U.S. women take a new look at speed

U.S. women take a new look at speedCORONET PEAK, New Zealand — What do you get when you mix a race camp in New Zealand with a crew of World Cup skiers who haven’t seen snow for four months? You get a group of girls who fall in love with their sport all over again.

The enthusiasm of the U.S. women’s ski team was greeted with a few inches of fresh powder when the group arrived at New Zealand’s Coronet Peak earlier this month for its first on-snow camp of the 2006-07 season. It was the first on-snow camp for newly promoted women’s head tech coach Chris Knight, who was happy to lead the group around some familiar territory. The 35-year-old grew up in Christchurch, after all, and was a racer himself at Coronet Peak.

“We had 15 centimeters of new snow right when we got there, so we ripped around all over the place and I took the girls around the mountain … the same thing I used to do when I was a kid,” Knight said. “Then it rained and snowed and became incredibly hard, icy snow, which set us up pretty well for the rest of the camp.”

Knight took tech skiers Resi Stiegler, Jessica Kelley, Kaylin Richardson, Lauren Ross, Caitlin Ciccone and Katie Hitchcock through his favorite powder stashes in an effort to yes, show them his old stomping ground, but also to open the team’s on-snow season with a yearning to step up and out of a routine.

“I showed them my favorite jumps. They’re not as big as they seemed when I was a kid, but they were pretty fun,” Knight said. “Really, you just want to do anything to take them out of their comfort zone. You train for weeks and weeks, and you just want to push them out of what they’re used to because they need to take risks in a race. It’s probably the most important thing … getting them to take risks.”

The team took everything in stride, even the tricky conditions, and all signs pointed to high motivation for the coming season.

“After the long break, the women were fired up,” women’s head coach Patrick Riml said. “It was really good to see them being so hungry. They showed me some fire out there.”

After a few days testing skis and running slalom and GS drills — and spending evenings cooking and eating together, watching movies and even taking a day to charter a boat on a nearby lake with one of Knight’s old friends — the tech team joined forces with speed skiers Lindsey Kildow, Kirsten Clark, Stacey Cook, Libby Ludlow and Bryna McCarty for a crack at super G racing.

“It’s a very technical hill to do super G on at Coronet Peak,” Knight said. “The skills they picked up there are really useful for their other races. You look at [Austrian] Niki Hosp … she won the last super G last season. She’s a great technical skier. You really see those skills coming into the speed disciplines. For our girls, it’s just about being comfortable with the speed.”

In turn, Knight said learning to relax and control skis at high speed are two things that tech skiers can do to bolster their GS skills.

“They react quicker at higher speeds, making them faster at GS all the time,” Knight explained. “Basically, we’re working on loading the ski over the top of the turn.”

Four-event skiers such as Kildow, who had had her best results in speed events, made a lot of progress with her GS gate-turning Down Under.

“Her biggest problem with GS is loading the skis at the end of the turn — loading and throwing them rather than putting the skis underneath and letting speed build up on the fall line,” Knight said. “She’s trying to really improve that, to be more stable in the transition. Her GS definitely improved a lot.”

In two GS races against mostly non-World Cup competition, Kildow and Clark finished 1-2, with Ciccone, who won the U.S. GS title last spring, close behind. Then Stiegler won a slalom race by seven seconds.

“Ciccone is skiing really fast right now,” Knight said. “Resi is standing on her skis really well too, and is starting to improve her upper-body stance.”

The women’s team departs Sept. 8 for more on-snow training in Portillo, Chile, where it will be joined by Olympic GS gold medalist Julia Mancuso, who missed the New Zealand camp to continue her recovery from hip surgery last spring. In Chile, coaches will continue implementing speed training into the technical repertoire.