Heli and Vio

If you’ve done a season of international races, you’ll know who Heli and Vio are. And you can’t know one without knowing the other. Relationships, and even marriages, are not unusual on the slalom scene but the blond couple are remarkable for their incredible ability to be continuously together. The Austrians are not only life partners but training partners, so are in each others presence both on and off the water. Every. Single. Day.  

Vio smiles when I ask her what the trick is. ‘There are some words you are not allowed to use. Like ‘always’; ‘you always do this…’, she answers. ‘If we need [time out] it’s mostly because we are really, really tired and that’s a perfect time to take a rest day and spend some time together.’

Heli adds that they have less communication issues than regular coach-athlete relationships. ‘I think…it’s really hard for coaches to use the right words’, says Heli. ‘It’s not the same as what they want to say. But we know each other so well that she knows what I mean. Also, I know a lot of different inputs, like if she’s a little bit ill or injured. But I think we can separate our training and our private lives. It’s not like if we fight on the water we’ll fight afterwards.’

For the past few years they can not have had much time to fight anyway. It’s almost three years to the day since their son Milo was born. No tests are needed to prove he is an Oblinger-Peters: blond hair, blue eyes- tick, tick. Like many children of elite athletes, he was born after an Olympics. ‘We were always pretty much agreed on [having children]… It was about trying to find the right time. And then before Beijing we thought we’d try to see what happened. There was a time before Beijing when everything was really upsetting and there were a lot of negative experiences and we just thought, ‘this can’t be everything’. Of course it’s our jobs but it’s also our lives and it’s the life we’ve been living together. So we wanted to have something that is outside canoeing.’

‘Then everything happened really fast – faster than we expected!’ chuckles Heli.

So now Heli and Vio have little choice but to separate their time on and off the water. It works to their advantage, claims Heli. ‘Now we also make activities with Milo, we go swimming or something, and it takes your mind off. Even if you don’t sleep or read a book or do something for yourself it really takes your mind off and you are recovered.’

It can’t all be games and play though? ‘It does still take a lot away...’, Vio concedes. ‘Yeah, a lot of sleep!’ says Heli, grinning broadly. ‘And a lot of energy. But it’s so worth it. Like when he was small and sometimes just cried the whole night - you don’t care. Nowadays with the training you have to be much more flexible. The kids are often ill or whatever… you can’t follow a strict plan.’

Vio agrees wholeheartedly. ‘We’ve been in the sport so long and we’ve seen so many different people and how they try to perfect every little detail in their athlete life. And sometimes it just makes me laugh because if they go to bed at ten past nine they get really annoyed...’

As if to prove his parents’ point, Milo interrupts Vio to discuss his toy car catalogue.

Heli continues, ‘And also with food! I think I hadn’t eaten any sausages for ten or fifteen years before Milo was born but now? Sausages, nuggets, and fries! First I started with porridge and now I get more yummy things.’

Flexibility may be the name of the game on a day-to-day basis but it’s clear the long term plans are not negotiable: anyone who has seen Vio paddle has seen how determined she is to be the quickest in the field.

Vio’s impressive return to elite level racing so soon after Milo’s birth is a perfect example of this drive. She says she had it all mapped out - Caesarean in April followed by recovery, some training and then World Championships in September 2009. Some may say she is understating it when she admits it ‘was a bit crazy.’ The attitude seems characteristic of Vio’s strength of mind though: rather than the recovery impinging on her race, she focussed on the race to help her through the recovery. ‘It was so fresh,’ she remembers, ‘I really wanted to paddle again, get back in the boat again. Especially because after Beijing when we found out I was pregnant I didn’t do any more races, I didn’t have the chance to race again so it was something that I wanted to do.’ The result was a very solid 5^th place.  The coach in Heli expands on that extraordinary achievement: ‘There’s a certain amount that is physical but the rest is just putting everything together. That’s a very, very big thing.’

And Heli has enough experience to know. Although he started paddling later than most at the age of 16 after a skiing injury, he is now looking towards his fifth Olympics this summer. He’s currently making the most of the warm weather and extra daylight in Australia to train more than he feels he would in Europe. Despite training as hard as any young aspirant, there’s some fatherly wisdom creeping into his approach. ‘It was hard before because you’ve always got a dream and you try to catch your goals. But now you try your best and if it’s good then you enjoy it, but Milo doesn’t care if you don’t win or if you are last. As soon as he sees you he wants to play.’ Heli seems to comply with Milo’s play requests on a regular basis, and there’s something really mischievous and good-natured about Heli that makes him Milo’s perfect side-kick.

With Olympian genes and a coach for a father, it’s easy to picture Milo as the next generation of Austrian canoe slalom. ‘I’d really like to see him do other sports and become a sporty person but I don’t know,’ reflects Vio. ‘I think I’m going to be the last person to make him paddle… To think that one day he might sit in a boat and paddle down white water. When I see some of the small kids I think, what must their mothers think!? I remember how I was hanging on to the big metal poles - I was hanging on to one of those saying ‘I don’t want to go down! … I’m not planning his career.’

Heli and Vio’s careers beyond the Olympics are unconfirmed too. Second or third children sound imminent and Heli has promised Vio that he’ll coach her when he retires - ‘but I think he’s had enough of me,’ she grins. ‘Plus I have too many things I need to learn so I really can’t stop.’

For days after my chat with Heli and Vio I try to answer my initial question: how do they manage to live, train, and raise a child together, whilst living in each others pockets? Despite reading them through several times, my notes aren’t any help. There’s no one thing that stands out. As a whole though?  There’s a great deal of love, respect and support in that relationship. And boys, before you knock it, just remember it’s produced 19 World Cup medals, 2 World Championship medals and an Olympic medal so far. And counting. 

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To visit Heli and Vio's website click here.