World Cup Rock Stars

A blog post from Mattias Hargin came across the radar a while back, but we never got around to talking about it.  So here goes:

If you've ever wondered whether it would be cooler to be a Scandinavian World Cup skier than to be the person that you are, the answer is this: It would be cooler to be a Scandinavian World Cup skier.  It's a short blog post, but even the Google translation let's you know that taking a helicopter up to a 4 run Slalom training session is no big deal.  Congratulations Swedish people.  You win.

PS - check out the rest of Hargin's blog, and maybe reconsider how badly you really need to run Slalom on the next powder day.


-

Lindsey Vonn is Basically Single. Has Not Registered on OkCupid Yet.

Photo courtesy of Dustin Cook's blog (and cell phone?)

It's been a huge week for ski racing, and not only in our own minds.  Between Ted making the New York Times, Lindsey Vonn getting divorced, Mikaela Shiffrin on her way to being the best (ever, in any sport, for any gender), Bode winning Birds of Prey, and, Vonn winning a World Cup downhill by 2 seconds (Alice in 8th!), AND the World Cup tour staying in the U.S. for a while (check the photos there), this is a great moment in the sun for us.  Is this what happens when the NBA is locked out?  Ski racing goes mainstream?  Awesome.  I hate basketball anyway.

We've been taking some flack this week via email and in the comments for not keeping up with all the goings on.  Sorry about that.  Now that Lindsey is single, we've been trying to get our profile dialed in on Match.com, and have been endlessy hitting "Refresh" on craigslist just waiting for her to post.  I mean seriously, did she not get my missed connections ad?  This is getting ridiculous.  But honestly, Thomas divorced Lindsey?  WTF?  That's like J. Howard Marshall divorcing Anna Nicole Smith.  Or Brigham Young divorcing any one of his 55 wives.  Or The Dude divorcing Maude.  The best email we got had a link to this priceless post from someone who is clearly blogging above their paygrade.  If the insinuations therein (that Parker somehow drove a wedge between Vonn and Vonn) are true, it would make for one of the best stories of all time.

Speaking of "best of all time," you probably saw Mikaela this week too (5th in the second run.)  When Vonn and Mancuso were second year J2's, they were some of the greatest ever for that age, and they've largely lived up to that potential.  Vonn has gone on to become one of the greatest of all time (43 wins puts her at 4th on the all time women's list), and Mancuso is no slouch either.*  If Shiffrin follows a similar track, she could become the most successful athlete ever in history.  Lance Armstrong could be better than Mikaela, IF he could time-travel back to when he was 16-years old and get himself a top-10 in the Tour de France, and then somehow manage to avoid conflicting with his past self as he continues upwards in the bicycling ranks.  That seems unlikely, so here's to the future.

Moving on:  The equipment thing is taking on a life of its own.  It's big when it makes the New York Times.  It's huge when some dumbass emails Guenther Hujara to call him a Nazi.  I mean really, do we need to get all Sarah Palin in here and starting throwing around the word "Nazi" when we really mean "a-hole"?  In related news, it would be great if whoever is running the SkiersPRO Twitter account would reach out for some help on how to put hyperlinks into a Tweet.  Right now, they're just filling my Twitterverse with Twitterrhea.  Here are all of their Tweets from the past 3 days, in order, in their entirety.  See if you can pick out the pattern:

Press release: Alpine athletes' specific demands of FIS
Head boss slams FIS ski change
Bode Miller slams ski officials over new rules
Pressemitteilung: Dezidierte Forderungen der Ski-Athleten an FIS!
Press release: Alpine athletes' specific demands of FIS
Bode Miller slams ski officials over new rules
Press release: Alpine athletes' specific demands of FIS
Pressemitteilung: Dezidierte Forderungen der Ski-Athleten an FIS!
Bode Miller slams ski officials over new rules
Skiing Protest Leads to Cancellation | http://skiers.pro - Ski Athletes Network http://fb.me/QFjgbx7U **

Skiing Protest Leads to Cancellation | http://skiers.pro - Ski Athletes Network http://fb.me/QFjgbx7U **
Press release: Alpine athletes' specific demands of FIS
Head boss slams FIS ski change
Bode Miller slams ski officials over new rules
Press release: Alpine athletes' specific demands of FIS
... ad nauseam

That's a total of 4 distinct Tweets (translations don't count), repeated 39 40 times as of this publishing.  This has gone on since they opened the Twitter account almost 2 weeks ago, and it needs to stop.  Or else all 19 of their followers are going to "Unfollow," and then where would we be?

In other news, double victory today for America.  Bode won at Beaver Creak by .04 over Beat Feuz (both on my fantasy team, thank you very much).  Vonn won at Lake Louise by a margin so large it's almost not worth talking about.  I mean seriously, there hasn't been a margin like that since Andrew Wagner beat up all the new kids at Nub's Nob (sic) back in '06.  After the race, Marusa Ferk Tweeted, "98% of people who were in LL or watching on TV are so naive, because they don't know what is really happening and giving 'smart' comments-NOT."  But then again, she was 3.6 seconds out in 33rd place (and admittedly, it's possible that she was referring to something else, like maybe farting in the finish or picking her nose on camera.)  It was extremely windy, granted, but still.  2 seconds in a World Cup Downhill is 2 seconds in a World Cup Downhill.

That's all we have time for right now.  Sorry about the thumbs, but you have to admit those pictures are pretty great.  Now, back to work.

*Ironic understatement.
**The truth is not really what the headline implies


 -

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.


-

The Battle Begins in Soelden

 

Not only is the World Cup season kicking off this weekend, but the battle over ski lengths has turned real within the last couple of hours.  You can follow the action via Twitter - there's a FIS meeting with athletes and administrators happening at this very moment, and things are getting pretty heated.  We're psyched that Racer Ready magazine is in there and letting us know what's happening.  Yesterday, Nathaniel Vinton (formerly the writer at Ski Racing magazine, now at the New York Daily News and appearing across a wide range of print media, including the New York Times) tweeted that Bode had said that he would consider protesting next year by using illegal skis and just accepting the disqualifications and fines.  Appropriately, the tweet was tagged #livefreeordie.  Frankly, I think that's an excellent idea, except for the fact that he would never get a second run.  Part of me now wants to see the new rules go into effect, at least for one race, just so we can watch Bode do it.  Superstars can pay the fines:

So that's happening. We'll keep hitting Refresh and see what everyone says.

In other Soelden news, there's a new Fantasy Ski Racing app available for the iPhone. The company that produces it is called Riseline, it's a joint venture by siblings Kelsey and Brendan Levine, both long time Eastern folks, though Brendan is currently doing a stint out in Jackson. We haven't dug too deep into it yet, but it looks awesome. You can make a league, set a draft date, and then fire it up on race day and see how good you are at picking the winners.  Check out more information about the app here, or just go download it in the App Store.  Brendan tells us that an iPad version is in the works, but all you Android and Blackberry users are, for now at least, out of luck.

Should we start a Hard Snow league?  Somebody get on that!


Thanks to @DownhillWriter for the photo
-