Ski Club Vail’s Lindsey Kildow, a four-event racer on the U.S. Ski Team, reports regularly from the World Cup tour in collaboration with Denver Post ski writer John Meyer.
Copper Mountain – My 16,000-mile round trip from Colorado to Finland and back for one World Cup slalom race – I crashed on the second run – was like the worst trip ever.
We left Copper Mountain for Denver last Tuesday night, spent the night, went to DIA at 6 a.m. Wednesday and flew from Denver to Washington, D.C. We were supposed to go from there to New York, then Helsinki and Kittila, Finland, which is about 20 minutes from where Saturday’s race was held in Levi.
Because there were weather issues in New York, we ended up going from Washington to Frankfurt, Germany, to Helsinki to Kittila – and our bags didn’t make it.
Fortunately, my ski technician traveled a day earlier, so at least I had one pair of skis, but teammate Sterling Grant had to borrow skis from the Swedish team. I borrowed warm-up pants and a jacket from a Canadian racer, and we rented helmets from a ski shop.
We trained and freeskied on the race hill Friday. We didn’t see our bags all day, and no one knew where they were. Finally, our bags showed up at about 7 p.m.
Saturday we started training at 8 a.m., with the first run of the race set for 11 a.m. and the second at noon. I felt fine the first run, but for the second run I felt like it was time for bed. It’s hard to fly all that way and not get the outcome you wanted.
We got back to our hotel at 4 p.m. and left two hours later for the Rovaniemi airport. We spent like two more hours at the airport – the smallest airport I think I’ve ever seen – then flew to Helsinki on a flight that left at 11 p.m. and arrived about 12:30 a.m. Sunday. By the time we got our bags and got to the hotel it was 1:30 a.m. We went to a 24-hour cafe and got these pizza sticks, this really terrible dinner. It was the only thing they had left on the menu.
According to my original itinerary, I was supposed to leave Helsinki on Sunday at 2 p.m. At “dinner” I’m thinking, “Sweet, I’ll sleep in and work out in the morning.” Fortunately I decided to double-check my itinerary, just in case, and discovered I had been rebooked on a 7:15 a.m. flight. I got three hours of sleep and spent Sunday flying from Helsinki to Frankfurt to Portland (Ore.) to Denver.
Because there was bad weather in Helsinki, I barely made my connection in Frankfurt. I was sprinting through the airport, I swear it was about 2 miles.
On my 11-hour flight from Frankfurt to Portland, I was in the very back row in a middle seat. The people on either side of me were passed out. I took a sleeping pill and slept for like 8 1/2 hours, and when I woke up my whole body hurt.
