Veronika Aigner and Johannes Aigner once again placed their family name among the biggest figures in Para alpine skiing at Milano Cortina 2026. The Austrian skier finished the Games with five medals from five events — four golds and one silver — while her brother claimed four medals and narrowly missed a fifth after finishing fourth in the slalom. Their first major statement came as early as 7 March, when both opened Austria’s gold medal account in Cortina with downhill victories in the vision impaired category.

Those results were not just a continuation of what the family had already shown in Beijing 2022, but also a test of adaptation on the Paralympic stage. Veronika won in the speed events with Lilly Sammer after arriving at the Games without her usual guide, her sister Elisabeth, who had injured her knee weeks earlier, while Johannes once again established himself among the leading contenders with Nico Haberl by his side. As she signed off from the slalom with another gold, Veronika offered a line that captured the emotional tone of her week: “It was my last slalom race ever. I feel very crazy, a little bit sad, but it is what it is. That pain in the knee is too big to try more slalom.”

A family of skiers raised without limits at home

Behind that latest haul of medals lies a family story far bigger than the podium itself. The Aigners are a singular presence in Austrian Paralympic sport because several of the five siblings have competed at the highest level, and because skiing has been part of their lives since early childhood in Gloggnitz, a town about an hour from Vienna. Veronika started skiing at the age of two, and Johannes was on the slopes soon afterwards as well, in a household where visual impairment, training routines and an unusually matter-of-fact sense of normality all existed side by side. “I think it’s the mix that makes it work,” Johannes explained in an interview with ‘ORF’, recalling that they had all grown up with that visual impairment from birth while also learning to ski from a very young age.

That way of looking at disability comes up again and again when the family speaks about itself. Veronika summed it up in a particularly clear way when reflecting on the attitude of her parents, Petra and Christian: “Mum and dad never forbade us from doing anything.” In their home, she said, there was never that instinct to pull a child away from risk because of a limitation. “Many children with disabilities are told, ‘Don’t do that, you can’t.’ That never happened with us. They always let us try everything.” That upbringing also helps explain the tone with which they talk about what they do: without solemnity, and without turning every medal into an epic exception, even if the family effort required to sustain a skiing career has been enormous in time, travel and money.

Between siblings, guides and trust that cannot be improvised

There is also an intimate layer to Veronika’s story that is difficult to separate from her sporting career, because for years she raced with her sister Elisabeth as her guide. Before that, it had been Irmgard helping her on the slope, but Elisabeth eventually took over and formed an inseparable partnership with her in major championships. “Lisi and I have never really argued, we are deeply connected,” Veronika once said while describing a relationship in which each can immediately sense when something is wrong with the other. That is why the knee injury that kept Elisabeth out of Milano Cortina 2026 was more than a technical absence: it disrupted a routine of trust built inside the family, even if Veronika found an immediate answer in Sammer to keep her competitive edge intact.

For Johannes, that bond with his guide also goes far beyond sport itself. Over the years he built it with Matteo Fleischmann before carrying it into a new chapter with Nico Haberl, always under the same principle: it is not enough for a guide to be fast, there also has to be an understanding away from the slope. He has explained that communication during races depends on Bluetooth earpieces, visual tracking of tiny references and constant coordination, but the point he returns to most often is another one: the personal relationship. There is no value in everything working on the slope if there is no connection outside it, as he has suggested when speaking about Matteo, with whom he also shared his free time, a love of cars and long afternoons fixing things together.

Music, rural life and a world that does not revolve only around skiing

That need not to live entirely inside competition was also visible in the Milano Cortina Paralympic Village, where the Aigners put together a small improvised gathering almost every night with guitars, a Styrian accordion, an accordion and a boombox. Veronika plays guitar, Johannes joins in with the accordion, and around them guides, teammates and friends drift into a scene far removed from the rigid image of the permanently focused athlete. “We are always ready for a party,” Veronika said before the Games. The songs they kept returning to included Austrian pop favourites, traditional tunes and pieces such as “Stand by Me”, all part of a routine that helped clear the mind after each race. “It’s good for your head not to have that racing feeling in your mind all the time,” Haberl explained.

Away from the snow, each of them has filled that life with very specific interests that also help shape who they are. Veronika devotes herself to horses, rides regularly, takes courses linked to agricultural work and speaks naturally about her idea of buying cows if she can find the space. Barbara, now retired from competition, breeds different kinds of chickens, while Johannes gravitates towards the technical side of things: repairing electronic devices, building computers or taking apart any machine he can get his hands on. In a house where, as he once joked, the cabinets keep filling up with medals and his father is still trying to work out where to put them, fame has not changed much. “We are the same people we were before the Games,” Veronika said after the successes in Beijing. “We are still just as silly, we still have our hobbies and we still have the same friends.”