1/12/09

So far this season I’ve gotten the opportunity to run a lot of the classic World Cup downhill coarses for the first time ever, gaining a lot of experience in doing so.  In my ski racing career I have raced some eaiser downhills on the Nor-am and World Junior level. This year has been a lot of fun getting to race some of the crazier ones!  This season, I have skied the Birds of Prey coarse in Beaver Creek and  the Laburhorn in Wengen, Switzerland. The thing about downhill is that you need to gain experience on a hill and run it a few times before you learn all the little tricks to it and can feel confident actually “racing it”.  What i mean by that is when you push out of the starting gate you know exactly where you are going, and can attack the hill and push its limits and go fast!  I find that the first few times I run a new hill I can’t attack it as much as i would like because I am learning all the turns and terrain at high speeds.

Beaver Creek-
Beaver Creek is considered one of the toughest Downhills in the world.  It starts out on this plateau on the top of Beaver Creek Mountain.  You cruise on the flats through some rolls for the first 35 seconds, thinking about nothing else but the brink coming up.  The hill drops out from under you, and you pick up speed off the brink into the talon turn.  The snow is actually water injected ice! Then you have 6 high speed downhill turns.  The left footers are all fall away turns and the right footers all deal with terrain and sometimes a little air.  This section is the steepest groomed run i have ever seen or heard of anywere.  So you start cooking going down this section and try to stay on line to carry speed into the pump house section.  Here it flattens out a bit (only compared to the section above) as you go through some long high speed traversing turns around a big tree island.  It is usually really bumpy and rattly here so you just try to stay compact and aerodynamic.  Then comes the Red Tali jump followed by a short flat section where you can catch a little break…  That is about a 7 second break until the ground falls our from underneath you off the Golden Eagle jump.  Going into this jump is dead flat, and all you can see are the mountains accross the valley. You have to know where to take off and make a good move off the jump to match the steep landing.  Then right away you have to stand tall through an abrupt compression left footer turn through the abiss. (Sometimes there is a double jump-camel jump here).  Then it is off the high speed Harrier jump.  At this point you can start hearing all the fans in the finish area.  After landing there are two more high speed turns throuh another compression and the finish jump, and you have made it!!!   So, as you can tell there is a lot to learn about a hill before a ski racer can really feel confident “racing it”.  Most of the best downhillers in the world have been racing these hills for a decade, so you can see how much experience they would have and the confidence they would have in racing down these hills.  For me i was downright scared going into the first training run!  But after the first time down all i wanted to do was go right back up and do it again!  Downhill is one of the more exilerating things you can do on a pair of skis. It takes full on commitment and focus to be good at.  So going out of my first experience with on of the toughest downhills, all i can say is i cant wait to come back and race it!