He was born in Germany, grew up in the Austrian Alps and will represent Peru at the 2022 Winter Olympics

When someone asks her where she is from, she answers, without pretense, from Peru. “I feel more Peruvian than German”bill Ornella Oettl Reyes (Munich, 1991) from Innsbruck, a city nestled in the heart of the Austrian Alps. Despite the distance, the professional skier feels deeply linked to this land: Roxana, her mother, is a Peruvian migrant with Huancavelican roots who arrived in Germany in the 1980s. “Whenever he could, he prepared ceviche for us. It was not easy to find fish and other supplies, but she made an effort to get them”remember.

At home, in addition to cultivating a devotion to Peruvian cuisine, her father encouraged her and her brother, Manfred, to practice snow skiing. For much of the year, a white blanket covers the city in which she was born, so it is common to start winter sports at a young age. Ornella has been skiing since she was seven years old and, she confesses, as a child she dreamed of representing her mother’s country, that distant place that she always told her about every night before going to sleep.

OLYMPIC CAREER

At fourteen, Ornella moved to Salzburg, Austria, to enhance her skills as an athlete: the city has some of the best sports centers for alpine skiing. Three years later, she moved to Innsbruck to study economics at university and develop a career as a highly competitive athlete at the same time.

When she came of age, Ornella and the Peruvian Olympic Committee did the necessary paperwork so that she could represent the country at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, where she wore a suit with alpaca motifs. In 2014 he qualified for Sochi and this 2022 will be present at the Beijing games, competing in the slalom mode, a test that is characterized by having to overcome obstacles at high speed.

“My goal is to go to the second round and finish in the top 50. After that, the idea is to go step by step to try to get as far as possible”says the skier. This will be her third participation in the Olympic Games, something that only ten national athletes have been able to achieve throughout history.

Before going to China, the athlete says that she has dedicated herself to training at least five times a week, between field work and the gym, to get ready for the competition. In addition, she is studying a master’s degree in statistics and teaches math classes to children. “Teams from Ireland, Albania, Brazil come here. The best in the world in winter sports”comment.

After beijing, says he would like to return to Peru to practice sandboarding in the Huacachina desert, in Ica, something he always does every time he is visiting. He would also like to get to know Huancavelica, in the central highlands, to better understand his origins, his identity and reaffirm how proud he is to wear the red-and-white shirt on his chest. //

THE DATA

• The opening of the winter Olympics will be this Friday, February 4.
• The mega sports event will be broadcast through the ATV signal.