WC Rewind: February pressure cooker heating up

There are three men’s slaloms left on the schedule. There is a race this week in the city of Zagreb, another the week before Finals in Kranjska Gora and the last at Finals in Bormio. On the surface this past weekend’s result in Garmisch won’t have much impact on the standings, depending, of course, on how the last three events play out.
    At midseason Jean-Baptiste Grange, certainly the slalom skier of the year to date, was all but being crowned champion. With a 120-point lead after Kitzbühel and consecutive slalom wins Grange was a near unanimous choice. Schladming didn’t change that significantly. He came in second in the race, purposely skiing within his limits and taking few risks, which was a plausible strategy. He came away from Schladming without a win but with 50 more points between himself and the rest of the field.
    But Garmisch was different.
    Garmisch is a tough hill, but Kitzbühel was no picnic and Schladming is widely considered the single most difficult. And the weather was fine. So it wasn’t so much the location. It was the competition.
  

THERE ARE THREE men’s slaloms left on the schedule. There is a race this week in the city of Zagreb, another the week before Finals in Kranjska Gora and the last at Finals in Bormio. On the surface this past weekend’s result in Garmisch won’t have much impact on the standings, depending, of course, on how the last three events play out.
    At midseason Jean-Baptiste Grange, certainly the slalom skier of the year to date, was all but being crowned champion. With a 120-point lead after Kitzbühel and consecutive slalom wins Grange was a near unanimous choice. Schladming didn’t change that significantly. He came in second in the race, purposely skiing within his limits and taking few risks, which was a plausible strategy. He came away from Schladming without a win but with 50 more points between himself and the rest of the field.
    But Garmisch was different.
    Garmisch is a tough hill, but Kitzbühel was no picnic and Schladming is widely considered the single most difficult. And the weather was fine. So it wasn’t so much the location. It was the competition.
    Reinfried Herbst has surprised people before. At the biggest event skiing has, the Olympics, Herbst was called up off the Europa Cup squad and helped power the already dominant Austrians to a sweep of the slalom medals (he won silver). With various knee injuries he has been relatively dormant since. He had registered the fastest second leg at Kitzbühel and was fast when he lost the course at Schladming, so he felt he was getting there, but he was so far down the standings ladder few paid much heed.
    At Garmisch, Herbst overpowered the field. He led after the first run by 0.45 of a second. He added to that in the second run then went and jumped over the fences into a pod of Herbst fan club members, having finally given most of them the first win they had ever seen (his other win had come in Japan without a full complement of fans).
    Slalom can be a fickle discipline. When it is going good it is a joy to perform. When the wheels come off it can be exceptionally difficult to piece it all back together again. A couple of the top skiers of the season did just fine. Manfred Moelgg notched his fourth slalom podium of the season and moved within 91 points of Grange who wound up mired in 25th place. And Ivica Kostelic made his third consecutive podium. Though the two previous finishes were combineds, his confidence has been fueled by those combined slalom legs.
    Other top contenders, perhaps sensing some vulnerability in Grange, tried to step up, and failed. Jens Byggmark, Rainer Schoenfelder and Marc Gini all went out in the second run. Mario Matt skied out in the first run. Felix Neureuther suffered from a cold and did not have his usual punch. Grange’s teammate and training partner, Julien Lizeroux, one of the few who can match Grange’s speed turn for turn, was fifth on the day after a second run mistake. And Benjamin Raich, being so careful in his hunt for overall points, could come no closer than 11th, 2.42 seconds behind Herbst.
    The pressure will only continue to increase as the number of chances left decreases.

Vonn blows away DH field; Fanchini with new life; Austrians lacking speed
The Sestriere downhill track was a new one for the women. The Kandahar Banchetta was used by the men during the 2006 Olympics but it had never been tested by the women’s tour. The course started a bit lower than the men had, eliminating one jump.
    Lindsey Vonn called the course, “a medium kind of course. It’s moderately steep. There’s a lot of terrain and a couple of gliding sections.” She also said it was not a course where it would be likely to make up time from a mistake.
    “I knew a mistake would end it,” she said. “There’s no place to make it up, so my goal for the day was to be solid and clean.”
    Three training runs, she said, was ample opportunity to learn any course nuances. “By the time the race rolls around it allows you to attack.”
    So she attacked, but she attacked with precision. “I was a little more aggressive,” she said of the race run, “and grabbed a tuck wherever I could. On race day you always put a little extra juice on the skis.”
    She blew the field off the track, winning her fourth downhill of the season by 0.62 of a second, the third largest margin of the season in a women’s downhill.
    In second was Kelly VanderBeek. It was the fifth Canadian podium in women’s downhill this season.
    “We are celebrating every podium and every victory whether it is mine individually or someone else’s,” she said in an effort to explain the Canadian successes. “It’s such a positive environment to be around. The coaches, the physios and all the rest of the staff are really working well together and everybody is doing their jobs well right now.”
    Then she put on a tiara and climbed onto the podium. No one’s counting, but the Canadian “speed queens” are out scoring the men’s “Canadian Cowboys” team five to three.
     Third place went to Italy’s Nadia Fanchini, a result that literally brought her a renewed outlook on life. It was her third race of the season after doctors had discovered an irregular heartbeat and forced her to sit out training. She just got clearance to race at Cortina Jan. 21, so a podium was totally unexpected. “This will help me to improve my standings for next season,” she said.
    Count those skiers up and you will not find an Austrian in the bunch. Fact of the matter is the Austrians own just four women’s downhill podiums, and no wins, for the season. And, they lost one of those podium winners, Maria Holaus, to a nasty crash in the super G. Renate Goetschl, however, was tied for fourth in the race and is second on the seasonal downhill standings list. She is fighting her way back from offseason surgeries. She was the only Austrian to finish better than 20th on the day.
    Claiming her first World Cup points was Chelsea Marshall who placed eighth from so late a start (40th) Vonn was giving interviews in the finish when she took to
the course. Vonn indicated the Canadians have no patent on team environment.
    “We have so many good young skiers coming up right now,” she said. “It’s awesome to have some fresh blood, and they’re hungry and that’s a good thing.” Vonn said in her course report for Marshall, “What I told her was snow is in perfect shape and it’s your opportunity to take advantage. That’s what we do, you know.”

First-place tie in SG; Chase for the overall
The super G was one of several events this season where the weather played a little too big a role. It wasn’t much of a wind, but its timing was impeccable. A breeze moved directly up the course just as the favorites came down. Early runners Fabienne Suter and Andrea Fischbacher took advantage and tied for the win, a double first-time occurrence for either of them, both the tie and the win.
    It was not a race to be fondly recalled by either North American team. Julia Mancuso gave her coach heart palpitations with a mid-run hiccup that could have caused grievous harm to a lesser athlete and still led North Americans in eighth place. Britt Janyk finished 12th to lead Canada.
    The amazing outcome of it all was a first-place tie in the overall standings between Vonn and the defending World Cup champion, Nicole Hosp. Vonn should relinquish that piece of first place this coming weekend with a slalom at Zagreb, which she will skip. There are three downhills, one super G, three slaloms (including Zagreb) and two giant slaloms left. Her road to the overall crown is covered in thorns. She has already matched childhood idol Picabo Street for a U.S.-record nine career downhill wins. She has a chance to catch Ms. Street’s single-season record of six as well.
     "I'm not necessarily thinking about winning when I go out of the start,” Vonn explained to reporters of her quest for Street’s win marks.
    Then she addressed her chances for the overall. “I’ll just keep fighting the rest of the season and see what happens. It is a major accomplishment. But the overall isn’t over yet. It is great to have us both leading right now, but there are a lot of races left to go and Niki is going to be a very tough competitor for me.”