MOSCOW — We didn’t have a World Cup race last weekend, but 16 of us competed in a slalom exhibition on a manmade slope in the Russian capital. It was an amazing experience.
The race was created to stir up interest for alpine skiing in Russia, which will host the 2014 Olympics in the Black Sea resort of Sochi. They built a huge slope on steel scaffolding, 56 meters high and 150 meters long, and covered it with snow trucked in from Siberia. We had lunch with Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin Friday, and about 20,000 people turned out for the race that night.
Moscow was really fun. We got to see Red Square and had a tour of the Kremlin. It’s crazy, the history of the building. You see evolution in architecture as you walk through it, from super-old to the more modern eras. A couple rooms were almost completely covered with gold, and there were wood floors with crazy designs in them. The old rooms had super old-school paintings in them.
We got to see the throne of the czars — big chairs of solid gold — and paintings of the czars. It was pretty over the top, in a gaudy sort of way.
They built the ramp right in front of Moscow University, a 36-story neoclassical tower built by Stalin in 1953. Between runs a band played throbbing Euro techno-pop.
The race was a parallel slalom, meaning four rounds of head-to-head eliminations where time didn’t matter and we raced as pairs, side by side. The slope was surprisingly steep, they got it pretty icy and the gates were set super tight.
I beat Giorgio Rocca of Italy in the first round and Manfred Moelgg, also of Italy, in the second round. Then Felix Neureuther of Germany beat me in the semifinals — he won the event — and Bode Miller won our head-to-head duel for third place.
After the race they invited us to fly down to Sochi. The plan was to ski with Putin and Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, but the weather was nasty so we ended up having lunch with them. We saw Putin and Medvedev dance, which was kind of funny.
The men’s World Cup schedule resumes Tuesday with a slalom in Zagreb, Croatia.
Olympic combined champion Ted Ligety, the reigning World Cup giant slalom champion, reports regularly from the tour in collaboration with Denver Post ski writer John Meyer.
