World Cup Rewind: Crazy Canucks to Cowboy Up?

Alpine Canada President Ken Read would really like to get a nickname for the new Canadians, and with a few more weekends like they had in Lake Louise they’ll deserve their own. Read, of course, was part of perhaps the most famously named group of skiers in World Cup history, “The Crazy Canucks.” He seems to be leaning toward “Canadian Cowboys,” for the current group. Time will tell how that goes.
    The Canadian men’s group put up five top-10 placings for the first weekend of speed races (DH and SG) at Lake Louise including the first downhill win of the season from Jan Hudec. It’s a small group, just as Read’s band was back in the late 1970’s, early 80s — just Hudec, John Kucera and Erik Guay, really. But they came in second to the mighty Austrians in points gained in the downhill (183-150) and third in super G behind Austria and Switzerland (186-136-132).
ALPINE CANADA President Ken Read would really like to get a nickname for the new Canadians, and with a few more weekends like they had in Lake Louise they’ll deserve their own. Read, of course, was part of perhaps the most famously named group of skiers in World Cup history, “The Crazy Canucks.” He seems to be leaning toward “Canadian Cowboys,” for the current group. Time will tell how that goes.
    The Canadian men’s group put up five top-10 placings for the first weekend of speed races (DH and SG) at Lake Louise including the first downhill win of the season from Jan Hudec. It’s a small group, just as Read’s band was back in the late 1970’s, early 80s — just Hudec, John Kucera and Erik Guay, really. But they came in second to the mighty Austrians in points gained in the downhill (183-150) and third in super G behind Austria and Switzerland (186-136-132).
    The Canadian women, on the other hand, have yet to score a single point, so all is not perfect in the house of the sleeping giant to our north (south if you live in Alaska), but all in all, it was a nice way to kick start the season for the hosts.
    Italian Denise Karbon — with that fabulous and inspiring story of fighting back from injury  — and Austrian sensation Marlies Schild each have perfect seasonal records in their disciplines. Schild is carrying on a domination that began last season about this time. Her record in slalom over the past season and this is 9 of 12, a 75 percent win rate comparable to those Ingemar Stenmark put up back in Read’s day. This clearly states she is faster in slalom than anyone else. Czech skier Sarka Zahrobska  — second in this weekend’s slalom at Panorama — would have three wins to her credit save for Schild and be the greatest alpine skier in Czech history.
    Karbon got a bit luckier in acquiring her second GS win. On a tricky course with flat light and a streak of injected snow down the center of the race line, she was fourth fastest in the first run, and turned in the third fastest second run. But the leaders could not match her effort and fell back. The record shows Karbon has won the first two GS’s of the 2008 season. With just eight races on the women’s GS schedule and none until Dec. 28, she’s likely to hold the lead well into January.
    But let’s go back to the men’s downhill. “Any one of 15 guys could have won that race,” Hudec told the CBC. The margins between skiers indicated the truth of that. A tenth of a second separated fourth from eighth. Twenty racers were within a second of the win. If Hudec’s win was a feel good story for Canada, Marco Sullivan in second was a huge placing for the U.S. Sully has his own recovery story having broken both heels last October and survived knee surgeries over the past three seasons. At Lake Louise he overcame that.
    Andreas Buder had the top downhill result of the Austrian team. That’s significant. While third matched his career best, it is particularly noteworthy that he came from the 29th start on a day when the rest of the top six all wore single-digit bibs. The visibility decreased during the day and the wind increased. Buder came out the best of the Austrians despite his teammates holding 68 World Cup wins (23 in DH), five Olympic medals and 10 World Championship medals. In addition, there were 11 World Junior medals represented by the members of his team. He will bear watching.
Aksel Lund Svindal — as cool a character as exists in the sport — has made his living being clean and safe. The 2007 World Cup overall champ did not win a World Cup race between Dec. 21 and March 14 last season. He has, however, won five times in eight chances since.
    In this race the Canadians did even better than the downhill — team wise — with Guay, Kucera and Hudec placing five, seven, eight respectively. Likewise the Swiss showed potently with Didier Cuche, Ambrosi Hoffmann and Didier Defago placing three, six, and nine respectively. That didn’t leave a lot of room for other nations to grab a top 10 result.
Austria got second place from tech whiz and 2006 overall winner Benjamin Raich. He has been as high as second in SG before, but until now, not with regularity. He was second in the final SG of last season as well, which is a signal of a concentrated effort. Now, he tells the Austrian press, he is ready to show some of the same ability in downhill.
With Bode Miller providing little yet to hang his independent hat on this season, the results from a relatively young U.S. squad were encouraging. Steven Nyman in 13th and Scott Macartney in 17th are hardly earth shaking, but they do not show weakness, either.
    In the women’s GS at Panorama we witnessed the unlikely resurgence of the Italian women. Not only has Karbon won twice, Manuela Moelgg has two top 10s, including third at Panorama, and Nicole Gius added a sixth. Still, the race was not so much won by Karbon, as lost by Austrian Nicole Hosp who entered the final heat with a lead of more than a half second over the field and a full second over Karbon. Despite losing three skiers to the first run and Hosp’s uncharacteristic error on course, the Austrians fared well. Elisabeth Goergl recorded second (her second top 10 in two chances this season), Schild took fourth and Eva-Maria Brem, just 19, got her second World Cup scoring result in the lofty reaches of fifth place leaving her shaking her head in disbelief.
    Julia Mancuso and Resi Stiegler provided the U.S. punch, Mancuso coming from 21st after a mediocre first run to finish 10th and carry the flag. Stiegler took 12th, right in line with her best GS scoring ever. Jessica Kelley made some ripples in 22nd and Libby Ludlow in 25th.
    Other impressive results came from Ana Drev of Slovenia with her first single-digit result in eighth, German Viktoria Rebensburg in 14th for her fourth GS scoring result since last February and the French teenager Tessa Worley in 15th.
Schild destroyed the slalom field. Her winning margin was a strong 0.68, indicating the battles this year, as last, would be for second place. Zahrobska drew that blood at Panorama with Croat Ana Jelusic third. The top seven represented different countries, and three of those were eastern European. That’s a relief to World Cup organizers looking to stretch the popularity into countries other than Austria. For the U.S., Stiegler posted ninth with a solid effort. Mancuso, in her worst discip
line, was 16th, very much in line with what should be expected. Lindsey Vonn, also skiing in her worst discipline, clung to a surprisingly good first run (ninth) and got a couple of points despite a disastrous second heat.
Aita Camastral of Switzerland and Marina Nigg of Liechtenstein, both unheard of before getting their first points at Reiteralm earlier in the month, made good on their promise with 11th and 12th respectively.
    But the biggest statement of the weekend was the attitude of the Canadian men.
    “I don’t think I took advantage of my start number (8), so I’m a little disappointed,” said Guay, “but at the same time I think I’m skiing better so I want to build on that and bring this confidence to Beaver Creek and keep it going for the rest of the year.”
    Jan Hudec, the downhill winner, also felt he might have fared better than the eighth place he scored in super G. “I had a chance today, it was a good course and stayed pretty fair for everybody and I knew I had to risk everything. I was really fast at the top but made a couple of mistakes in the middle section and that’s where I lost it.”
    John Kucera, the second of three Canadians in the top eight with a seventh-place finish was a touch better pleased. “I think I skied well, skied aggressively,” he said. “Now we all know we’re skiing well, know a bunch of us are skiing well and getting into the top 10 and it’s just a good confidence boost going into the rest of the season.”
    “We get to a point where the guys want to win races, and if we’re not there, we’re not satisfied,” Alpine Canada’s Chief Athletics Officer Max Gartner told Canadian reporters. “What I like is we have so many guys who can win on any given day. We have a pretty exciting team, and they’re still pretty young.”
    Pretty exciting, pretty young and pretty determined to keep this thing going. They might get a nickname yet.