Lindsey Kildow, a product of Ski Club Vail and a five-event racer on the U.S. Ski Team, reports weekly from the World Cup tour for The Denver Post.
Aspen – It was really a boost for my confidence to win last Saturday’s downhill in Lake Louise, Alberta, where I picked up my first World Cup victory a year ago. It’s nice to do well in the beginning of the season because it lets you know you’re skiing well. Hopefully, like last year, it will carry forward into the next races – especially the races in Aspen this weekend.
It’s great to get a good result before Aspen, because the races in Aspen are going to be really big for me. There’s a super-G, one of my best events, and I will have a lot of family there: My great aunt and uncle, their daughter and son-in-law, my mom, her brother, his wife and two kids, my boyfriend and two friends from Boulder. It’s going to be interesting to see how I deal with all that. It’s good to get used to that sort of thing, because that’s the way it’s going to be during the Olympics.
The first race last weekend – the first downhill of the season – didn’t go that great and I finished fifth. I kind of got some bad luck with the weather. I picked an early start number, because the course got really bumpy in the training runs and I thought a low number would be better. But right after I went, Lucia Recchia of Italy crashed, and there was like a 30-minute course hold. The sun came out – when I had run, it was completely dark – so I felt like that was a bit of bad luck for me. You really can’t perform your best when you can’t see the mountain. The other factor was that the course definitely got faster when the sun came out. When the sun hits the snow, it warms the snow crystals and your skis encounter less friction.
So the next day, another downhill, I was really eager to get a good result and I skied really well. I executed my plan really well. On the bottom I made a mistake that probably cost me half a second, but I managed to get the win so I was really excited about it. It was sweet. It was definitely the best run I had all week.
The Aspen super-G course is great. It’s really technical, there’s a ton of terrain features, and it’s really steep. It has everything you want in a course. In slalom I’m hoping to finish in the top 15. In giant slalom, a good goal would be qualifying for a second run, which means finishing in the top 30 in the first run. Right now giant slalom is my neglected discipline, but hopefully in the next year or so I will become more of a well-rounded four-event racer. I am doing all four events now, but GS is kind of lagging because I haven’t been able to focus on it much.
