The disappearance and tragic death of skiing icon Blanca Fernández Ochoa

Blanca Fernández Ochoa has gone down in history not only as one of the best Spanish skiers of all time and the first Spanish woman to win a medal at the Olympics. Unfortunately, a tortuous mental health battle ultimately led to her untimely and mysterious death.

She was exposed to snow from an early age as her parents worked at a ski school in the Navacerrada ski resort in Madrid. Skiing was a family tradition and there had already been an Olympic champion in the family years before Blanca – her brother Paco Fernández Ochoa won gold in Sapporo in 1972, as covered by Eurosport.

In February 1992, Blanca won the bronze medal in the slalom at the Winter Olympics in Albertville (France), becoming the first Spanish woman to win a medal at the Winter Olympics medal, as reported by Spanish outlet Marca.

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Her resume also includes four World Cup bronze medals (1991 and 1992 in slalom, 1987 in giant slalom and 1988 in Super-G) as well as a total of 20 podium places. In 1981 she became a European Cup winner in the giant slalom, as stated by the Olympic website.

Throughout her career, she has been awarded the Queen Sofia Prize for the best Spanish athlete in Spain in 1983 and 1988, as well as the Gold Medal of the Royal Order of Sporting Merit and the Grand Cross of the Royal Order of Sporting Merit in 1994 and 2019.

Blanca was also a pioneer in promoting women's sports in a country that had, by many accounts including The Independent, neglected women's role in the sporting world for a long time. As such, she was a highly respected figure, long after she had officially retired from competition.

On August 24, 2019, the same year in which she received the Grand Cross of the Royal Order for Merit in Sport, Blanca Fernández Ochoa suddenly disappeared without a trace.

According to a neighbor's statement to the police, later reported by the BBC, she was last seen in Cercedilla, the town near Madrid where she had lived since childhood.

After several days of searching, in which around 400 people were intensively involved, her lifeless body was found on September 4, 2019 near the peak of La Peñota in Madrid's Sierra de Guadarrama by an off-duty civil guard, as stated by the BBC.

What had happened to Blanca Fernández Ochoa? As her brother Luis Fernández Ochoa told in the Spanish RTVE documentary 'El viaje. La medalla de la salud mental' (2023), she suffered from bipolar disorder, a condition that she had had since childhood.

A skier since childhood

As he explained in the documentary, the champion skier was always very restless as a child, so her diagnosis years later made sense to the family. Despite the battle, she still competed at the highest level.

Skiing brought Fernández Ochoa a lot of success, but also a lot of pressure, especially when she was compared to her brother Paco. Blanco's sister Lola Fernández Ochoa says that "she didn't cope well with it and didn't want to be the center of attention", while her brother Luis adds that "she was under pressure, poor thing, she needed success like food".

"We started thinking that Blanca had a problem when she retired after her Olympic medal in 1992. (...) She started to shrink, to feel small because she didn't understand what was happening to her. She didn't want to be recognized. She always wore a hat and glasses," her sister Lola said in the documentary.

"Every fall she did the same thing to us: she disappeared for two or three days. The whole family looked for her, every fall. Each year we did it, until..." Luis told RTVE.

Spanish newspaper El Mundo revealed that Blanca's death was the result of a prescription drug overdose.

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This was confirmed by the coroners, who determined that the death was not an accident and was not caused by a fall – as had been reported at the time – as the body had no bruises or wounds and was found in a natural position, as reported by El Mundo.

Many of the country's top athletes attended Blanca's funeral to say one last goodbye to a beloved Spanish skiing star. Her ashes were scattered on "Los Siete Picos", her favorite mountain in the heart of the Sierra de Guadarrama.

In March 2022, under the chairmanship of Lola Fernández Ochoa and in honor of her sister, the "Fundación Blanca de Apoyo al Deportista" was created, offering support top athletes after their retirement by helping them find employment and social opportunities outside the sport they had dedicated their lives to.

Blanca Fernández Ochoa left us much sooner than she should have after losing a mental health battle she had long fought in silence. While the topic of mental health is becoming far less taboo than it was at the time, her tragic end highlights just how serious the consequences of these conditions can be, especially if left unspoken and unaddressed.

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