Beaver Creek: Brit Mickel has big downhill dreams

A day after having to sit in the lodge after bad weather canceled the first training run, Finlay Mickel was the first racer out of the gate Wednesday in the lone training run downhill racers will get on the difficult Birds of Prey course before racing gets under way. “This is my first time to come down [the course] first. It’s a tough hill,” the 29-year-old Great Britain native said. “I’ve never been in the top 30 here before and it’s something I want to remedy this year.”
BEAVER CREEK, Colorado — A day after having to sit in the lodge after bad weather canceled the first training run, Finlay Mickel was the first racer out of the gate Wednesday in the lone training run downhill racers will get on the difficult Birds of Prey course before racing gets under way.
    “This is my first time to come down [the course] first. It’s a tough hill,” the 29-year-old Great Britain native said. “I’ve never been in the top 30 here before and it’s something I want to remedy this year.”
    Mickel has raced the Birds of Prey downhill four times, and the 29-year-old echoed the opinions of many other World Cup racers by saying sections of the track rival the best downhill courses in Europe, and the race produces legitimate winners every year.
    “If you see the guys that win here are really technically on top of their game, guys who are also doing well in super G,” Mickel said. “There’s a gliding section at the top that’s more like a ski test but after that it’s a full-on super G, gate-to-gate attacking course. I really like the bottom, lots of jumps, nice open flowing turns. The one thing I need to work on is that steep pitch.”
    Mickel finished 42nd in Wednesday’s training run, 3.02 seconds off the pace set by Austria’s Michael Walchhofer. Mickel, who was testing some new Atomic skis that he said he won’t use in Friday’s downhill, got thrown into the air four gates in after hitting a rise he said was larger than in years past and lost some time. After that, entering the steepest part of the course — the Brink — Mickel said he failed to attack the steeps aggressively.
    “[The Brink] is a real challenging section for me to get the head forward and really drive those turns like Bode [Miller] does and like Hermann [Maier] does. You really have to attack that like super G turns, and that’s what I’m really still learning in my downhill. I felt like I wasn’t quite on top of it today.”
    Standing in the finish area with British ski legend Martin Bell, from whom Bell said he learned how to better inspect courses over the years, Mickel said he feels more confident of a top-30 finish at Beaver Creek this season. Part of that, he said, is due to training alongside members of the U.S. Ski Team the past few seasons.
    “That’s a real big thing for me, to keep that relationship working,” he said. “The last couple of years we’ve been pushing each other along, the group below Bode and Daron [Rahlves] last year — [Erik] Fisher, [Steven] Nyman and Marco Sullivan are in that group. Those guys are really pushing into the forefront of downhill, and that’s what I want to do too.”
    Mickel said he has no plans to compete for the win in today’s super combined, consisting of one downhill run and one slalom run. Nope, this Brit is born for the long boards.
    “Slalom’s not the deal for me. Short skis … ohh, dangerous,” he said.