FIS Calendar Conference wraps up in Croatia

The annual FIS Calendar Conference 2009 wrapped up over Memorial Day weekend in Cavtat-Dubrovnik, Croatia. The yearly meeting gathered skiing officials from around the world to set next year’s schedules as well as discus and debate technical rules and regulations.

The conference included the first-ever FIS World Cup Organizers’ Seminar, and a briefing with the candidate cities for the 2014 and 2015 FIS World Ski Championships.

Fresh on everyone’s mind was the recent reformation of the European Ski Association, also known as Euroski.

As we reported in early May, members of Swiss, French, Italian and Austrian Federations decided to reactivate the association and to name Austrian Peter Schroeksnadel as its Chairman. Germany is also expected to join in the near future.
The annual FIS Calendar Conference 2009 wrapped up over Memorial Day weekend in Cavtat-Dubrovnik, Croatia. The yearly meeting gathered skiing officials from around the world to set next year’s schedules as well as discus and debate technical rules and regulations.

The conference included the first-ever FIS World Cup Organizers’ Seminar, and a briefing with the candidate cities for the 2014 and 2015 FIS World Ski Championships.

Fresh on everyone’s mind was the recent reformation of the European Ski Association, also known as Euroski.

As we reported in early May, members of Swiss, French, Italian and Austrian Federations decided to reactivate the association and to name Austrian Peter Schroeksnadel as its Chairman. Germany is also expected to join in the near future.

The group’s purpose is to “better defend their interests.” They also aim to get better benefit from the marketing and TV rights from companies representing the World Cup organizers and create a stronger lobby in order to get more races in member countries, limiting races in North America.

Nonetheless, the meeting established that at least five more years of World Cup racing would continue in North America. 

“They wanted to have the circuit return to Europe for the first week of December,” Alpine Canada’s chief athletics officer, Max Gartner told the Canadian Press. “It’s been a bit of a dog fight over the World Cup, where the races are. It was an interesting meeting from that perspective.”

Euroski representatives argued that global economic slowing makes it too expensive for racers to travel to North America for races mid-season.

“They were using the argument ‘Why should we go to North America, it costs a lot of money, there is not much interest in races,”‘ said Gartner. “Our argument was it’s a World Cup. You have to race everywhere. We have the advantage there is no other place in the world where you can run a downhill at that time of year.”

The meeting established that the first World Cup downhill of the season will be a men’s race at Lake Louise Nov. 28. The women will be in Lake Louise the following weekend to race two downhills and a Super G.

Gartner said it was important that FIS agreed to two women’s downhill races at Lake Louise during the next five years because having five races over the two weekends creates more television revenue. “On some of the schedules going forward that wasn’t in there,” he said. “They only had us slotted with one (women’s) downhill. We got that changed. If we have four (races), we lose too much money.”

The calendars for the 2009/2010 FIS World Cup season will now be sent to the FIS Council for approval in its next meeting in mid-June. The preliminary versions can be found here.

Ski companies took advantage of the meeting to announce that they will no longer be paying for ski technicians to travel to summer training. Skiing hard goods companies are among the hardest hit by the current slouching economy, and are making cuts across their entire operations to stay afloat. The Canadian Press reported that the cutback will cost Alpine Canada around $50,000 to allow four ski technicians to accompany the team to summer training camps.

Representatives from Deer Valley Resort in Park City, Utah were also in attendance to present a draft schedule of the 2011 FIS Freestyle Ski World Championships, which will be held on many of the same slopes as the 2002 Winter Olympics.

It will be the second time that the resort hosts the event. The provisional dates of Feb. 2-5 were accepted and will go to the FIS council in June for final approval.

“Deer Valley is proud to be the host of the World Championships a second time,” said Deer Valley Events Manager Carrie Budding. “We feel very close to the freestyle community through our annual World Cup events and it’s an honor to be hosting this event.”

Deer Valley will partner with Park City Mountain Resort for the halfpipe event.

“Deer Valley has become a real favorite of athletes and team officials from around the world,” said U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association Vice President, Events, Calum Clark. “The Teams had a great Championships in Japan this past season and are now looking forward to returning to Deer Valley in less than two years.”