Weekend Roundup: Great Racing, Paerson Flexes on FIS

Dustin Cook shows you how to get it on edge in Soelden.  Photo from Twitter.

As we wrap up the first weekend of Northern Hemisphere racing for the 2012 season, here's hoping things stay this interesting all year long.  Yes, the racing was good (Vonn: 1, Mancuso: 10 on Saturday.  Ligety: 1, Miller: 9 on Saturday.  Nickerson, Jitloff, and Biesemeyer pretty close to the flip.  And holy JP Roy!  Definitely the performance of the weekend moving from 53 to 22 overall, 2nd place on the second run).

But the real action was on Friday at the meeting between the FIS and their most elite members - the World Cup men and women.  The meeting went for over 2 hours, and eventually Didier Cuche led the charge, asking all the athletes in attendance to stand together, literally to stand up, which they all did for the last hour.  They did not sit down.  There were some great quotes from Bode, who is sort of the pre-eminent philosopher in the group, and the athletes pretty much put the hammer down on the nerds sitting at the front of the room.  The best moment by far came from Anja Paerson, who gathered up Svindal and Lara Gut to make her point.  As described at skiracing.com:

...the meeting came to a dramatic climax when Swedish World Cup star Anja Paerson had six-foot-three-inch Svindal stand next to five-foot-three-inch Swiss standout Lara Gut. “So you are saying that the research done for Aksel is good to use for Lara,” said Paerson after confirming with the researchers that the vast majority of the tests had been conducted with male subjects.

After a long, silent pause while FIS officials played hot potato with the microphone, Paerson answered her own question. “So men are the priority of the World Cup.”

That article is well worth reading.  It gives you a sense of how displeased the athletes are with this at the highest levels,  and it really exemplifies the kinds of shortcomings that ski racing leadership is showing, almost across the board, at the moment.

Also, just a word of advice to Guenther Hujara:  We've been through this once before on this site, but the person who walks away from a wreck like this and wins a medal the next day is probably not a good person to piss off:



After the meeting, Paerson tweeted (translated from Twedish): "Politics, Anja put your foot down on the big meeting with the FIS. Patting myself on the shoulder and say good Anja good!"

So, Hujara et al, if you're sure you want to go through with this, she'll just be there in Sweden, washing her car.  But seriously, you guys should hit the gym first.

Thanks to Dustin Cook's Twitter for the opening pic.
Thanks to Ms. Paerson's Twitter from a few months ago for the other pic.


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