Kwame Nkrumah-Acheampong, an automatic nomination for the McThoughts All-Name Team, says the qualifying race for World Championships is unfair. He’s the skier/racer from Ghana they call “The Snow Leopard,” though we wonder who they is.
Kwame Nkrumah-Acheampong, an automatic nomination for the McThoughts All-Name Team, says the qualifying race for World Championships is unfair. He’s the skier/racer from Ghana they call “The Snow Leopard,” though we wonder who they is.  
    As reader Palmer Emmitt brings up in a well-thought-out letter to SR, the FIS is indeed being fair. In case you missed it, and apparently almost everybody did, with 151 entries for the men’s GS, the FIS held a prerace race, a qualifier. There were 101 skiers entered and the top 25 got to ski the championship race. I don’t know how to be much more fair than that.
    McThoughts was fortunate once upon a time to be in the presence of World Cup founder Serge Lang at an Olympics. We watched the great man guffaw uncontrollably while watching game but unskilled skiers negotiate the GS course. That may have been the year a skier was “lapped” on an alpine course by a later starter. The IOC decided then and there changes to qualifying needed to be made.
    This season, 19 years later, a “new” qualifying procedure was implemented for the World Championships and bravo. It is unfortunate — but hardly surprising — no one watched the qualifying race. Kwame Nkrumah-Acheampong apparently was disappointed. We wonder if he would have watched had he not been waiting for his start.
    They should have qualified for the women’s GS, too. With 40-second start intervals for starts 31 through 79, it would have taken 32 minutes to end the race after it had been decided. They increased the interval after TV went off the air. That should be a clue, TV going off-air. Here’s another one: the 31st finisher was five seconds out. As much as we need to see more countries — not fewer — enter the World Championships, there has to be a modicum of ability. People over their heads are candidates for injury. World Championship athletes need to be able to handle a test for the proficient.
    MULTIPLE CHOICE: A reader asked on SR Forums if anyone had ever won three gold medals at a World Championship before Anja Paerson. How short are our memories? Janica Kostelic did in 2005. And Erika Hess in ’82. Toni Sailer, Stein Eriksen, Emilie Allias, Christl Cranz and Inge Wersin-Lantscher, all of them won three in a single title meet. Most of those are skiing household names, which is how Anja Paerson is now positioned for all time in history. Dress up the belly flop, boys, it’s not just for swimming pools any more.
    There’s one more athlete who won three gold medals, though French great Marielle Goitschel didn’t actually get the third gold for 30 years. And baseball thinks they got the lock on characters and odd goings-on. Erika Schinegger won the DH gold in 1966 at Portillo with Goitschel winning silver. Some time later, Erika discovered a set of male organs tucked inside her body. She gave back the medal and became Erik and raced thereafter as a male. In 1996, Goitschel was officially presented the gold. Top that, baseball.
    There are just 10 U.S. skiers to have won more than a single medal in World Championship competition. Three of them are currently representing the United States in Are: Bode Miller, Julia Mancuso and Lindsey Kildow. Here's something else that might surprise: Phil and Steve Mahre are not among those 10 multiple-medal winners. In fact, the only FIS medal Phil won was by taking the 1980 Olympic combined, which was calculated from the Olympic DH and SL and awarded as a championship medal.
    Phil, by the way, did make the cut for the Wild West Classic FIS Elite Tech series Feb 22-25 as he continues his quest to qualify for nationals. He’s 50. Some guys go out and buy a red convertible.
    If Natko Zrncic-Dim doesn’t make the All-Name Team, who does? Safe speed guys.