Anna-Carin Zidek: Life with an Aircraft Hangar Builder

It is a lonely road up towards the red house on the hill.

Next to the dirt road, the cows are trampling around in the mud.

Once inside the courtyard, buildings from the 17th century line up. One is now hiding something that costs several millions.

But we will only find out later.

Before we have time to step up onto the porch, curious eyes look at us through the fence at the house’s edge. The family’s Siberian Huskies wonder what’s going on.

Suddenly the door opens, the former biathlete Anna-Carin and Tom Zidek welcome in to the house that has been in the family for over 100 years.

Then it was on Åsgatan, now the road is named after her: Anna Carin’s road.

– There was a guy in the village who submitted a citizens’ proposal to the municipality, the rules actually say that you have to be deceased before you can have a road named after you. But I’m not yet.

It is noticeable that it is a family that likes activities, shoes and helmets crowd the floor and wall in the hall.

– I don’t have any, says Anna-Carin Zidek and points to the scooter helmets.

Her husband of 18 years, Tom, is in work clothes ready to take on the tasks on the farm, but also his own projects.

After a frantic search for his headphones, he passes out.

And Anna-Carin quickly thaws buns in the microwave, before placing them on the saffron-crusted table in the annexed part of the house.

The hour is relatively early, but Anna-Carins Zidek has a time to fit. In a couple of hours, she will step into the classroom as a biathlon teacher at Härjedalen’s high school.

The 52-year-old describes it as both fun and rewarding to share his experience with young people.

After all, she has plenty of it, the experience: 24 podium places in the World Cup, an Olympic gold and an Olympic silver, among other things.

– I think the medals are in some box in the living room. We started to renovate everything, put in underfloor heating and so on. So everything was packed down and hasn’t come up yet.

The motivation to train 25 hours a week disappeared, which made her stop biathlon almost 15 years ago. But it is precisely the stamina and will that she is most proud of today, and that her body held up to the hard training. The performances after that have been few, it has been over ten years since she participated in SVT’s Mästarnas Mästare.

– I was an expert at Eurosport right then when I had quit. But I felt that maybe it wasn’t really my thing.

Why not?

– I didn’t want to and had no drive in that direction.

Do you feel like you want to be outside of celebrity?

– No, it’s probably nothing that I consciously choose. Or maybe I do. With the choices I made and that I stay here.

In 1998, she moved to Lillhärdal and her grandfather’s house. After training as a physiotherapist in Boden, Anna-Carin thought it was too expensive to rent a flat in Sveg, about half an hour from here. So in return for paying fixed costs, she was allowed to move in.

– When grandfather passed away, mother got it from him and then I got it from her.

The choice to settle here or Canada, where husband Tom is from, became quite easy when children Liam and Khaleesi were born. It simply became smoother for everyone when Tom continued to travel around with the World Cup in Europe.

How would you say life is today?

– It’s rolling on. I think it’s something almost all the time. It’s probably like that when you also have children who are active in different ways. Then I am involved in various constellations in the development of the village.

She still thinks it is important to move in everyday life, but was forced to replace her hip joint last autumn. The problems crept in a handful of years ago.

– It hurt when I ran, but it passed. In the end I couldn’t ride a bike because it hurt so much. I walked around with a limp.

The stubbornness meant that it took time to see a doctor, in the end it was Tom who lovingly belched and she was forced to go under the knife.

– They used some new technique where they stretched the muscles to the side instead of cutting off so much muscle. So the recovery was quite quick and I didn’t have too many restrictions either, which was great.

Last spring winter she dared to ski again and suddenly not having pain was liberating, even if the fear of falling was great at first.

– It was only now when we were in Idre with the school and I could go to the firing range without problems that it really dawned on me that it was no longer a problem. I could ski and wasn’t afraid on the slopes in the same way.

The love of forest, nature and recycling is something the family really shares.

– Tom has been a hunting guide in northern Canada, so he has hunted a bit and we have done it a bit together. You can hunt there with a bow, so we did that when we were there to visit his family last time.

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Scenes from a Robin Hood movie flicker by, but Anna-Carin shoots them down fairly immediately.

Actually, it doesn’t work that way.

– I never managed to shoot anything. It’s a completely different kind of hunting than it is here. In Sweden you either sit on a pass or you walk with a dog. There you really had to sneak around in the forest. It was quite exciting to go and try to find where they were, find them and then get a location.

You didn’t intend to take up the hunt here then?

– I started taking the hunting license and have taken for small game, but not for big game. I haven’t had any real urge to go out hunting, but it’s nice to be out in the woods.

Anna-Carin Zidek is largely responsible for the ground service here at home. Tom is always busy building both one and the other out on the farm.

More specifically: Aircraft.

You read that right, airplanes.

When we leave the kitchen table, he is in the process of putting up the doors to the hangar he has started building. Tom has run a company that until now only electrified cars – but which has now taken a turn.

He will start building electric airplanes.

– Yes?

Anna-Carin laughs a little surprised when she hears her husband tell, yesterday they had a family meeting about it, but not all the information was presented.

– I didn’t know you were going to do this.

What does the market for aircraft actually look like?

– If you have a good product or idea, it doesn’t matter, but it’s definitely a crazy world. It is said that if you want to become a millionaire in the airline industry, you have to start as a billionaire, says Tom.

The airplane is more than just a pleasure, it is a prerequisite for the job to go well. In terms of time, he can fly from Östersund to Sundsvall and still be at home within the framework of an eight-hour working day. It will also be easy with its own runway at the back.

– It’s my car with wings, it’s fantastic.

The car business is located in another building that he carefully moved from one part of the yard to the other. Log by log. Preserving heritage is important.

In the garage there is a lot of knick-knacks, or an organized chaos for the creative Tom.

An old Amazon stands in the middle of the room, inside, however, is a hypermodern Tesla model S.

Hanging from the ceiling is a car he is currently converting into an electric car. A cost of approximately one and a half million kroner.

– It takes a year to convert it, but it is completely customized and the smallest car I have ever converted.

Anna-Carin is not in here very often.

But there are many traces of her, images from a long career appear where you least expect it.

– In the hangar later, I plan to set up a nine-metre high board on her, says Tom.