Julia Dujmovits walks into a common area between Vienna's Museum of Fine Arts and Natural History Museum. She strolls along the sidewalk, looking for a place to sit to take advantage of the rare opportunity to let an afternoon drift by.
The area she has chosen on this cloudless fall day is the Ringstrasse, a circular street around which sit the Austrian capital's most historic buildings -- a veritable outdoor architecture museum.
When Dujmovits, 30, needs a break from the intense focus of her quest to win a second Olympic gold medal in parallel slalom snowboarding, she sometimes retreats here and disappears into the calm she finds among the buildings, some of which are more than 150 years old. "It's more grounding. Right now, I live out of my car, traveling, packing, staying at a hotel for three or four days. Sometimes it seems chaotic," says Dujmovits, who won gold in Sochi, as she walks in front of the Wiener Rathaus (Vienna City Hall).
Even the Ringstrasse, idyllic as it looks and feels, comes with chaos. Hundreds of people scurry about -- tourists taking photos, lovers walking hand-in-hand, students learning about history. Dujmovits loves the anonymity that comes in a big city, compared to the attention she attracts as the first medalist in any sport from her home state of Burgenland and the first snowboarding gold medalist from winter-sports-crazy Austria.
As a survivor of the worst fire in Austria since World War II -- a tragedy that claimed the lives of her entire snowboarding team -- she has visited the depths of sorrow. As a gold medalist, she has tasted glory. Simple and complex always exist one after the other with Dujmovits. There's rarely any middle ground.
She bounces between the ferocious focus needed to be a professional athlete and her desire to wake up in the middle of the night on the beach in Maui, where she spends every summer, and lie there and look at the stars until dawn washes them away.
When she started practicing yoga five years ago, she found the tranquility that comes from meditation to be a helpful counterbalance to snowboarding's frenzied pace. But she also learned that if she does too much yoga, she has to grab her kiteboard, run to the beach, pump it up as fast as she can, fly through the air ... and crash, as if she needs that jolt to remind her she is alive.
She's at her best when she toggles back and forth between those extremes. As she prepares to defend her gold medal at the Olympics this week, she's looking for just the right amount of each.
When Dujmovits was 13, she traveled with her snowboarding team to Kaprun, a resort town in central Austria. She and her brother, Georg, were standing in line for a train ride to the top of the mountain on Nov. 11, 2000, when Georg said they should get out of line and take the gondola instead.
Normally, Dujmovits says now, she would have said no and insisted they ride to the top with the rest of the team. But she said yes, and they got out of the train line and jumped on the gondola.
Just before the train started the 2.4-mile ride up to the Kitzsteinhorn Glacier, an electric heater caught fire. The fire caused the train to stop in a tunnel. A total of 155 people, including all of Dujmovits' teammates on her youth snowboarding team, died. Julia and Georg found out about the unfolding tragedy when they arrived at the top of the mountain and saw black smoke pouring out of the tunnel. Georg called their parents to tell them he and his sister were alive.
Among the dead were 92 Austrians, 37 Germans and eight Americans. The Austrian government called for two days of national mourning. There were so many funerals held in such a short amount of time that Dujmovits and her family had to decide which ones to attend.
She was only 13, and day after day, she faced the toughest questions any person ever faces. A decision that seemed meaningless at the time had saved her and her brother's lives. A different seemingly meaningless decision had cost all of her teammates their lives. Why? Either everything happens for a reason, or nothing does, and both seemed like horrible explanations for that day. How does anyone, let alone a 13-year-old, make sense of that?
In the weeks and months after Kaprun, Dujmovits first learned to keep going, never losing faith in herself. A month after the tragedy, she made a decision that would shape the rest of her life. She went snowboarding again -- at Kaprun.
"It was the most terrifying thing to do," she said. "For me, it was, if I'm not going back to this place, I would be scared forever.
"You're making all these pictures in your head if you're afraid of something. It makes you even more afraid. Actually facing something, it's super scary, but it's the truth. You're not seeing something extra. When you just imagine something, it's like bad cinema. Facing it is painful and difficult. But it's actually the real thing."
She found returning to snowboarding comforting, though it was years before she loved it the way she did before Kaprun. "Getting into sport again connected me with my own body again. You lose all feeling for yourself, somehow. You're in this mode of just being but nothing making sense anymore," she said. "When I started to do sports, I could find connection to myself again."
But snowboarding, in fact, was crushing her. A series of injuries (broken ankle, two torn ACLs, broken collarbone) forced her to miss the 2010 Olympics, and she decided to reshape her life. Part of that reshaping involved spending summers in Maui, where she trains on the beach and became a yoga instructor.
The meditation required by yoga helped her face the tragedy. She recovered her belief in a higher power and is comfortable talking about the subject now. "For the first time in my life, I was ready to look at all those things from Kaprun, to be honest about it, about the pain, just for myself. Not just saying, it's OK," she said. "In my case, I'm so happy I didn't talk about it [earlier] because otherwise I would be broken forever."
That established a pattern she followed again and again: When she faces a challenge -- whether it's snowboarding down a steep mountain in Alaska or recovering from injury or becoming a yoga instructor -- she attacks it head on. It's not that she's never afraid; it's that she reminds herself that she has already faced life's most terrifying problems and survived. Having gone through the horror of Kaprun, there isn't much that worries her for long.
Dujmovits succeeds as a snowboarder based on feel -- both mentally and physically. Her coach, Peter Eichberger, says she has an uncanny ability to know what kind of run to make based on what she feels of the snow, her board and her boots. That feel flows right up to her head.
In her best runs, when Dujmovits wins her biggest races, it's always because she feels like she's going to win before she does. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy: Feeling becomes knowing, and knowing becomes doing. When the race starts, she's essentially unaware of the snow, her board, her boots or anything else. She just goes.
And so it was, in the final few seconds before her gold-medal-winning run in parallel slalom at Sochi in 2014, as she washed her mind clean before the run, she knew she was going to win, even though she faced a .72-second deficit, an eternity in snowboarding. Georg -- whom she calls the most important person in her career -- saw the look on her face in the starting gate and says he, too, knew she was going to win.
He knew how mad she had been about finishing second in the world championships the year before, and he was confident she would refuse to let that happen again.
She flashed out of the gate and flew down the course, contorting her legs, hips, torso and upper body around the blue flags like a human braid. She occasionally dropped her right hand onto the snow, as if feeling to make sure it was still there. She crossed the finish line 0.1 seconds ahead of Germany's Anke Karstens, which meant she won the gold-medal race by .82. After she crossed the finish line, she fell on her back, pounded the snow and lifted her hands to her head in pure delight.
She barely remembers any of that. She says the first question in her first interview afterward was about how she recovered from a big mistake early in the run ... a mistake she had no memory of making.
Georg watched with pride as the gold medal was put around his sister's neck. As the Austrian national anthem played, he thought about all she had been through -- coming from Burgenland, overcoming Kaprun, dealing with a series of injuries -- to achieve her dream. He marveled at the perseverance necessary to do so. "It was a decade of solving problems and challenges," he said. "She always kept going."
Dujmovits' approach to snowboarding parallels her approach to fear: She attacks it. She says she would rather win one gold than a dozen silvers and bronzes, and she races accordingly.
"For me, the most difficult thing is to try to go slower and safe," she said. "I crash at the same gate six times in a row. And the coaches tell me, 'OK, you have to do this.' I try it eight times, and then it works. I know that the line is possible. I just try to do it and not to do the safer way."
She loves interval training, the more difficult the better. Eichberger uses Dujmovits' mentality to push her. "I don't think you can run that hill in 45 seconds," he'll tell her. And then he smiles in delight when she brags about having finished it in 43.
"She likes to show me, 'Hey, I did it,'" he said. "She's not afraid of losing. She thinks, 'I will do it, and I will show them.'"
As a native of Burgenland, a state in the flatlands of eastern Austria that borders Hungary, Dujmovits was an unlikely candidate for a snowboarding star. To get to any mountain requires a long train ride. Dujmovits' online bio compares her rise in snowboarding to "Cool Runnings," the movie about a Jamaican bobsled team.
At Sochi, Dujmovits achieved the ultimate "I will show them" -- she reached the goal around which she had focused her whole life. She had conquered adversity, again and again, but could she handle success? As she walks around the Ringstrasse, she ponders the question. It's one athletes with singular goals often ask themselves after they achieve those goals. There was a time after the 2014 Olympics when Dujmovits searched for motivation. But she soon found it: If one gold medal was great, what would two be?
Eichberger and Georg say she's in as good of shape now as she was in Sochi, and they both believe she can win gold again. So does she. When she races this week, Dujmovits has a chance to build a legacy that goes beyond Burgenland, beyond Vienna, beyond Austria. "She can finish her life as the queen of snowboard all over the world," Eichberger said.
Dujmovits is nothing if not an audacious goal-setter, and she sees trying to win a second gold medal as at least as preposterous as winning one.
"This is the biggest motivation because I know it's a huge challenge. It might be hard to win it once. But to win it twice?"
She smiles to make it clear: It should be impossible. "On the other hand," she says ... and pauses as she goes from one extreme to the other ... "I know how to do it."