A man who was and remains a symbol of men’s alpine skiing in the former Yugoslavia, a skilled technician, and one of the world’s best specialists in slalom and giant slalom in the 1980s. He was an idol for generations in Yugoslavia, with a large number of people following skiing.
Križaj was born into a skiing family on January 3, 1957, in Kranj. He learned to ski at the age of three. In December 1976, he scored his first points in the World Cup. At the beginning of the 1977/78 season, he placed among the top three in slalom for the first time in Madonna di Campiglio, and two years later, on January 20, 1980, he achieved his first victory in Wengen. Throughout his career, he achieved seven more victories.
At the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, Križaj was only two hundredths of a second behind the third-place finisher. He won his only medal at the 1982 World Championships in Schladming, where he finished second in the slalom, behind Swedish skier Ingemar Stenmark.
He ended his career in March 1988 at the final race of the World Cup in Saalbach-Hinterglemm, where just before the finish line, he took off his skis and walked through the finish line on foot.
Most Yugoslavs would agree that even if there were better skiers in these regions, from Vardar to Triglav, there was certainly no one more popular and charismatic than Bojan Križaj.
