The Czech native, Ester Ledecká, the 9th female partner to join Richard Mille, is the first athlete to combine snowboarding and alpine skiing at the highest level.
Ester is from a family of athletes and artists: her grandfather was a World Cup hockey champion and her mother was a figure skater. Her father is a world-renowned composer, and then there’s her brother, a recognised comic-book designer determined to transform his sister into a superhero, who designed her racing suit, no less!
Undaunted, Ester who was born in 1995, confronted challenges head-on from an early age. She began competing at just 5 years old, winning her first Milca Cup Series that year. In 2013, she became a two-time gold medallist at the World Junior Championships. The Czech won the parallel giant slalom at the 2014 World Cup, her first professional career success. She is a two-time Snowboard World Champion, with victories both in 2015 and 2017.
Being a champion is a habit she’s found hard to drop, most recently winning double gold in skiing and snow-boarding at the PyeongChang 2018 Winter Olympic Games in South Korea, where she surprised everyone by winning the Super-G. Even before winning her medals, Ledecká had already taken up a challenge: qualifying for the Olympic Games in two different sports. With this victory, Ester became the first female athlete to achieve such a performance in a single edition of the Winter Olympics. ‘From the beginning, people have told me: You can’t do both, you have to specialize, otherwise you’ll never reach the top level,” commented Ester Ledecká. “Since I was 14, I’ve had these kinds of discussions with my coaches. I would say, No, I want to practice both, and if it bothers you, I’ll find another coach because that’s how I’ll do it.’
Ester has already been road-testing the RM 007 Titanium and soon she will wear a prototype of the RM 67-02 Automatic Extra Flat.
