend more than two weeks without leaving again. I have a stable relationship, a “real home” is how I’d like to call it. I still don’t think I’ve found my “new” self quite yet but I’m working on it. I love my job as presenter even if I have to prove myself twice as much as everybody else. In the end I’m a fighter, I’ve always been and hopefully I will suceed again.

I guess what I really wanted to express with this post is that anybody that devotes their life to something and is forced to stop doing it, no matter what the reason, will most probably feel completely lost, empty and depressed when they enter the new phase. I don’t know what you can compare retiring from a sport to, as I’ve never experienced anything that comes even close to that feeling, but maybe this will help friends and families understand what it is like for a professional athlete to retire. Maybe this post will motivate young athletes to think about their future early enough because even if you do, it will still be hard when you step away from competing. Maybe it will show other ex-athletes that they are not the only ones to have felt that way. I wish I had somebody to talk that understood what I was going through when I retired.

Of course I would also like to thank my parents, my fiancée and my friends for never letting me down, for lifting me up when I was desperate, for always believing in me and for showing me that there is something else out there for me, even if I’m not “Mirjam the skier” anymore.

xxx,

Mirjam Jaeger