Are: U.S. men prep for long night of video study

ARE, Sweden — After a disappointing showing in Tuesday’s super G, where no American cracked the top 10, and a less-than-stellar showing in downhill training on Wednesday, U.S. men’s head coach Phil McNichol planned to put his charges through an extended night of video analysis ahead of Thursday’s super combi.
ARE, Sweden — After a disappointing showing in Tuesday’s super G, where no American cracked the top 10, and a less-than-stellar showing in downhill training on Wednesday, U.S. men’s head coach Phil McNichol planned to put his charges through an extended night of video analysis ahead of Thursday’s super combi.
    “We’ve been compressing video for the last four, five hours. That work is what comes up next,” McNichol said after a team captains meeting Wednesday night. “We’ll work the service guys. We clearly need to address how cold the snow is and what the skis are doing in the snow. I have some questions to talk to the service guys about in terms of some of the splits up top [in training], and we need to look at the video so I have my thoughts right.”
    Bode Miller, Steven Nyman, Ted Ligety and T.J. Lanning will start in the super combi. Each one struggled finding speed in the training run on a course that was described by numerous racers as in great shape given Wednesday’s brutally cold conditions. The air temperature at the top was well below zero Fahrenheit, and the snow temperature was much colder.
    “Today is very cold. Extremely, extremely cold,” Nyman said. “We had colder temperatures in Lake Louise [Canada], negative-33, but today felt colder. But the hill is great, the snow is prepped pretty well, but it’s so cold that it’s a lot more grippy and sticky and your skis just don’t flow well with that.”
    McNichol, though concerned about his racers’ struggles Wednesday, cautioned that poor training doesn’t always equal a poor showing in the race. He pointed to Nyman specifically, mentioning his training struggles at Val Gardena but subsequent win there in the downhill.
    He also singled out the gold-medal performance of Italy’s Patrick Staudacher in the super G. Staudacher hadn’t trained in more than a week due to a knee injury entering the World Championships. “Now he’s the world champion,” McNichol said.
    “As a coach, you can put an excessive emphasis on training and being on snow but it doesn’t guarantee success,” he continued. “The guys have to be focused, they have to be relaxed, and they have to execute at a high level, which Patrick did in the super G. He was really clean, there was nothing spectacular, he didn’t make any mistakes and he won the race.
    “Yeah, we could go back in hindsight and say [the super G] was coming off the three or four days stuck in the weather up here, but I think the guys are better than that. They need to execute, we’ve talked about that, we’ve put that race behind us and now we need to go through the process of learning the downhill as quick as possible and come out [Thursday] full guns.”
    McNichol called the downhill course, on which racers will reach speeds of up to 120 kilometers per hour, challenging and turny. A couple of jumps, including the once-massive Russisprung, named for course designer Bernhard Russi, has been shaved down for safety. Racers flew up to 70 meters on the jump last season.
    “And with the grippy snow, speeds are slow and you have to really be in-synch with the snow and be really clean,” McNichol said. “Wax is important, and also how material runs. We know Head [Miller’s ski maker] runs good in the cold. Fischer’s [Nyman’s ski maker] been OK in the cold. We just have to work hard and make sure the servicemen are on their game, and they are. They’re immensely focused on figuring it out, but cold snow can be the toughest thing for a service guy."
    SULLIVAN UPDATE: Marco Sullivan took part in Wednesday’s downhill training run, testing an abdominal injury sustained in Are shortly after he arrived. Sullivan finished well back, but McNichol said Sullivan “had some good sections and I liked what I saw.” He should be ready to go for Saturday’s downhill.
    “He’s doing OK with [the injury], which gives him a sharp pain when he’s breathing. It was limited in terms of when he was skiing on the course, but he’s getting great therapy from Todd Daniels, our trainer. So I think he’ll be 100 percent. He’ll have some pain to deal with post and prior to the race, but he’s ready to compete.”