Julia Scheib Is Done Playing the Slow-Start Game

For years, Julia Scheib's ski season has followed a familiar rhythm: however well she trained over the summer, it took her roughly a week of World Cup racing before everything clicked into place. Heading into the 2026/27 winter, Austria's reigning giant slalom champion says that pattern is over — and her build-up over the southern-hemisphere summer looks nothing like it used to.

A trip to South America spent on someone else's skis

Scheib and her Austrian teammates just wrapped up a training block in Argentina and Chile, the traditional off-season proving ground for European ski racers chasing early snow. What stood out this year wasn't what she trained — it's what she left in the bag. By her own account, Scheib never even unpacked her giant slalom skis during the entire South American camp, putting all her time instead into Super-G and downhill work. The previous year, by contrast, she'd managed only two days of Super-G training in the same window in Ushuaia.

It's a deliberate bet. Scheib heads into the new season as the reigning World Cup giant slalom champion, having won the discipline's crystal globe last year with five race victories, ahead of Switzerland's Camille Rast and Sweden's Sara Hector. That success has bought her room to spend her summer chasing a second event rather than defending her first. She's said she intends to start every Super-G on the calendar this season, even as she rules out a full switch to World Cup downhill — she plans to keep at least one downhill training run in during Speed weekends, without adding actual downhill races to her program.

Breaking an old habit

The more striking claim, though, is about form rather than discipline. Scheib has said that in past seasons, it typically took her about a week of racing before her skiing felt fully sharp. This year, she says that feeling arrived on day one of training — comparable, in her words, to how she felt at the World Cup Finals in Norway at the end of last season, historically her best form of the year. Whether that early sharpness holds up once World Cup points are actually on the line is exactly what the coming season will test, but it's the basis for her stated resolve not to accept the same slow start again.

First test: Sölden, October 24

Scheib's claims will face their first real scrutiny fast. The women's World Cup traditionally opens with a giant slalom on the Rettenbach glacier above Sölden, and this season is no exception, with the race scheduled for October 24. It's a course with symbolic weight for Scheib: her breakthrough World Cup win came there, and it's the kind of high-visibility, high-pressure opener where a genuinely faster start to the season — or a repeat of old patterns — will be immediately obvious to everyone watching.

Behind the individual story is a broader shift inside the Austrian women's team, now under new head coach Hannes Zöchling after Roland Assinger's departure. Scheib has said the coaching change hasn't altered much for her personally, since her specific training group has stayed intact — leaving her free to treat this off-season less as a transition and more as an experiment in doing things differently on her own terms.

Off the clock: a new role promoting her home region

Scheib's calendar away from racing has also just gained a new fixture. This month she launched a three-year partnership, running from September 2026 to September 2029, with the Erlebnisregion Südsteiermark — the tourism board for South Styria, the wine-and-orchard country around her hometown of Frauental an der Laßnitz. The region's managing director, Nicole Reiterer, has described the collaboration as intentionally more than a standard sponsorship deal, built instead around Scheib's genuine ties to the area rather than treating it as a backdrop for generic advertising.

The concept, launched under the tagline "Blickwechsel" ("change of perspective"), has Scheib exploring South Styria on camera much as a curious local would: cycling and hiking its trails, visiting winemakers and other producers, and stopping at regional restaurants — deliberately framed as the opposite of her competitive life, where, in her words, performance and hundredths of a second dominate every day. The partnership is expected to deepen over its three years, moving from Scheib simply discovering the region toward her showcasing personal favourite spots and the people behind them.

It's a modest but telling counterpoint to the rest of her season preview: while Scheib is busy dismantling old habits on snow, her new regional role is built around the opposite instinct — making time to slow down.