Lucas Pinheiro Braathen is carving his own line.

With a dual nationality, once a Norwegian champion, he is now the first Brazilian gold slalom champion, winning the Audi FIS World Cup at Levi in Finland. A renaissance athlete racing faster, stronger and higher.&nbsp;

&ldquo;The snow this year is better in Innsbruck.&rdquo; For your eyes only, 1981.

In the fall of 2025, I visited the ongoing construction of the new, splendid and controversial Eugenio Monti bobsleigh track in Cortina d&rsquo;Ampezzo. Following 1956, the Queen of the Dolomites was getting ready for her second time hosting the Olympics, wearing an incredible robe of oranges, reds and greens of spruce, birch and pine. The next day, I took the train to the Austrian Tyrol to meet with Lucas Pinheiro Braathen. A rare pause for the Brazilian-Norwegian skier in the middle of the intense Olympic &amp; championship pre-season preparation. We spent the day between Fulpmes and Patsch, close to S&ouml;lden, where he trains daily. As architecture enthusiasts, we visited the Edith-Stein-Kapelle in Patsch and had a conversation about the spirituality of mountains, inspiring others and becoming one with your true self&hellip;

How was training in Ushuaia this summer? What does it mean to be a Brazilian-Norwegian skier for the sport, the kids and your peers?
Well, one of the many aspects that I love most about my life as a ski racer and why I became a skier is because it allowed&nbsp; me to stimulate my curiosity. It&rsquo;s such a frequency, right? I get to be exposed to new landscapes, new cultures, new people. Basically, every single week. And with polar, radical opposites to one another, and I feel like that is what makes me feel like I&rsquo;m living such a rich life. I feel like I progress a lot because I&rsquo;m exposed to so many differences, and I try to allow that to shape my path. And so talking about my pre-season, this was yet another example of trying to go a bit of a new path into the biggest season of my life, right, with the Olympics now representing Brazil, skiing, truly with my true colours. We wanted to reconnect to my home soil, which is South America. Skiing in Ushuaia for the first time brought a unique experience into this new season in my preparation. As a bonus the conditions were amazing. It was incredible to be on the mountains and ski with fellow Latins, having both Spanish and Portuguese speaking people around me being able to interact with them in my own element, in the mountains, is something I don&rsquo;t usually get to do in Europe or in the US. So that was really, really amazing. And that made me feel like I was connecting to the fact that I am now representing these people.

What is your relationship with nature and the mountains? What are the sensations you feel while skiing: speed, spirituality?
Skiing is about connection, and it&rsquo;s about feeling one. That is the feeling that I chase every single day. This is what performance is. To be able to perform at my highest potential, it is when I&rsquo;m the most able to connect with myself, my environment and the climate that day, and create sort of an orchestra of all of these chaotic elements and factors and allow myself to just emerse within it, surrender to it, let go, become one with it. It&rsquo;s spiritual. It&rsquo;s a sport that is in constant dialogue between nature and yourself. The climate of that day&mdash;in the weather and in your head. Performance is very often measured in numbers, statistics, trophies, etc.

Yes, for the public, this is how they see the sport but there is way more to it.
Truthfully, the only result that matters is the performance for myself. It is that sensation of being one with the environment in order to express myself to the greatest&nbsp; extent. And that is when I win. The true success is inside myself and not in numbers.

As we are in Austria today, I was thinking of Klaus Heidegger from Innsbruck and how he developed Kiehl&rsquo;s, in parallel to the new skincare you just launched. Why and how did Octo emerge?
All of the projects that I do stem from my purpose in life which is to inspire others. Follow your dream, whatever that is. As a ski racer, I try to inspire others by reaching my own personal dreams, which is to become the best in the world at something. Winning gives me this stage. On that podium, if you may, I can actually create a difference and showcase of all of the creative projects that I participate in. Whether it is the design work that I do, whether it is expressing myself in this interview we&rsquo;re having right now, or whether it is Octo, this health brand that I launched, it all stems from within. I want to become a source of inspiration for others to be happy. And Octo is a brand that invites people to reconnect with nature and themselves. It is a feeling that I seek every single day as a skier. Modern society has become disconnected from nature. We are not grounded anymore.
We seek guidance and validation in our phones or people around us, whereas what I want to inspire is that you can follow your own intuition. The name Octo means &lsquo;eight&rsquo; in Latin, which symbolizes eternity. We are all one with ourselves, each other, nature, hence, why the product is composed of eight ingredients sourced from the Amazon, which is the richest microbiological environment in the world. Every day I strive to become the very best version of myself, and in order to achieve that I need to be connected with who I am.

SKIING is about connection, AND IT&rsquo;S ABOUT FEELING one.

How are you preparing for this season after your incredible comeback and how do the Olympics differ from the championships?
Milano Cortina 2026 is a stage that will go beyond. For many of the athletes competing including myself, the Olympics is a stage that goes so beyond the discipline, the category and the respective sport that you perform in. It&rsquo;s a universal stage where all of a sudden, the stories get to shine. All of a sudden, it is the people with the unique stories that can inspire not just another skier or hockey player but a universal audience. So many are watching sports only during the Olympics. So for me, I look at it as the biggest, most global, and universal stage, where I get to speak about my personal path and who I truly am as a person, not only just as a skier. It is the biggest opportunity to serve my purpose, to the greatest extent. And the only approach I have is to be who I truly am, not skiing for someone else or for others, but truly skiing for myself, connected with my heart and my purpose in order to be my authentic self, because this is the only way you can inspire someone else. The difficulty lies in the fact that at every stage you have disturbing external factors trying to put you off balance. The true champion, he or she, still skis or competes for him&mdash;or herself. You need to remain connected to yourself, and that is really the only approach I have. For my debut Olympics, I represented six million people and in Bormio I will represent over 200 million people. I am alone responsible for whether we are leaving the Olympics as a nation that failed or as a nation that brought back history.

I am alone RESPONSIBLE for whether&nbsp; WE ARE leaving the OLYMPICS as a nation that FAILED OR AS A NATION that brought back HISTORY.

It also goes back to Pierre de Coubertin&rsquo;s motto: &ldquo;The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not winning but taking part; the essential thing in life is not conquering but fighting well.&rdquo; People tend to forget the second part, which is the one that matters to us.
Totally but as you said, skiing is very difficult especially when you compete for a country that is not popular in the sport. You don&rsquo;t really have a team spirit like in football, you need to be independent and have the greatest self-belief. This is its greatest test representing a nation way bigger than basically any other nation competing, yet it is a nation that is only represented by me. I am solely responsible for whether this is a failure or success. It goes beyond the sport. The beautiful oxymoron, which makes this so special for me, is all of the pressure that it brings. It is that huge opportunity and responsibility but pressure is truly a privilege. It is when you are under pressure that you can truly realize your potential that one cannot achieve or fulfil in a normal and comfortable state. Do you want to approach this pressure with gratitude and curiosity to see what it is that you can enable with it or will you let it become what fails you? At the end of the day, nervousness and excitement are the same chemical reaction in the body, but it is our perception and approach to it, that decides whether that is excitement or nervousness. It&rsquo;s all about law of attraction, channeling in a proactive way towards your purpose. The winner competes for their why and not for recognition, medals or results. How you feel inside is an extension of yourself.

Besides the physical training, how important is your mental preparation? Do you have a spiritual approach in racing, as in your life?
You are leaning into my next answer in a very natural way because we were speaking about this thing of independence, this huge responsibility, etc. I have a huge team, I could never go anywhere without them, and I am a product of them, but at the start gate, it is all me. I have no one else to carry me, no one else to assist me in the run. It is me, my mental, my physicality, my spirituality.

You are completely alone with yourself for 2 minutes.
Yes exactly. In the last four years, I have grown my independence tremendously. And looking back at it, it is exactly what led me to retire. I grew more connected with myself, I started following my own intuition because I knew that in order to serve my purpose, I needed to be who I am 100% to the greatest extent, or else I cannot inspire people. It led me to find my path back into skiing in the way that I now get to ski as the way I am. I found out how much of the work happens in your everyday life. It is not only in training you grow as an athlete but also as a person, because keep in mind, the athlete and the person, one does not go without the other. They are merged, they are one. So growing with this realization that you have to be balanced and connected. That&rsquo;s when you start looking at life very differently. It&rsquo;s my life. And so for me, I do various things. I do yoga, I practise somatic therapy and indulge in other spiritual ceremonies at certain times a year. I&rsquo;m always on a quest of connecting more deeply with myself and my environment at all times. And I find that the stronger and the deeper and the more profound connection I&rsquo;m able to establish with myself, the more clarity I get on how I should develop as a human, and eventually as an athlete.&nbsp;
And that is where the greatest amount of growth lies. That is where the biggest difference is, every single season that I return as a skier, because we all train pretty much the same. We all basically train the same hours but it is how we live and train that varies. That is the differentiator between the champion and the fourth place.

What are the sensations you have while skiing and what are you trying to transmit to the kids through the Luci Foundation?
It is very connected to our entire conversation because I hated skiing growing up. I was a football player and I liked to be comfortable. I was super afraid of being outside of my element probably because I was so uncomfortable for the majority of my upbringing, dealing with a lot of insecurities, my cultural duality. I was the Latin kid in Norway and the gringo in Brazil. Separated parents bouncing between two cultures and homes. They were never living the same place. I&rsquo;m 25 now and I&rsquo;ve lived in 23 places in my life. I&rsquo;ve always been the new kid on the block, the new kid in class, the new kid in the football group. I always felt wrong. I was very scared of the uncomfortable state because I was so much in it already. So I found my escape in football because on the court, no one could judge me. It was the ball that did the talking, and then I just lost myself to football, and I made that my life because I got to escape those insecurities to the greatest extent on a daily basis. The transition to skiing, was quite coincidental. My father wanted to teach me how to ski, and I was making up all sorts of lies, that my blood wasn&rsquo;t meant for these temperatures, that my feet were meant for the ski boots, etc. And at a certain point, he gave up. I did not ski until I was nine and then he asked me again, and just out of wanting to not let my old man down because skiing was one of the biggest loves of his life, I said: &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll learn how to ski. I&rsquo;ll do it for you, basically.&rdquo; What then happened is that&nbsp; he brought me to a Galdh&oslash;piggen, the highest year-round ski resort in Norway. He found a race group that didn&rsquo;t have a geographical location, because normally you grow up skiing your local regional club. But as a representation of who I am in my story, I didn&rsquo;t end up in that place obviously. I ended up in a race group that we just found online that gathered in the middle of the summer with kids from all over the country. And so I found myself in a diverse group. I didn&rsquo;t have a race suit, my skis were wrong, my boots were wrong, I was a horrible skier, and I ended up in this group with some of the greatest athletes in the country for that age. And I was so uncomfortable. We all had different accents, we all came from different financial backgrounds, we all looked different. All of a sudden I couldn&rsquo;t be judged as wrong because we were all equally as different and weird to one another. But they didn&rsquo;t care. They just invited me into the group, and it&rsquo;s the first time I&rsquo;ve had this welcoming, sensation in that way. And so even though I was a really good football player at the time and I was a horrible skier, at the age of 10 I said to my dad: &ldquo;I will become the greatest skier in the world now, not the best football player. Next year, I will win the national race as a skier.&rdquo; And so the only reason I dedicated my life to skiing was because of this group of people that was grown out of diversity and then accepted me. I always told myself that if I ever made it to a place where I have market value, where I become professional or whatever, I will do something that enables more kids to have that type of life changing experience as epic and idealistic as it may sound. I want to bring that type of inclusion that I got, and that&rsquo;s what I&rsquo;ve grown to realize is really the sports greatest value in society. That resulted in my father and my 21-year-old self, creating Luci Foundation, in order to include kids that don&rsquo;t have the financial background to be included in sports.

Citus Altitus Fortitus

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