McKee's McThoughts: Slices of reality at the Beav

Beaver Creek is surreal. Even for the filthy rich the place is elite. Everything is a bit exaggerated. The entire place is a gated community. The sidewalks are heated so snow can’t accumulate. The condos either have a doorman or you need to know the combination just to get into the lobby. At dinner the other night the waiters had their own waiter. It’s a fun place to spend money, if you’ve got somebody else’s credit card.
    So it’s somehow satisfying when an athlete brings a breath of every day life into the scene, and there’s not much of anybody more down to earth than Didier Cuche. He’s never been a great slalom skier. But after winning the downhill leg of the combined he said was going to give it his best shot. “This summer I trained more slalom than any time in the last 10 years,” he said. And then added, “Which was three runs.”
BEAVER CREEK IS SURREAL. Even for the filthy rich the place is elite. Everything is a bit exaggerated. The entire place is a gated community. The sidewalks are heated so snow can’t accumulate. The condos either have a doorman or you need to know the combination just to get into the lobby. At dinner the other night the waiters had their own waiter. It’s a fun place to spend money, if you’ve got somebody else’s credit card.
    So it’s somehow satisfying when an athlete brings a breath of every day life into the scene, and there’s not much of anybody more down to earth than Didier Cuche. He’s never been a great slalom skier. But after winning the downhill leg of the combined he said was going to give it his best shot. “This summer I trained more slalom than any time in the last 10 years,” he said. And then added, “Which was three runs.”
    Cuche managed to finish, and although no one watching was thinking joyfully about the opportunity to analyze his technique, he played the game and played it well, played it smart, got some points. He did it the way a work-a-day guy does life. He’s our kind of guy.
While no one was standing in line for that video there was another chunk of video everyone was clambering to see; and it was from a 10th-place finish.
    An interesting observation after the downhill: Steven Nyman skied exactly as he meant to, (well almost) outskied everyone on the hill, and lost by 0.05 to one of the greats of the Austrian team because he skied in a heavy snowfall and Michael Walchhofer actually had sunshine on the course. Yet most of the conversation at the bar wasn’t about Nyman, it was about 10th-place finisher Andrew Weibrecht. The kid’s run was that good. He was taking that much risk. He was aggressive. There was no one within 22 bibs of his start number of 53 to make it into the top 20. Folks in Beaver Creek were giddy. If you still haven’t yet seen the video — stop reading this right now and go here .
    You walk around Beaver Creek and wonder where the workers come from. They certainly don’t live here. The course work crews, which are among the most enthusiastic we run into anywhere, are largely imported. Some of them give up their vacation time, every year, to work their tails off on the Beaver Creek course. A tip of the McThoughts hat to all 200-plus of you. Well done.
    Life can get in the way of sports. Things happen and suddenly who wins a little sporting event seems pretty insignificant.
    At Beaver Creek the first training run probably turned the course of the entire World Cup season. Aksel Lund Svindal, the defending tour champ and the leader of this season’s standings crashed, slammed his face into a pole in the fences and had his skis cut so deeply into his butt and leg there was concern of contamination of his circulatory system from his lower digestive tract. It’s enough to make a cowboy cringe. It’s a damn site better than cancer, but it brought a bit of perspective to the circuit.
Benjamin Raich, the runner-up last season, and not insignificantly, second on the current tour at the time of the crash, was among the first to offer condolences.
    “We ski against ourselves,” he said. For Raich, and I suspect most of the skiers on the World Cup, a strong competitor only makes the battle more interesting.
    It’s one of the interesting things about our sport and one of the reasons we should all be thankful. There isn’t much nastiness among competitors. There aren’t hateful rivalries. It is pure sport, in the original Olympic tradition, the Greek tradition where the true goal is to raise the level of your competition, because that makes the game better. I don’t see that often in the ballyhooed, televised team sports where criminals can be considered role models.
    Did Daniel Albrecht slip in under your radar? He did mine. Not in Switzerland, though. Check out the Dani Albrecht video put together by Gismo at their site: https://www.gismoband.ch
    And should you marvel at his popularity back home, consider that both he and Ambrosi Hoffmann donated 30,000 francs of their winnings to the Swiss Nachwuchskader, or development group. Now there’s a concept: Put the money into development.
    And how about Lindsey Vonn at Lake Louise? Three-quarters of a second is a mighty large margin. Especially in a downhill … even more so on a relatively flat course. Some of that is pilot. Vonn can glide with the best of them. But some of it has to be mechanic. A tip of the McThought hat to tech rep Niclas Cronsell. “He knows a lot,” says Vonn, “about a lot.”
    Ingrid Rumpfhuber has to be a member of my All-Name Team.