The Czech champion, whom Richard Mille welcomed into its family of female sports partners in 2018, is the only athlete to combine snowboarding and alpine skiing at the highest international level. Ester comes from a family of athletes and artists: her grandfather was a world champion hockey player and her mother a skater. Her father is a world-renowned composer and then there is her brother, a well-known comic book artist who is determined to turn his beloved sister into a superheroine by designing her nothing less than her own racing suit! No pressure, right? Undeterred, Ester, who was born in 1995, has faced challenges from an early age. She started competing when she was only 5 years old, winning her first Milka Cup Series. Her performances and victories have continued to grow since then. In 2013, she became a two-time gold medallist at the Junior World Championships, while her first professional success came with winning the parallel giant slalom at the 2014 World Championships. She is a two-time snowboarding world champion, winning in 2015 and 2017. Being a champion is a hard habit to break. In fact, she recently won double gold in skiing and snowboarding at the PyeongChang 2018 Winter Olympic Games in South Korea, where she surprised everyone with her victory in the Super-G. Even before getting her medals, Ledecká had already taken up a challenge: to qualify for the Olympics in two different sports. With this victory, Ester became the first female athlete to achieve such a feat in a single Winter Olympics. "From the beginning, people told me: you cannot do both, you have to specialise, otherwise you will never reach the highest level. Since I was 14, I had these kinds of discussions with my coaches. I always said no, that I wanted to practise both and that if they didn't agree, I would find another coach because that's what I wanted to do,' says Ester. Ester is, however, living proof that having the success gene is never enough. It takes real determination, competence, passion, ingenuity and above all courage to make it work! No surprise, then, that Richard Mille has chosen Ester as the latest member of his family. She has already experienced the RM 007 Titanium and will soon be wearing a prototype of the RM 67-02 Automatic.
