McNichol: U.S. men are rarin’ to go in Sölden

U.S. men's alpine head coach Phil McNichol stepped off the plane in Austria on Wednesday and found it really hard to think about ski racing.
    “It’s still a warm and beautiful Austrian fall. You just want to throw your hiking boots on and charge into the Alps with the lederhosen and a little yodeling along the way,” McNichol said.
    “It doesn’t really render the picture of a ski race yet, but damn it’s beautiful here. Perfect weather.”
    Perfect weather for hiking, yeah, but hardly the conditions World Cup organizers in Sölden want while prepping the snow on the Rettenbach glacier high above the Austrian village for the season’s opening weekend Oct. 28-29. Reports from Austria are that it’s been quite a challenge getting the glacier in shape for racing.
  

U.S. MEN'S ALPINE head coach Phil McNichol stepped off the plane in Austria on Wednesday and found it really hard to think about ski racing.
    “It’s still a warm and beautiful Austrian fall. You just want to throw your hiking boots on and charge into the Alps with the lederhosen and a little yodeling along the way,” McNichol said.
    “It doesn’t really render the picture of a ski race yet, but damn it’s beautiful here. Perfect weather.”
    Perfect weather for hiking, yeah, but hardly the conditions World Cup organizers in Sölden want while prepping the snow on the Rettenbach glacier high above the Austrian village for the season’s opening weekend Oct. 28-29. Reports from Austria are that it’s been quite a challenge getting the glacier in shape for racing, and the dreaded “C” word even came up a few weeks back when natural snow was very scarce. But McNichol said any worries about canceling the Sölden stop are nonsense.“Ski racing doesn’t have a lot of [marketing] firepower in a lot of ways, but obviously the early season is one of their silver bullets,” he said. “It’s definitely not [a race] where they’re gonna say, ‘By the way, we’re canceling the race, don’t buy any ski equipment until after Christmas.’ It’s just not gonna happen.”
    McNichol said he hadn’t stepped foot on the Rettenbach glacier yet, but he’s not concerned about course quality for the prerace training and the events themselves.
“[The Austrians] will do whatever it takes,” he said. “They’ll use snow guns. I’ve never seen them make snow in Sölden on the glacier. I’ve heard they’re making snow. They’ve probably been farming it, dragging it, doing whatever.”

‘Tremendous’ conditions boost preseason training
The U.S. World Cup tech group arrived in Austria on Thursday fresh off a pair of preseason training camps in the Southern Hemisphere in New Zealand and Chile. McNichol said his racers got in a ton of training runs on both stops, decreasing the need for major training work in Austria right before the races.
    “We’ve made some modifications in how we train and where we train, and we do less in Europe in October than we’ve done historically, but the guys are more prepared, in my opinion, now for October and November than I’ve ever seen them,” he said. “[We had] tremendous conditions in New Zealand and really good conditions in Chile.”
    In a somewhat different twist than years past, McNichol said the entire World Cup men’s team was subjected to a “volume overload” in Southern Hemisphere training. The goal was to diversify the workload, giving the downhill group more giant slalom training and doing more slalom work with the slalom and GS racers. The focus was on training each racer’s weaker disciplines while not sacrificing their stronger events.
    McNichol said Sölden will be a good opening test to gauge how the revamped off-season training schedule pans out, but he and his fellow coaches won’t have a serious evaluation until mid-January.

Sölden “not a good measuring stick” for season success
Last season’s World Cup opener at Sölden saw Bode Miller (second) and Ted Ligety (eighth) each finish in the top 10, with Miller posting the fastest time on the opening run and Ligety pacing the field on the second. For Miller and Ligety, that Sölden success was a precursor of things to come last season, but McNichol said he doesn’t put much stock into a racer’s performance on the glacier as a harbinger of future success.
    “I would say Sölden’s not a great measuring stick,” he said. “We’ve had complete failures maybe outside of, say, Bode on a given year, and many years we’ve always struggled here even in our big success years like ’05.
    “We’ve never really as a team come in and kicked ass. I’d say last year winning both runs was our best year in Sölden. Although as a team, running six, seven, eight guys down the hill, you expect to do more than win each run … although I ain’t complaining.”
    Neither is McNichol’s boss, U.S. Ski Team President/CEO Bill Marolt, who when reached Wednesday said he’s looking forward to the start of the season in Sölden, which offers “that last blast of sunshine before it really starts to snow and get cold.”
Marolt will leave for Sölden on Tuesday.
    “No matter what you’ve done in the past or what last season was, a new year is a new opportunity and you really don’t know where you are,” Marolt said. “You always are confident you trained well, the athletes are in shape and the coaches are ready to go, but you don’t know until the end of that first competition.” 

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