Beaver Creek has long been the U.S. Ski Team’s best friend, hosting World Cup downhill races annually and the world alpine ski championships in 1989 and 1999 — with another coming in 2015.
But if U.S. racers perform well in men’s races there Dec. 2-4, Copper Mountain could deserve a lot of credit in a supporting role.
Sometime around Nov. 12, the U.S. Ski Team Speed Center at Copper will debut with the only full-length downhill training in the world this early in the season. Bill Marolt, the ski team’s chief executive, calls the long-term deal a “game changer” for his racers, and it’s certainly the most significant news in Colorado ski area improvements this season.
While European downhillers will have to scramble for training slopes that cannot duplicate World Cup downhill conditions, the U.S. team can be in full downhill training mode on a slope nearly two miles long with a 2,300-foot vertical drop. That could give U.S. racers a huge advantage at Beaver Creek and Canada’s Lake Louise, traditionally the first downhills of the season.
“It will provide unparalleled training for our elite athletes prior to the World Cup season,” Marolt said, “and play an integral role in our strategic development plan for the next generation.”
As a new ski season draws toward November with two Front Range areas in operation and a significant storm taking aim on the high country, there are other noteworthy resort improvements Colorado skiers and riders will welcome in the coming weeks. One of them is the replacement of Chair 4 at Loveland, where a double built in 1967 has been replaced by a triple that will increase uphill capacity from 900 per hour to almost 1,400.
Buttermilk replaced two fixed-grip lifts (Eagle Hill and Upper Tiehack) with a high-speed quad that will trim hangtime from 18 minutes to seven. Monarch and Wolf Creek laid new asphalt parking lots, Vail will open a new gourmet restaurant and a new backcountry hut will open near Tennessee Pass.
Breckenridge will mark its 50th year in operation and the Aspen Valley Ski Club will celebrate its 75th.
When Aspen hosts the women’s World Cup Nov. 26-27 for giant slalom and slalom, Vail’s Lindsey Vonn will be wearing the red leader’s bib in GS. A week later, Ted Ligety will wear the red bib in the Beaver Creek GS. Both won over the weekend in the season-opening races at Soelden, Austria.
Both of them figure to get plenty of laps in the new training venue at Copper Mountain. Served by the high-speed six-passenger Super Bee chairlift and located on slopes at the east side of the resort, the training arena will be significantly steeper than the slopes the team used at Copper in recent years.
The race course will have 20,000 feet of safety netting. Construction included 12,000 feet of power cables, 16,000 feet of communication cables and 87 new snow guns.
“Bill Marolt has been passionate for many years about finding a home for a training venue of this nature,” said Gary Rodgers, Copper’s president and general manager. “The natural attributes of the mountain are a base elevation of 9,600 feet, predominantly north-facing slopes, and the area where we’re constructing the venue is really just tremendous terrain for this type of training.”
Trails involved include Upper Andy’s Encore, West Chute and Oh No, funneling into Rosi’s Run. The latter was named a generation ago for Rosi Mittermaier of Germany, who won two World Cup races there three weeks after winning three medals at the 1976 Innsbruck Olympics.
The ski team will not have to pay for using the venue. Copper does have the right to rent training space to other teams as long as the ski team is accommodated first, but Rodgers said Copper will be content to break even.
“We certainly see upside, positioning Copper as an official training venue for the U.S. Ski Team,” Rodgers said. “Should we ever get in a position where there is some profit generated, we will be splitting that with the team.”
