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.
Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany – I spent Christmas with my best friend on the tour, German racer Maria Riesch, and her family.
It was a traditional German Christmas, with the celebration on Christmas Eve. We slept in, and then we had a big family breakfast. Maria, her sister and I went to the gym for a couple of hours. Then I took a nap.
We went to visit her grandfather. We had a little champagne and traditional German cookies and sweets. We all walked to the cemetery. They have like a family headstone, and everyone is buried in one plot, kind of stacked up on top of each other.
We lit candles. A traditional German band was playing Christmas hymns at the cemetery church. Pretty much the entire town was standing there, listening to the music. It was a cool ambience with all the candles and everything.
Then we walked home and had a big dinner of wieners, German potato salad and pretzels, traditional Bavarian fare. The potato salad was so good, not even close to American potato salad. Of course we had some schnapps.
After dinner we opened presents. They don’t do Christmas gifts the way we do back home. Everyone buys so many presents in the U.S., at least in my family. With her family, everyone gets one present. It’s all very meaningful. After the exchange of gifts, everyone sat around the dining room table drinking some kind of fruit rum.
Since I can’t go home for Christmas, this was the perfect place for me to be. It kind of ends the year on a really good note and re-energizes me for the next couple of months because they are going to be really important – especially the world championships in February.
Getting on the podium twice last week, with a win, was a really nice present. I’m leading the World Cup downhill standings by a considerable margin. I got a call from my old coach in Minnesota, Erich Sailer. He’s always happy when I do well in speed events, but he was really psyched that I did well in the first run of slalom, finishing fourth, even though I didn’t finish the second run. That’s typical, because slalom is his first love. That was pretty funny.
Now it’s back to work. Maria and I left Garmisch on Monday for Austria and I’ll be training giant slalom and slalom today and Wednesday before races in Semmering on Thursday and Friday.
