Lucas Braathen is forging his own path and dancing to his own (Samba-) drum, and is not afraid to ruffle feathers and raise eyebrows on the way. Leaving the Norwegian team at the start of the 2023-24 season, after having claimed the prior season’s Slalom crystal globe, shocked the ski world. He subsequently announced a comeback nearly six months later under the Brazilian flag—a move, he admits, was “controversial” and “drastic,” and came with a “wide range of opinions,” he diplomatically puts it. Being the director as well as the only athlete of the Brazilian ski program has undoubtedly been a unique experience, one that the young athlete is taking in his own stride.
Braathen, the son of a Norwegian father and Brazilian mother, burst onto the World Cup scene at only 18 in December 2018, claiming his first FIS points at his debut race and steadily climbing up the ranks. In his second season in 2019-20, he repeatedly skied into the top 10, and in the 2020-21 season, he won his first World Cup race. While his initial stronger discipline was Giant Slalom, he soon started to dominate in Slalom, culminating in the season title win in 2022-23.
The resulting shock was even bigger when the rising star announced his retirement at just 23 years of age. The decision came after continued conflict with the Norwegian Ski Association around its regimented structure, including the ski racer’s media rights. Norwegian athletes do not hold their own marketing and image rights; instead, they must sign these rights over to the Norwegian Ski Association. After his retirement, he stated he finally felt free. However, this freedom is now being lived out in a new form under the Brazilian flag, which the Braathen, whose middle name is “Pinheiro”—Portuguese for ‘pine’—describes as a journey with pros and cons.
Looking back on his first season as the creator of his own program under the Brazilian flag, Braathen is overall happy with the 2024-25 season, and he confirmed to SnowBrains that it was everything he had hoped for—but maybe not what he had expected. “I’m extremely happy and I got to achieve a lot of the potential that I believed I had in me, except bringing the win for Brazil, which was a tough one to swallow because I set myself up for achieving that and I worked so very hard to bring that piece of history back to Brazil.” He acknowledges that he had never been as physically capable as he was last year, but the victory he had longed for eluded him. He finds more in the challenges that come with going out on his own and creating his own program.
Speaking with Braathen at the Atomic Media Day on October 9 about the challenges of creating his own path as a Brazilian ski racer, he admits that he initially found it hard to figure out which elements to manage and which aspects he should let his training team decide. “Coming from a collective—seeing the polar opposite—I always knew that it’s not a matter of now going as far away from that as possible but it’s trying to claim the balance between the qualities of a collective like Norway—and what that taught me—and the things that I was missing.” Now, after a season under his belt he feels he has a better handle on ”what topics and what types of conversations do I partake in and what do I fully leave up to my staff to take the decisions for me.” He has learned his lessons and says he needs to digest them and convert them into his approach for the upcoming season: “I think that was the last piece of the puzzle for me.”
He is not concerned about what others think of him, his move from Norway to Brazil, or his overall persona. He admits that he has spent many years struggling with his multi-cultural background and felt insecure about being different. He has now learned and embraced that “this diversity and this duality of mine is what I’m proud of and it is frankly what makes me what I am today—I look at it as my superpower that I get to bring to the starting gate.” If you saw him dancing samba in the finish area and saw the weight that was visibly lifted off his young shoulders last season, you can understand that he is finally coming into his own.
The pressure to conform to a rigid system that didn’t fit his personality and style has lifted as he forges his own path, embracing his differences and recognizing them as a strength. As he has grown and matured over the last couple of years, he learned that “there will always be people that don’t like you. But now I am very content that there are people that don’t like me,” he adds and leans in closer, “and I don’t like people that everyone likes,” he confides.
