At 43, Ghana's Carlos Mäder finally lives Olympic dream

No one would have blamed first-time Olympian Carlos Mäder for taking a cautious run down Yanqing's Ice River course during Sunday's men's giant slalom.

Even some of the top racers were struggling with the snowy conditions. Competition had to be paused continuously for workers to clean up the course, and the second run was delayed by nearly two hours.

But Mäder, who, at 43, is the oldest Alpine skiing competitor at the Winter Olympics, did not work so hard to go slow. Ghana's sole representative came to Beijing to go fast.

"If you don't risk, you're far behind, so it's always full gas," Mäder told DW. "I always want to go as fast as possible. For me, just coming down is not an option."

Sporting Ghanaian flags on both of his legs and arms, Mäder's run didn't last long. He couldn't even make it through the first sector before spinning out to the left. But he has no regrets.

"I'd rather be kicked out in the finish than think 'I didn't do everything to be fast,'" he said. "For sure I hoped to finish, but it is what it is."

Who is Carlos Mäder?

Soon after he was born as Kojo Benya Brown in Cape Coast, southern Ghana, Mäder's mother put him up for adoption. "She was alone and could not feed me," he wrote on his website.

Mäder, therefore, grew up in central Switzerland close to a little ski resort in Mörlialp. That's why, he said, "I could probably ski before I could walk."

He had aspirations of being a footballer and played in the academy of top tier Swiss club FC Luzern. But after his football dreams fell away, he took up snowboarding. But about six years ago, his friends pushed him to start skiing.

All that time, he maintained his connection to his homeland, and his dream was to represent Ghana at the Olympics. But he had to obtain a passport and a license with skiing's governing body FIS before he could make his dream come true.

"I wanted to qualify for the [2018] Pyeongchang Olympics, actually, but I just had four or five weeks to achieve this goal," Mäder said. "It didn't work out, but I swore to myself that I'd try again and here I am."

Ghana's lone representative

And now he's in Beijing, without funding from a national Olympic committee and without a personal coach, which he couldn't afford. He carried Ghana's flag as its lone representative at the opening ceremony — he's the third Olympian, and second skier, from the western African country.

Mäder has also tried to support Ghana off the slope, with a charity called Hope for Ghana. He donates up to 10% of his sponsorship and donations to this project, which supports schools in very poor regions with libraries and computer learning labs.

"It means a lot to raise the flag for Ghana as a winter sport nation," Mäder told DW. "Ghana doesn't stop at the borders. We are spread all around the world. I hope I can inspire some young guys to follow dreams — work hard and you can achieve something crazy."

Crazy was certainly what he was going for, but he wasn't the only African skier to spin out in the first run of Sunday's men's giant slalom. Yassine Aouich of Morocco and Madagascar's Mathieu Neumuller also didn't make it to the bottom, with Eritrea's Shannon Abeda the only African able to ski into the afternoon.

But Mäder didn't seem to mind. For him, just being in Beijing was an accomplishment.

"I'm still a one-man show," he told DW. "It was a lot of work, and the qualification to be here was the payoff for the hard work."

When asked by DW about finally living his Olympic dream at 43, Mäder could only laugh.

"When I started the project, I was already 37," he said. "It was always somebody else telling me 'Hey! You're 43!' What can I say? I won't focus on the next Olympics."

Edited by: Matt Pearson