Was "enfant terrible"

Cancer! Skiing world fears for two-time Kitz winner

The podium of the 1974 Wengen downhill race: Franz Klammer, Roland Collombin, Herbert Plank(Bild: APA/KEYSTONE/STR)

In the 1970s he was at times one of the best and fastest skiers in the world, between December 1972 and January 1974 he won downhill races in Kitzbühel (1973, 1974), Wengen, Gröden and Garmisch - but the memory of his successes is currently fading into the background, as it has now become known that the Swiss skiing legend Roland Collombin (74) has cancer!

Nevertheless, as Collombin's former arch-rival and long-time good friend Bernhard Russi explains in a ski podcast with "Blick", Collombin, who was considered an "enfant terrible" during his time, a "candle burning at both ends", is apparently coping well with his illness.

"That's life, that's just the way it is ..."
"If you ask him about it today, he says: 'Hey, I'm doing great, I don't feel a thing, I'm not sick!" says Russi, who won downhill gold at the 1972 Olympic Games in Sapporo ahead of his compatriot and Austrian Heinrich Messner.

The winners' podium of the 1972 Sapporo Olympic downhill: Heinrich Messner, Bernhard Russi and Roland Collombin(Bild: AFP)

More details about the state of his health and the nature of the cancer were not divulged in the podcast ("I don't know the details now, I don't know how it's progressing"), but Russi believes that Collombin will not let it get him down. "As long as he can do what he enjoys, he says to himself: 'That's life, that's just the way it is ...'"