INNSBRUCK, AUSTRIA — Last week we made our first-ever trip to Bulgaria for races at the Bansko ski resort and it was an adventure, to say the least. The travel complications were pretty chaotic.
Getting there wasn’t too bad, just a delay of a couple hours, but coming back Sunday night was a fiasco. We flew from Sofia on a Balkan Holidays Airline charter that was supposed to land in Munich, but there was fog there. Apparently our airplane didn’t have adequate instruments to land in fog, so we pulled up abruptly and flew to Stuttgart.
I guess every other airline was landing in Munich with no problem. Somebody said we had a bad pilot and an old airplane — not a good combination.
We waited on the airplane in Stuttgart for 60-90 minutes before they could find a bus to take us to the main terminal. When we got there, they were supposed to have a couple of tour buses to take us to Munich. We waited there with all our baggage for another hour.
Then they told us they couldn’t find us a bus, so we had to wait at an airport hotel and take a bus in the morning. By the time we got to bed, it was 2 a.m. Monday. We got on a tour bus at 8 a.m., and drove three hours to Munich.
The races in Bansko actually were really nice. There were a lot of spectators and they were really fired up. The atmosphere was amazing. For their first World Cup, I’d say they did an excellent job.
I was really happy about winning Sunday’s super-G. I went a couple years without much success in super-G, so it’s nice to be in a rhythm and post consistently good results in that discipline. Hopefully I can win the season title at the World Cup Finals in two weeks, to go with the downhill title I clinched last week.
With six races remaining I have 1,556 points in the overall standings and Maria Riesch is second with 1,165. I would have to not finish most of the races and Maria would have to finish first or second in all them to overtake me. It’s pretty close to being wrapped up, I think.
World Cup overall champion Lindsey Vonn, a product of Ski Club Vail, reports regularly in collaboration with Denver Post ski writer John Meyer.
