Olympic combined champion Ted Ligety reports regularly from the World Cup tour in collaboration with Denver Post ski writer John Meyer.
Are, Sweden – Unlike the Olympics last year, the day of the combined at the world championships Thursday just wasn’t my day.
I had what I thought was a decent downhill run, but I was a little too hard on my edges and ended up losing tons of time the whole way down, finishing 25th, 2.82 seconds behind.
With a little more experience in downhill, I think I would have handled the conditions much better. Most of the downhills I’ve run this year have been on harder snow with more challenging terrain than we had here.
The combined downhill at the Olympics last year was pretty challenging, but this one wasn’t. It was more of a glider’s course, and I wasn’t as clean as I needed to be on my edges, just a little too harsh. As I get more miles on the downhill skis and see conditions like this a few more times, I’ll have a better feel for this kind of snow.
In the combined slalom, I was skiing really well – although I was too far behind because of the downhill to have a chance for a medal – when I came over the last pitch and four course workers were standing right in my way. I stopped and asked for a rerun.
They gave me a ride back up the mountain on a snowmobile, but halfway up the snowmobile broke down. I had to ski back down to the bottom and find another snowmobile, then get back up there.
On the rerun, I lost my pole coming out of the start, then went out of the course about 10 gates later. It was a rough day.
The only consolation was that I was already out of the running after the downhill, so the rerun and the broken-down snowmobile didn’t cost me anything.
I was 31st in the super-G last Tuesday. I made some really good turns in sections and made a couple of mistakes. The tough thing about the super-G was that it was such a close race. I was only 1.7 seconds behind and I was 31st. The 10th-place finisher was less than .7 of a second behind.
It’s tough to be too upset when I did pretty well, and super-G isn’t really my event.
I think I have a good chance in the giant slalom Wednesday and the slalom Thursday. I’ve really started to get my slalom figured out and I feel pretty comfortable with it. Hopefully I can lay down a good run in GS as well.
