The worst part was while Kostelic was coach for the Tresnjevka team. The club promised to pay for a flat for the Kostelics in Sveta Nedelja near Zagreb, but after a few months they stopped doing so. The owner threw the couple with two small children out on the street. The family found itself in an extremely difficult situation. Tresnjevka did not have enough money to "fatten up" the contract to pay all the coach’s living expenses, and he had a bad reputation in handball circles, no one wanted him… So the Kostelic family lived in their yellow Fiat 850 with a Fiat 750 engine. The car in which this family of four was "accommodated" was even used by the crazy Kostelic to transport the team to Sljeme when the handball players went to exercise there. "The children were small and were not aware of it. We were amazed at Mica, how she could put up with it all, but the kids did not understand the life their parents were living," said Branko Bracun, then and now the janitor of the sports hall popularly known as the "Matchbox"... Ante, Marica, Ivica and Janica slept in their Fiat 850 in front of the sports hall. Sometimes the wife and children would go home to her family in Ivanic, but most of the time they were together! For Kostelic training was sacrosanct, and he stayed the entire time in Zagreb. His wife would bathe the children in one of two women’s changing rooms and she cooked on a gas burner. Whilst Kostelic was coach for Tresnjevka, the children played in the stands and on the floor. Ivica, according to witnesses, was obedient, but Janica was a hyperactive child. Sometimes they would trap her in a ball bag and sometimes Kostelic would shout at them to lock her in the ball basket. Janica was a "little devil" and would scream with joy at attracting her father’s attention. Sometimes, whilst Kostelic was running a training session for Tresnjevka, the children would sleep in the van. The janitor Bracun would then keep an eye on Ivica and Janica. Mica was always quiet. When no one wanted to train, and the sports hall was empty, she would train with her husband. The children crying, the two of them training. Love.

"Then Gips showed me his kids. Ivica and Janica, although it was already dark, were training on the stands. They were running up the steps and later they jumped down from the stand holding the flood lights. Ivica and Janica were jumping from those blocks, about a meter or a meter and a half high, on to the grass. Or the cycling track, I can’t remember. He told me then that the training was designed to drive out their fear, which was important for their later involvement in sport. He said, "When you lose your fear, you are no longer afraid of steep slopes or anything." And I will never forget, he told me then, "Listen, mate, listen, if they let me work, if they let me work, I will win the Olympics with them, the Olympics." He was convinced of his vision." Handball circles were shocked by Kostelic’s decision to leave the sport in which he had spent more than thirty years and dedicate himself to training his young skiers. He trained top teams, institutions of Yugoslav handball and just when he had good reason to hope that it would finally pay off, that he could cash in all his sacrifices, he chose a path which made people feel sorry for him. For him, his wife and children, and the Spartan existence that he condemned himself to. By his decision to make his children Olympic champions, Kostelic condemned himself to at least ten years waiting for the satisfaction he dreamed about. He talked about his vision – gold medals for skiing, but for Croatia! "Ante Kostelic thought that his son would be an ice hockey player. He told everyone how fast and agile the boy was. But there very quickly came a time when he would entertain the company with statements like, "I would really like to know how the Austrians will pronounce the name Kostelic in their television broadcasts when Ivica starts beating them. Probably I- vica Ko-stelic".

On their path through life, our main characters came across some shifty, but also some truly humane episodic actors. For example, at the Campo Interatore ski resort near Rome, hearing that the Kostelic family didn’t have accommodation or money, the owner of a small family hotel approached them and offered them a free room. He even said that he was doing it because he believed they would be famous one day and he would then be able to boast that his hotel had helped the champions on their way. On the other hand, for completely altruistic reasons, on one occasions Jean-Claude Fritch helped the Kostelics, as the man in charge of the race at Val d’Isere and head of the Club de Sport. He saw the Kostelics first in a children’s race. The accommodation was paid for by the organizers, but the food was bad. "Where do you want to eat?" he asked Ante Kostelic. "I don’t know," the confused father replied. "How about Paolo’s?" "Well, ok, we like it there." Fritch took some office paper, wrote something on it, signed it and said, "Take this to Paolo and eat there every day." A wonderful gesture by this noble Frenchman, who later, at the race he was managing, enjoyed Janica’s champion skiing. Franjo Bahovec doesn’t recall which championships it was in Maribor, but he does remember that he was skiing in the company of the former director of the Dinamo football club, Zdenko Mahmet, when all of a sudden Ante Kostelic came out of the woods. "Where have you been? What’s the matter?" Mahmet asked Kostelic, knowing that his children were sleeping in a tent. Kostelic mumbled something. Mahmet gave him a thousand marks. "But," said Mahmet, handing him the banknote, "Now you have to take your children to a hotel." Of course he didn’t. Going to a hotel would mean that in the morning they would once again have to cross the check point and pay for the chair lift, which as it was, sleeping in a tent, hidden in the woods by the slope, they didn’t have to pay. Those difficult days, and years full of days like that, are probably best illustrated by Kostelic himself. "The children were asleep in the tent, and I thought, "Oh God, please look down on us and encourage us a little." So I went, while the children were asleep, to Badgastain, to the casino. A lorry driver had dropped some money from his pocket. I intended to gamble anyway, and now I had a little more money. And God let me win money gambling. I came back to the children and it had been snowing, I couldn’t find the tent. I nearly died of fear. I dug in the snow with my hands until I found the tent. And Janica and Ivica were sleeping like babies…"

And a joyful, smiling, happy Janica Kostelic sat down in the back seat of the Chevrolet jeep. Her father was driving, and sitting next to him was Doctor Zeljko Sucur. They turned Oliver1 up to maximum and at times sang louder than the sound blasting from the speakers. Janica set off for the slope, where in an few hours the downhill race would be run, as though she was returning to the hotel after winning the race, as though she had already won. She had an unusual glitter in her eyes… Ante Kostelic, in the finish arena of the downhill, had a small wooden pencil in his jacket pocket and on a piece of paper he was calculating Janica’s chances: first for winning any kind of medal, and then for a gold. He tried to assess what time would be good enough. "I am not going to tempt fate, but we could win a medal," Ante Kostelic muttered. The changes in Gips’ moods were terrible. When only four or five competitors were left before Janica’s run, he told Sucur, who was standing beside him the whole time, "Uh, it’s going to be hard, hard to get a medal, you know, hard to get a medal." When he concluded on the basis of Janica’s advantage in the slalom and the times of most of her opponents that Janica could win a medal, he muttered, "Uh, super, a medal! But not a gold, she can’t win a gold." And when finally, Janica reached the finish and Kostelic realized that she had won, he just kept repeating, "Janica, Olympic gold, Janica, Olympic gold, Janica, Olympic gold…." "Unbelievable, from the time the competitor who skied before Janica reached the finish and Janica’s start, he had calculated quickly with that tiny bit of pencil on his paper the time that would be fast enough for a gold medal," Sucur remembers the most dramatic moments in the life of Janica’s coach-dad until then.

On the second to last day of the Games, Ivica Kostelic appeared in his strongest discipline, the slalom. Unfortunately he got caught on the gate just before the finish. And that is Ante Kostelic for you… The crowd – Kostelic, Marica, Sucur, coach Vincenij Jovan – who were watching the race in a group hug, was stunned. Vincenij Jovan could not hold back his tears. He had no voice. Ivica was staring blanking and walked past his family. But Gips… "What? What now? Now you don’t know me? It’s not the end of the world!" Ivica retraced his steps. "Listen, now we have to sort this out. Come on, here," spit, spit, "Say: I will never touch the gate again! I will never touch the gate! Repeat that now thirty times," Ante Kostelic said excitedly to his downcast son, meeting him at the finish line. "But how can you say that, dad?" Ivica replied, "That’s ridiculous. As though I wanted to touch it…" "No! Say it!" "Well, that is like me saying to you: Tell me you will never spit again while you’re talking…" Ivica found it hard to accept what had happened. He went off, no one knew where he was, and it was already dark. The family and the others in the team were already worried about him. But they sensed that he was dealing with his pain by himself. At the welcome in Zagreb, Ivica was moved by the fact that the people treated him like a winner too.

At the September preparations in 2003 on Zermatt, Janica collapsed. She was unconscious. Ante Kostelic called Sucur in deadly fear. "Listen, this is not good, this is not good, Janica said…The first time I was really scared for her, she said, "I’m going to die, I’m going to die, I’m going to die". Listen Suc, I know, look, Janica told me, listen, I can’t explain it to you, but I know for sure, next time this happens she is done for, she is, you know, that, done for. Believe me, she is done for. You know I always say, You’re ok, this and that. She is done for, this is something serious," Kostelic blurted out excitedly while they were flying the skier to hospital in a helicopter. "We can’t deal with this over the phone. Bring her to Zagreb. She had all the laboratory tests for the operation by Haspl. He didn’t find anything then, so it must be something new," Sucur said. The doctors in Austria did not find any illness, but Ante Kostelic’s words were important that as soon as Janica ate anything, she was always suddenly taken ill. For Sucur that was a sign that it was some kind of endocrinological disorder. Janica had symptoms typical for an endocrinological disorder: rapid pulse, weakness after a win, but also symptoms which could lead a doctor to draw the wrong conclusion. Specifically hyperthyroidism is an illness that strengthens the metabolism, so it would be expected that Janica would eat more than ever, but still rapidly lose weight. What happened was completely the opposite; Janica had never been more overweight. She did not have one typical symptom, disturbed sleep. Sucur concluded that it was probably because she was hypotonic. But, he noticed a small oedema on her shin, and she had occasional diarrhea.

In the middle of the nineties, whilst the Kostelic family were still a long way from choosing the clinic where Janica and Ivica would have their injuries treated, Ivo Drinkovic organized an operation for Janica at the last minute. He simply used his connections as a doctor and got her a bed very quickly in Merkur Hospital. Everything went well, but the still very young Janica was terribly afraid of the doctor who was later supposed to take out her stitches. The people who told me this story did not want to reveal who that "terrible" doctor was, but I learned that the doctors understood the little girl’s fears and they asked their young colleague Drazen Shejbal to help. Janica liked him. A few years later, the "terrible" doctor, Drazen Shejbal and some musicians, the Kalogjera brothers, were sitting on the terrace of the konoba1 Adio Mare on the island of Korcula. They could not get over their surprise at how much one of the waitresses resembled Janica Kostelic. "All the guests at the konoba looked in amazement at that waitress, but we were all too embarrassed to ask if she was really Janica. She had already appeared on several front covers of women’s magazines and we could not believe that she was working as a waitress," tells Shejbal. Finally, Shejbal summoned up courage. "Janica, is it really you?" he asked. "And why wouldn’t it be me?" Janica replied with a counter-question. The champion skier was helping out the owner of the restaurant. They had a shortage of waiters, and it was the height of the season. Janica had volunteered by herself to help them out. Ante and Ivica also worked there with her for a month. She disappeared into the kitchen and did not come back into the dining room that day. The guests cursed their own cowardice, through their laughter, because they had missed getting her autograph.