Beaver Creek – As if to mock all the hand-wringing over the alleged effects of global warming on the early-season World Cup schedule, Mother Nature brought a sense of humor to the tour’s North American swing.
Even as races were being canceled in Europe because of summer-like weather and an almost universal lack of snow, the men raced downhill and super-G in Canada with temperatures plummeting more than 10 degrees below zero. Most of them raced here last week with white medical tape covering their faces because of skin damage suffered in Canada.
Their flights from Calgary to Denver for the Beaver Creek races were delayed for hours because it was too cold for de-icer chemicals to work on their airplanes.
While the stakeholders of the sport dithered about what to do with European races in a Europe without snow, and the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association labored in vain to bring canceled races to Colorado race courses already in place, a training run was canceled here because of a major snow dump and the downhill was held in a substantial snowstorm.
FIS official Guenther Hujara called it “one of the most frustrating situations” in his 32 years working on the World Cup.
“You all know we have excellent excellent course conditions on this hill,” Hujara said. “Everything is ready. The course is ready. People are ready. Racers are ready. Everything is there, and we can’t put races together. It is not possible to find sponsors, to find enough money, to have races. In Europe we have no snow. We tried with all our partners to put something together to present alpine ski racing, to present the World Cup to the world on a course that is waiting for us.”
European sponsors for the races that were canceled weren’t willing to cover the costs of holding two more races here, a figure in excess of $1 million.
“So we will fly home and sit home,” Hujara said. “Maybe we have enough time to buy Christmas gifts.”
On Friday the FIS found one site in Austria with enough snowmaking to host two of the canceled men’s races, but more cancellations appear likely.
Beaver Creek and the Vail Valley Foundation worked hard to bring canceled races here, as did Aspen. The USSA was willing to eat a substantial part of the shortfall – well into six figures – but the gap was too great.
The $1 million was needed to cover lodging, meals, prize money and the cost of televising the races back to Europe. Admission is free for spectators at World Cup events, so the costs of races and producing the telecasts have to be underwritten by sponsors. The USSA was able to find substantial funding but fell about $350,000 short.
By comparison, the budget for the four races held at Beaver Creek last week was about $2.4 million, according to Vail Valley Foundation president Ceil Folz.
“It is much cheaper to do a pickup race, of course, because you’re not doing course preparation,” Folz said. “It still is a significant number to try to raise money within a number of days.”
That’s what irked the USSA. The FIS should have a way to spread the risk for relocating canceled races.
“It’s frustrating that you have an international sports series that doesn’t have a methodology to manage a situation like this and the burden goes back to the organizers,” said Tom Kelly, USSA vice president for marketing. “We’re as good as anybody at doing this, but there wasn’t any way to bring this close enough to happen. We were out there alone.”
The FIS is notoriously averse to forward thinking and creative ideas.
“We’re a bunch of committees, and we just create minutiae,” said USSA president Bill Marolt, an FIS vice president. “We create nonsense. We repeat the same things and we don’t make any decisions. We are the FIS. We have to solve it. We needed to have a better plan to deal with this kind of situation.”
Always looking for positives, Marolt believes the calendar crisis could be the catalyst that forces the FIS to think more creatively and market more effectively.
“I believe it is, and I’m going to be on my high horse, pounding the table,” Marolt said. “This perfectly illustrates what the problems are and solutions we have to develop.”
