ZAGREB, CROATIA — I finished sixth in the Zagreb night slalom last Thursday, my best slalom result in three years.
My slalom is getting progressively better. Even in Sunday’s slalom at Adelboden, Switzerland, I was skiing pretty well before I went out of the race. I think things are moving in the right direction with my slalom.
Zagreb is a pretty cool city. It’s super old, your typical mid-sized European city with lots of old buildings. The mountains kind of tower over the city, and when you get to the top of the mountain, you’re looking down on Zagreb and looking over the mountains into Slovenia as well. It’s a really cool view from the top of the mountain.
It’s also one of the only races where you can really hear the crowd when you’re racing. In Schladming (Austria) the crowd is super loud and crazy, but they save their biggest cheers for the Austrian racers. In Zagreb, they cheer loud for everybody.
Seeing my slalom form coming around is definitely encouraging, especially leading into this big month of slaloms.
We’ve got important slalom races this weekend in Wengen (Switzerland), Kitzbuehl (Austria) the following weekend and Schladming two days after Kitzbuehel.
In recent weeks we’ve been figuring out a few things with my equipment and we made another little adjustment before Sunday’s race. It felt even better, so I think the slalom set-up is going to be pretty good in the next week or so. Hopefully we will have enough time and decent training in Wengen to try to get it a little more figured out.
Even before Zagreb in training, I was starting to feel like I could be quick and feel coordinated. Sometimes in slalom when your equipment isn’t working all that well, you can feel a little uncoordinated on your skis. It’s hard to roll the ski onto the edge smoothly. I feel like now I can start rolling more smoothly onto the edge, and that’s helping me a lot right now.
In the Adelboden giant slalom, I shot out of the course and finished 28th. It was the first GS race of the year I didn’t win, but I’m still No. 1 in the GS standings.
Two-time World Cup giant slalom season champion Ted Ligety, the 2006 Olympic champion in combined, reports regularly in collaboration with Denver Post ski writer John Meyer.
