Simon Ammann

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Olympic medal record
Men's Ski jumping
Gold	2002 Salt Lake City	Individual normal hill
Gold	2002 Salt Lake City	Individual large hill

Simon Ammann (born June 25, 1981 in Grabs) is a Swiss ski jumper. He grown up in Unterwasser were his parents still live. He currently lives in Schindellegi, Switzerland.

He debuted as a 16-year-old unknown during the 1997-1998 Ski World Cup season. Ammann qualified for the 1998 Nagano Olympic Games, where he finished 35th.

Before the 2002 Winter Olympics, he crashed and suffered injuries. In Salt Lake City, he surprised everyone by winning the individual gold medal in not just the short hill, but also the long hill event. Ammann was only the second person to accomplish this feat. (The first was Matti Nykänen in 1988.) Ammann quickly became a huge star in Switzerland and also made appearances on American talk shows, such as David Letterman. Much of his stardom can be credited to his uncanny resemblance to Harry Potter, a comparison Ammann personally disliked.

Ammann also won the ski jumping event at the Holmenkollen ski festival in 2002.

He made his third Olympic appearance in 2006 in Turin. His nickname is "Simi".

Apart from his athletic career, Ammann is also a student of information technology and electrical engineering at ETH Zurich since 2006.

[edit] External link

FIS Profile

Olympic champions in ski jumping individual normal hill
1964: Veikko Kankkonen \| 1968: Jiří Raška \| 1972: Yukio Kasaya \| 1976: Hans-Georg Aschenbach \| 1980: Toni Innauer \| 1984: Jens Weissflog \| 1988: Matti Nykänen \| 1992: Ernst Vettori \| 1994: Espen Bredesen \| 1998: Jani Soininen \| 2002: Simon Ammann \| 2006: Lars Bystøl