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.
Sestriere, Italy – This week we return to the course at San Sicario where I had a really bad crash in downhill training last year during the Olympics. I’m actually really excited to be back.
Before the crash, I’d skied really well here, and I always felt like it was a really good hill for me. I think the races here – super-G on Friday and Sunday, downhill on Saturday – will be my revenge.
The crash here last year, which frightened everyone who saw it and sent me to the hospital in Turin, was really fluky. They had put in new terrain features to make the course more challenging, but the snow was extremely grippy and it was easy to catch an edge – which I did.
All the athletes agreed we wanted the course at San Sicario to be tougher, but the way they made it tougher wasn’t right – pushing snow around to create weird terrain features in weird places. It was more dangerous to do it that way than to leave it the way it was.
When you create terrain that isn’t naturally in the hill, it can be really dangerous if you don’t do it right. The snow was really dry and “aggressive,” but they also injected water in a few turns to make them icy. If you wanted to finish the course, you had to have sharp edges to handle the ice, but sharp edges aren’t what you want on aggressive snow, which tends to grab the ski.
Because they don’t have a lot of snow to work with this year, I don’t think they will be able to trick up the course the way they did last year. I think it will be better than it was at the Olympics.
I crashed in last Saturday’s downhill at Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, and fell out of first place in the World Cup downhill standings, so I want to make up for lost ground this week. I think I took too many chances in Cortina.
With the downhill standings, you have to be consistent. Sometimes I think too much about winning or beating Austria’s Renate Goetschl, now the leader in the standings. This week I’m not going to go 120 percent, like I’ve been trying to do the past couple of races. I’m just going to go 100 percent. Hopefully that will be enough.
We have only three World Cup downhills left. I’m thinking about winning the title, but trying not to think about it.
