Can You Top This? Best Ski Team Video We've Seen

Double ski flips!  Muscle-ups!  World domination!  Bruce Goldsmid doing... something.  Alright, we don't want to get stuck in a rut here or anything, but we came across this vid while cruising YouTube, and we have to give credit where credit is due.  This is probably the best video of a ski team ever (or at least the best one that we've seen).  And, because they're Canadian, we can say this:  Top that America.  No seriously, let's see what you got.

Dykster, for the win, again!

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If Winter Sports Parties Were Contests, Hockey Would Win

While Vancouverans (ites?) were busy burning cars and shooting each other in the junk with M80's, the Boston Bruins were getting busy at the bar at Foxwoods.  Luckily, a copy of their bar tab is now circulating around the Internet.  Hockey players, like skiers, can apparently handle themselves at the bar.  The big difference is that none of us have $100,000 to spend on one bottle of champagne.  However, as one commenter asks, "Who is the lame ass who ordered 2 Coors Lights?"

Sure would be nice to be one of the Big 4.

















Just keep watching, over and over again:

Cross Country Skiing: Exciting? Yes.

 

 

If you had any doubts about whether or not an XC ski race could make you squirm, watch the epic men's team sprint at World Championships this year.  Canadian Alex Harvey (in the red and white) does some work on the rest of the field, overcoming some shyster tactics by the Russians (red and black) and some other team whose first skier might be wearing goggles?

Also, Alex Harvey's ski fell off on the first lap.  Unclear exactly how damming that is, but obviously it cannot be a good thing.

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.