Olympic combined champion Ted Ligety reports regularly from the World Cup tour in collaboration with Denver Post ski writer John Meyer.
Trento, Italy – The famed Hahnenkamm downhill and super-G, which were supposed to be held this coming weekend in Kitzbuehel, Austria, had to be canceled because of warm weather. It’s too bad, but it’s typical of the havoc the weather has caused on the tour this winter.
It’s really a bummer. For downhillers, Kitzbuehel is the race of the year, attracting the biggest crowds. It has the most notoriety on one of the most feared hills in the world, and that makes it the race they all want to win the most.
We will race two slaloms there, which makes it an important weekend for me, but I was looking forward to racing the downhill there for the first time, hopefully scoring my first World Cup downhill points (by finishing in the top 30).
It’s a shame to lose those races, but it would have been scary to run that hill if they didn’t have enough snow to put it together well. It’s good that they’re not running it in marginal conditions. It seems like every race this winter is being marginalized because of the weather.
They tried to save the downhill with helicopters bringing in snow from higher elevations, and they were going to reroute the bottom of the race, but then they had to abandon that idea. We hear we’re not going to run the slalom on the normal slalom hill, either. The normal Kitzbuehel slalom course is kind of notorious in its own right because there are lots of terrain features, but this year they’re going to run it down the flat finish pitch of the downhill.
As a slalom skier, the next week will be very important. After the slaloms in Kitzbuehel on Saturday and Sunday, we have next Tuesday’s famous night slalom in Schladming, Austria. That’s one-third of the World Cup slalom season in four days.
The Schladming slalom is the most important slalom race of the year – 60,000 people, and it’s just a madhouse.
It’s pretty important for me to be on my game those four days. I’m getting pretty comfortable with my slalom right now. I’ve been making some changes in my equipment, figuring out a new pair of skis I like a little better than what I was using. I’m finding more speed with them on a more consistent basis. Hopefully it will set me up for a good four days. If not, it could be disastrous for me in the slalom standings.
