Ski Club Vail’s Lindsey Kildow, a five-event racer on the U.S. Ski Team, reports regularly from the World Cup tour for The Denver Post. She was third in a super-G last week for her fourth podium of the season.
Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy – I was really aggressive in last week’s super-G, my first podium of the season in that discipline. I was a little more confident because of the podium I got the week before in super-combined in St. Moritz, so I was just attacking.
I’ve always been a little better in downhill than super-G, and I’m definitely skiing better in downhill right now, but super-G is getting better every time I race it. I can still be more aggressive, and sometimes I’m not as clean in difficult turns as I could be.
The course for the Olympic super-G isn’t very challenging, and that could work to my advantage. It depends on how the course is set, but it is more of a gliding course, which should suit me pretty well.
When Picabo Street won the Olympic super-G in 1998, the course was set more like a downhill, and that suited her because she was better at downhill. The super-G in the Turin Games could turn out like that for me, too.
My teammate Julia Mancuso got her first two podiums of the season in Cortina, finishing second in the downhill and the super-G. Mancuso won two bronze medals at the world championships last season, and some people have said her results this season have not been that good until last week, but they may not have realized she left her boots at the hotel at Lake Louise in Canada after finishing fourth there in early December. Then her boots got lost in the mail or something, and she didn’t get them until two or three weeks ago. I think that had a huge effect on her performances.
I think she’s skiing really well right now. I don’t know what her strategy was, but she definitely seems to be going for it these days, and she’s getting some good results.
I felt terrible for another teammate, Caroline Lalive, who apparently broke her kneecap in a downhill training run last Wednesday. She didn’t crash or anything.
I talked to the doctor, and it’s a crazy thing to have happen. It’s an awful time to be injured, especially with all the injuries she has had in recent years. She has worked so hard.
But she’s still fairly young (26) and has still got a lot more years of skiing left in her. She has a very strong will, so I’m sure she will be around for the next Olympics.
