USST men's tech coach looks forward to Kranjska Gora

USST men’s tech coach looks forward to Kranjska Gora{mosimage}The head coach of the U.S. Ski Team’s men’s technical squad, Mike Morin, says the American team will fill all of its quota spots at this weekend’s World Cup races in Kranjska Gora, Slovenia. That’s seven men in the giant slalom and seven in the Sunday’s slalom.

‘We’re wondering how the hill is’ said Morin. ‘It rained really hard Monday down in that area. We’re anxious to see how it looks. I’m really hoping one of the younger guys steps up.” Morin was referring to Jesse Marshall, Jake Zamansky and James Cochran — younger athletes who started World Cup racing this year and last year, but haven’t yet scored points. ‘They’ve all just missed qualifying by a little bit, and they’ve showed splits that would have qualified them.’

Morin took the team to train in Hermagor, Austria this week, following two Europa Cup giant slaloms there (Dane Spencer finished third and fifth, collecting an eight-point result in one of them). ‘We left Hermagor because it rained and then it snowed on top of that and the snow totally rotted out’ said Morin. ‘It wasn’t productive so we went to Innerkrems, which is a bit higher. We trained slalom with the Japanese team and GS with the French. Akira Sasaki is due for another big result. He’s all-business.’ Sasaki beat Bode Miller in each timed training run, although Miller was trying out a new pair of slalom skis.

The U.S. Ski Team is billing the Kranjska Gora races as the start of a showdown between Miller and Austria’s Hermann Maier. The team launched a ‘Bode vs. Hermann’ link on their website, listing schedules of TV coverage for the final eight races of the year (at Kranjska Gora, Kvitfjell, Norway and Sestriere, Italy).

Two outstanding juniors, Ted Ligety of Utah and Jeffrey Harrison of Washington state, will be among the American athletes who get start positions in Slovenia. Both won medals at the World Junior Championships in that country two weeks ago (Ligety a silver in the slalom, and Harrison a gold in the GS).

Morin said that ‘incredible quickness in turn transitions’ was what was making Ligety, a Park City native, so fast in slalom. ‘He almost looks late, but he manages to pull it off and stay fast because he’s so quick. It’s incredible how much speed he transfers from turn to turn. There’s no question he could qualify for a second run.’

Earlier this week, Harrison had to sit out a couple days of giant slalom training after a gate that he’d hit swung around and slapped him in the back, giving him a large hematoma over his ribs. He has resumed training, and will race Saturday’s giant slalom. It will be Harrison’s debut on the World Cup. His giant slalom breakthrough is a result of better tactics. ‘He’s much more patient’ says Europa Cup coach Sasha Rearick. ‘He is super clean throughout the turn. In the past he’s always had trouble pinching the turns. He’s patient building up the pressure and then he’s able to carve in the fall line and take the turn deeper. After his first run at World Juniors, it looked like someone had laid down train tracks. It would go up there in a World Cup.’

Independent skier Eric Holmer recovering from injury

Eric Holmer, an independent racer from Mt. Bachelor, Oregon, is recovering from injuries sustained in a crash at a Europa Cup downhill training run in Les Orres, France earlier this month. Holmer, along with his friend Andre Horton, had gone to Europe in hopes of skiing their way back onto the U.S. Ski Team.

‘I went into an A net feet first and almost square to the fence’ said Holmer in an e-mail. ‘I ended up cutting my right index really bad and crushing the outside of my tibia plateau and ruining my meniscus. I had stiches on my finger in France (which let me tell you was really fun), and then I had surgery on my leg on Monday Feb 9th. So now there are twelve screws and a metal plate in my right leg and I’m on crutches for twelve weeks.’

Holmer is known as ‘Homie’ and is famous for appearing as the chief model in the Race Place catalogs (the Holmer family runs the business).

‘I think it’s great what those guys were trying to do’ said U.S. Ski Team coach Trevor Wagner in January, after he arranged for Holmer and Horton to fore-run a women’s Europa Cup in Tignes. ‘It takes so long for downhillers to mature, and it’s great that those guys are sticking it out as long as they can.’

B-Team’s Kaylin Richardson fired up about Europa Cup win

Kaylin Richardson won her first Europa Cup on Sunday, February 21, in a giant slalom at Krompachy, Slovakia. The Minnesota-bred junior won by 0.11 over Liechtenstein’s Jessica Walter. The next fastest American was Lauren Ross, who finished 18th.

‘It seems like I’ve been up and down all season’ said Richardson in a cell-phone conversation later in the week. ‘It was nice to put down two fast runs, especially on such a beautiful day. My serviceman Andy Buckley is really good.’ The morning of the race, Richardson was warming up when she fell and broke her skis, but Buckley was able to prepare some replacements quick enough for Richardson’s run.

Richardson called her parents immediately, waking them up in Minnesota to tell them the news. ‘She was pretty upbeat’ said Steve Richardson, her father. ‘She’s had ups and downs this season, but we have to keep reminding her of how far she’s come and how fast. For her now, the ‘downs’ are still point results in the mid- to high-teens.’

Richardson grew up racing for the Mt. Gilboa ski team, trying to keep up with her two older brothers. Now she races Europa Cups and a few World Cups. Her principal coaches are Roger Bay, Trevor Wagner and Patrick Riml.

‘I was so happy after the race, and the coaches were so excited, but by the time I got back to the hotel it was just another race’ said Richardson. ‘It was pretty easy to keep things in persepective over there. There were shantytowns all around the resort.’

Slovakia, which is off the beaten path for alpine ski racing, is trying to ramp up it’s tourist economy, and has built modern facilities at the Krompachy ski area. The ski team athletes enjoyed the food, and said that the course preparation was the best they’ve seen all year. ‘It’s weird’ says Europa Cup coach Trevor Wagner. ‘There’s a super-nice hotel, and you’d drive to the hill, and you think, ‘how can we be skiing?’ There’s such a huge range. There’s a full on gypsy community. It’s like the slums you see around Tijuana or Mexico City. It’s really poor.’

Wagner said that the GS hill was ‘easily the best terrain’ his team had seen all season, and that the slalom hill was ‘hand’s down the best all year.’ Out of the start, said Wagner, was ‘eight gates of flats, then a breakover where you almost catch air it’s so sharp. And that’s at slalom speeds. It’s steep.’

USST’s Nick Baker vows not to slack on the knee rehabilitation

Nick Baker, the top-ranked junior downhiller in the country, blew his knee out in a crash at Altenmarkt, Austria in January. He has since had surgery, begun physical therapy, and expects to be back on snow by July.

‘It didn’t feel too good’ says Baker. ‘I was coming into a compression and my left ski caught up and I cartwheeled. I knew right away that it was done. I told the Austrians who came along to fiddle with it to leave me alone. There were four guys there trying to help.’

The U.S. Ski Team’s Europa Cup coach Dave Kerwynn was on the scene, and said Baker’s first words to him were humorous. ‘He said, ‘Kerr, the world’s fastest tourist is out for the season.’ That’s what he calls himself.‘The World’s Fastest Tourist.”

Kerwynn called down to the ambulance driver immediately. Baker’s teammate Steve Nyman was already in the vehicle, waiting to be transported to the hospital (he’d broken his leg in a crash just 15 start positions in front of Baker). ‘I said, ‘Have you left yet? Well don’t, because I’ve got another one
for you.”

Baker severely damaged his left knee in fall. He fully tore the anterior-cruciate ligament (ACL) and medial-collateral ligament (MCL). He also damaged the bones in his leg when the upper and lower leg bones jammed together. ‘I dented the femur and got bone contusions on the tib-fib plateau’ he said. ‘There’s partial meniscus damage from that impact, and there was hemorrhaging in the PCL too.’

Baker is in Park City, working on rehab. ‘I want to be on snow at the end of July’ he said. ‘I can walk almost normal now. It feels like someone put a balloon in my knee and blew it up. The hamstring is tight still from the surgery. I’m working on it every day. I’m not slacking at all with this thing. You basically have a hundred-percent chance of hurting yourself in this sport. I see it as my induction into ski racing.’