Canadian Tech Team (yup, it's real) Comes on Strong

Ski racing is unpredictable, but that’s what makes it fun to predict.  As expected, Alexis Pinturault won the first run of the men’s Slalom at World Junior’s yesterday.  Bibs 2 and 3, Victor Malmstrom (FIN) and Reto Schmidiger (SUI) were also 2^nd and 3^rd respectively.  Also not unexpected. 

What WAS unexpected was Malmstrom walking out of his ski while knifing the second run (the second very high profile pre-release on Atomic bindings in two days).  Pinturault was in the start and presumably did not see Malmstrom ski out, and, even though he was winning by .73, you could see him pinning it to try to keep his lead.  The lovely and gentlemanly Phil Brown of Canada had started first and was winning the run, and in fact nobody had really come close to him yet, so Pinturault surely had heard that the course was deteriorating.  At any rate, back to the story.  After Malmstrom goes out, Pinturault’s lead was effectively almost 1 second, but he didn’t know that.  So he throws down much harder than he needs to in order to win.  And, uh! ohhh, oh boy, he goes out in a hairpin, coincidentally just above where Malmstrom went out.  Tragically, Pinturault must have seen/heard Malmstrom (Malmstrom was literally throwing things and cursing his ski up and down, video coming soon) as he skied off to the side of the women’s DH track to rip out his own still-beating heart and throw it over the A-net.  Malmstrom: hitting his ski with his pole like an LAPD officer on a minority American citizen.  Pinturault: crushed at having skied out, and even more so after learning what he didn’t know (his closest competitor also standing on the sidelines).  It was downright Shakespearean.

In other news, the Canadians were ridiculous.  Not only did the aforementioned Phil Brown win the run, moving from 30^th to 10^th overall, but Eric Read took 4^th on the run and moved to 6^th overall.  Every Canadian that started the race also finished inside the top-30, with the exception of Andy Trow who joined 72 other competitors in DNF’ing first run.  Many of them show up as DQ’s, but only because they couldn’t halt their own belly-slides across the finish.  Two flushes near the end of the course gave the boys ample opportunity to try out their best Anja Paerson, at speed no less!  Canada, though, hasn’t been in the mix in a tech event in a long time (like probably never before on this scale).  So while the world junior hockey team let the whole country down, the world junior ski team really surpassed all expectations.  It’s okay, Mark Visentin, Phil and Erik are here now.

Also, Reto Schmidiger won by 1.5 seconds over countrymen Justin Murisier (pronounced Schjooostehn Meuooreeseeay), so I guess that's pretty good.  Not a bad day for the home team.