He left football, they shut him down at the Olympics. Now the Czech rider has a lifetime achievement belt

“My girlfriend didn’t even recognize me for a while,” smiled Houser after the race of his life so far. “I’m still absorbing it. That third place is a reward for everything I dedicated to snowboardcross. I went into the sport with the idea that I would like to be on the crate one day,” he admits.

He is 27 years old, but the snowboarding chapter of his life is relatively short. He skied, played football. And not bad at all, as a teenager he made it all the way to the third highest MSFL competition in the jersey of his home club Třebíč. “But I didn’t make any progress in those sports, and none of them suited me as well as snowboarding later on,” he explains.

At the age of 21, he decided to try to break through on a board. Junior coach Petr Knapp and then senior team coach Marek Jelínek started working with him. “I had snowboarded before, but a lot of things were new to me,” he recalls.

For example, obstacles on the track and jumps. “I always felt like I would fly on those jumps like those riders on TV. But I found out that it’s not that simple,” he recalls. He also went through many injuries in the beginning. Repeatedly injured shoulders, broken wrist. “But I enjoyed the sport so much that I always had the motivation to come back,” he recounts.

And so he fulfilled his childhood dream. “Since I was little, I hoped to be in a national team. At first I thought it would be football, then skiing for a while. Neither worked. I was quite old in snowboard cross, it was clear to me that I had to take it by the shoulders,” he says.

Which he did. With his hard work and diligence in training, he earned the admiration and occasional snide remarks of his teammates. “Hauzr is the greatest athlete and self-coach among us. He likes to invent new exercises, we laugh at them for being weird. And then we’ll go try them ourselves,” the biggest Czech ace Eva Adamczyková scowls.

After all, she is largely responsible for the nickname Hauzr, as Houser was sometimes read at foreign races. “When I started, Eva and I didn’t meet that much. But then the Red Bull 400 race was running and Evka was looking for someone to run with her. And she didn’t write me Houser, but as she heard Hauzr somewhere, she wrote me that way. Since then, they have not called me anything other than Hauzr in the team,” he recounts.

He jumped into the absolute elite for the first time three years ago, right at the World Championship. “I managed to qualify for the race, which I found incredible. These feelings inject a lot of energy into your veins, you want to move on and achieve even better results,” he described.

He almost scored an Olympic start, but the events at the Beijing Games took a direction as if from a black grotesque. Jan Kubičík was originally nominated, but he broke his ankle during a training ride in China. Houser was hastily summoned and boarded a plane headed for Beijing.

“However, immediately after my arrival, they tested me for covid and locked me in a hotel room. So I didn’t even have time to absorb the atmosphere. Only when I was familiar with the program did I occasionally tune into it on TV in my room. It was such a mixture of emotions,” he recalls.

If he avoids injuries, in two years in Livigno, where he will fight for Olympic medals in snowboard cross, he could play a significantly more important role.