The alpine Nations Cup is a joke, and unfortunately that says a lot about where alpine World Cup skiing is headed. In the week leading up to the Aspen races, some of the silliness surrounding the alpine World Cup reared up in Web and print. First, Hank McKee, in his McKee’s McThoughts journal on this Web site, chatted about the number of competitions the FIS stages throughout the world. At the same time, the Aspen Times took a look at the Austrian Nations Cup winning streak — 17 years, to be exact. The two don’t add up.
THE ALPINE NATIONS CUP is a joke, and unfortunately that says a lot about where alpine World Cup skiing is headed.
    In the week leading up to the Aspen races, some of the silliness surrounding the alpine World Cup reared up in Web and print. First, Hank McKee, in his McKee’s McThoughts journal on this Web site, chatted about the number of competitions the FIS stages throughout the world. At the same time, the Aspen Times took a look at the Austrian Nations Cup winning streak — 17 years, to be exact. The two don’t add up.
    Alpine ski competition is big, and around the globe there are a ton of people participating, officiating, gatekeeping, you name it. So why don’t we treat it like a big-time sport and make adjustments so prizes such as the Nations Cup make sense instead of making the sport look foolish. Imagine how exciting it would be if the NFL’s Pittsburgh Steelers won the Super Bowl 17 years in a row. Or, if Italy won the FIFA World Cup 17 consecutive times. Those sports would do something about it. But apparently, not skiing.
    Don’t blame the FIS. In this case, as in most things which don’t make sense in ski sport, it is not the staff and management in Oberhofen which is responsible. It is the individual national ski federations, whose members make up the various rule and governance committees, who are to blame. And the guiltiest party is Austria, the “big” winner.
    Austria is a great ski nation. It has overwhelmingly dominated alpine World Cup skiing for the past 15 years. Austria has a lot of political clout with the 104 federations that make up the FIS. Only about 25 of the these federations typically enter World Cup competitors in a given race, which leaves a whole bunch who could care less what the rules for the Nations Cup are because they are not involved. So the Austrians, who think winning alpine ski races is a national security issue, quash any attempt to make the Nations Cup legitimate.
    As Hermann Maier indicates in the Aspen Times article, the real race is for second place. It is an honor only found in World Cup alpine among any sport in the world.
    What a shame! And it would be so easy to fix by just counting the top three or four finishers of each country — today the Nations Cup is determined by total World Cup points, and since the Austrians start twice as many racers (which is another more troubling problem) as the next nation, you do the math.
    The sad part of this is that the total domination by Austria is hurting, perhaps killing, the sport worldwide — but that topic is for another time.
    For today, I challenge McThought to come up with a prediction of the date when the Nations Cup will once again be won by Austria. The season is six events old. Can the rest of the nations combined hold the Austrians off till the new year? Perhaps, but by Jan. 31 with the season about half over, I’ll bet the Nations Cup will be residing in Innsbruck for the eighteenth straight year.
    What nonsense.

— G.B. Jr.