International Roundup: Torino 2006, Hermann sells out, Kaprun memorial, Colorado training

International Roundup: Torino 2006, Hermann sells out, Kaprun memorial, Colorado trainingTorino 2006 tickets are on sale now

More than 500,000 tickets for 177 sports events at the 2006 Turin Winter Olympics went on sale Thursday. Of a total of 1 million tickets, 65 percent will be available to the public. The other 35 percent are reserved for national Olympic Committees, sponsors, international sports federations and broadcasters. Aside from visiting outlets in Italy, fans can order tickets online at the organizing committee’s website.

The cheapest tickets are for biathlon, cross country, curling, freestyle and preliminary women’s hockey. Prices for figure skating range from $89 to $382. Opening ceremony tickets start at $318 and reach $1,082. Ticket sales are expected to raise more than $95.5 million, the third-largest source of income after TV rights and sponsorships.

Special offeres include ‘Carnets’ booklets that will allow fans to follow their favorite sport or national team in all the events, or to live a more assorted Olympic experience. People can choose to buy a ticket for a single race or a selection of the best events. The men’s super-G, for example, will have two price brackets, 30 and 110 euro, depending on where one sits. At the moment of purchase, fans will receive a voucher, while the actual tickets will be delivered at home a few weeks before the start of the Games: this system was adopted to avoid risks of counterfeiting.

Shakeups at Torino 2006

The big news this week on the Torino 2006 Olympic front wasn’t the tickets, but Valentino Castellani’s announcement that he was resigning, and his subsequent retraction of that announcement. Castellani is the chief organizer of the Turin 2006 Winter Olympics (TOROC). Last Thursday he said that he would resign because the Italian government seemed to have lost faith in his leadership, and was undermining him by nominating Mario Pescante, culture ministry undersecretary and former head of the Italian Olympic Committee, as overall supervisor for the games. But then on Tuesday of this week Castellani announced that he was reconsidering his resignation, and appears to be staying the course.

Pescante’s nomination, last month, came not long after Herwig Demschar, a personality well-known to American ski racing fans, resigned as the chief of sports. The TOROC committee has come under sharp criticism for a $227 million budget shortfall, according to the Associated Press. -Staff and wire reports

Hermann Maier sells his stamp collection

The Herminator is selling well, just not as well as The Terminator. An Austrian postage stamp depicting Hermann Maier, the country’s first skiing star to adorn a stamp, sold out in just six weeks after it went on sale September 25, the country’s post office said Tuesday. Fans from all over the world snapped up 600,000 stamps.

“There are no more stamps for sale,” said post office chief Herbert Goetz, who presented the first of the stamps to the four-time World Cup champion. As impressive as that was, it couldn’t top the demand for a stamp released last summer honoring Austrian-born California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, which sold out in just three weeks. Maier, nicknamed the “Herminator,” took the defeat in good humor, conceding he failed to achieve his goal to top his friend. -The Associated Press

Canadian team wants Olympic success

Ken Read, the president of Alpine Canada Alpin, collected a few rocks from the ski hill at Sestriere to remind him of the team’s goals for the the Olympics, which roll through Sestriere in 2006 and Vancouver in 2010. This is according to a story in the Globe and Mail, available through free subscription. In the story, one of Canada’s alpine athletes comments on how pride helps fuel the American team’s success.

Kaprun fire victims memorialized in Austria

It’s an elegant but somber memorial to Austria’s deadliest peacetime disaster: a stone building with 155 glass columns, one for each of the skiers and snowboarders killed when fire engulfed a crowded alpine cable car on November 11, 2000. On Thursday, the fourth anniversary of the inferno, President Heinz Fischer and other dignitaries are commemorating the memorial in a private ceremony with relatives of the victims.

The $463,000 memorial was built at the base of the craggy Kitzsteinhorn mountain, where the victims were headed for a day of fun on the slopes when the cable car bringing them to a glacier at the top caught fire in a tunnel. “The building exhibits a soberness and a sense of humility over this terrible misfortune,” said Anton Michael, a German architect who designed the memorial in the popular ski resort town of Kaprun, 60 miles south of Salzburg in the heart of Austria’s Alps. -The Associated Press

And you were using Banana boat…

SKI Magazine has a story on their website called How to Watch a Ski Race. The designer who developed the art for the piece seems to have taken a photo of an World Cup skier, turned it into a cartoon and added some fans behind the A-net fencing.

Back to the Olympics…

The International Herald Tribune ran a story on Friday, November 5 about Bardonecchia, the Italian mountain town that will be a hub for much of the skiing events in the 2006 Winter Olympics. The story by Elisabetta Poveledo (click here to read it) details the affect the Olympic build-up is having on property prices in the region.

Bardonecchia is also the scheduled site of some snowboard World Cups in early February and the alpine World Junior Championships at the end of that month. There, the American team will defend its title as the top nation.

Teams ready to train in western U.S.

Most of the Austrian team has traveled to North America (the men’s tech team flies on Saturday), but there’s still not that much space for training in Colorado. “In the past 24 hours, we’ve had nine inches of snow at mid-mountain and 15 inches at the summit,” said a Beaver Creek spokesperson. “Another system is expected to move in tomorrow night and continue through Sunday. Temperatures dropped last night and it’s expected to remain cold through the rest of the week.”

Beaver Creek’s priority is preparing Golden Eagle and the main mountain for opening day (November 20). “Snow was blown at the top and bottom of Golden Eagle last night and crews are working hard to make snow as weather patterns allow,” said the spokesperson for the mountain. “Beaver Creek will continue to concentrate its efforts on preparing the race course and main mountain.

Teams typically train at several Colorado resorts and training took place today at Loveland, Copper and Keystone. The U.S. Ski Team men’s tech crews (World Cup and Europa Cup) are heading to Jackson, Wyoming, according to one coach, to use snowmobiles for three days of slalom skiing in their new uniforms.

Questions, comments or concerns for Ski Racing’s Roundups? Contact us at webeditor@insideinc.com.

< br>