Furious with FIS: Bloody unfair and obvious discrimination

Ebba Andersson FIS
On Friday, it happened again. Now the ski star has had enough of what she experiences as bloody unfair and blatant discrimination against athletes.

On Friday, it happened again. Now the ski star has had enough of what she experiences as bloody unfair and blatant discrimination against athletes.

Furious with FIS: Overall, the 27-year-old Swede can look back on a stellar season, having returned home from Trondheim as the World Champion for the second time. However, there is one thing that is eating away at Ebba Andersson, something she cannot let go of.

“Still incredibly angry”
Andersson is talking about the incident in Holmenkollen during the penultimate World Cup round. She thought she had secured third place in the 20-kilometer race. But a quarter of an hour later, she received the shocking news: You are disqualified.

“I’m still incredibly angry”, she says to Expressen.

According to the jury, the Swede had taken too many skate strides. Sweden filed a protest, but the jury stood firm. They appealed the decision to the judiciary of the International Ski and Snowboard Federation (FIS Court), but their appeal was rejected. Andersson is still both disappointed and angry about the rejection in the FIS Court in a case where she feels she was treated unfairly.

And then it happened again in Lahti over the weekend. She feels herself seething with anger.

“You don’t get any less angry when you see how they (the jury) behaved around the incident here on Friday”, says Andersson.

Unfair

The incident Andersson is referring to is what happened in the men’s sprint final during the World Cup in Lahti on Friday evening. In the battle for third place, Federico Pellegrino crashed into the Swiss skier Valerio Grond, causing him to fall.

Despite anger and protests from Switzerland, there were no consequences: the jury decided not to punish the Italian.

“The next day we started discussing what happened in the sprint on the bus up to the stadium. I asked the others how it ended, whether he (Pellegrino) got disqualified. But I heard that nothing happened at all.”

How did you feel about that?
“That now it’s all starting again. That I started to burn inside. That I felt unfairly treated.”

Andersson experiences it as blatant discrimination.

“That’s exactly what makes me so angry. How differently the jury treats different athletes and different situations. If our sport is going to be reduced to a subjective sport, then it’s gone too far”, she rages.

Why do you think you’re judged so harshly? Is it because of who you are, because you come from a major ski nation?
“I don’t know, and I wish I could say no. But there are examples that suggest otherwise. So, I can’t say that there’s nothing else behind it.”

The 27-year-old pauses for a moment.

“But I also can’t sit here and say that it’s NOT like that.”

Read More: Stina and Ebba to meet again

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