Simon Ammann

Simon Ammann







Simon Ammann (born June 25, 1981) is a Swiss ski jumper.
Ammann was born in Grabs, Switzerland, to Margit and Hienrich Ammann and raised in Unterwasser, Switzerland. He has two brothers and three sisters. He made his debut as a 16-year-old unknown during the 1997–1998 Ski jumping World Cup season. Ammann qualified for the 1998 Nagano Olympic Games, where he finished 35th and in the 2010 Vancouver Olympic games won gold as the first athlete to win a medal at those games
Before the 2002 Winter Olympics, he crashed and suffered injuries. In Salt Lake City, he won the individual gold medal in both the short hill and long hill events, only the second person to accomplish this feat. (The first was Matti Nykänen in 1988.) Ammann became a star in Switzerland and also made appearances on American talk shows, such as Late Show with David Letterman (February 20, 2002).
Ammann also won the ski jumping event at the Holmenkollen ski festival in 2002 and 2007. This would earn him the Holmenkollen medal in 2007 (Shared with Frode Estil, Odd-Bjørn Hjelmeset, King Harald V, and Queen Sonja of Norway).
He made his third Olympic appearance in 2006 in Turin, Italy. 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.
On February 24, 2007, he won his first medal at the FIS Nordic World Ski Championships with a victory in the individual large hill in Sapporo, Japan. Ammann would follow this with a silver in the individual normal hill the following week. Ammann would his complete his set of medals with a bronze in the individual normal-hill event at the FIS Nordic World Ski Championships 2009 in Liberec, Czech Republic.
Ammann currently lives in Schindellegi, Switzerland.
On February 13, 2010, he won the gold medal in the individual normal hill event in the 2010 Olympics.