Men’s Downhill Day at World Champs
February 7th, 2009Posted in Skiing Everywhere
The hoards of European ski racing fans surely loved this morning in Val d’Isere. It was a mostly sunny and mild day to watch the premier event at the FIS World Championships, the Men’s Downhill, held on the Face de Bellevarde course, the same course used in the 1992 Olympics. This is a great race venue for race fans because most of course can be seen from the bottom of the hill, and even from all over the town. Those ski racing fanatics must have loved today’s race because the course was very icy, and being a very technical course, the likelihood of racers losing control and hitting the fences was pretty high. Ten racers, more than a quarter of the starting field, failed to finish the race today.
The fastest man this year was the Canadian John Kucera. The fastest American was Bode Miller who finished 8th. Defending world champion Miller claims to being enjoying himself more this year since he is not the points leader in the overall World Cup standings (he’s currently in 8th place). I thought racers raced to win, but what do I know.
While there are more famous downhill racing courses like Kitzbuhel’s Hahnenkamm, a cool thing I discovered about Val d’Isere, when I skied there several years ago, is that from what appeared, at that time, to be a permanent start house at the top of the Bellevarde, the local races officials had three entirely different and seperate FIS downhill courses to hold races on, and they could all use the same starting house to launch the racers. (Only a handful of American resorts have just one FIS downhill course.) Heading skier’s left from the starting house, the Face de Bellevarde course drops 3147 vertical feet right down to the heart of the town. The other two downhill courses veer to the skier’s right from the starting house and take a more circuitous route. They drop about 3300 feet down the backside of the Bellevarde peak and return to the valley in La Daille, a sub-village of Val, about a mile from where the Olympic downhill ends.
Despite the ski writer’s tendencies to hype up the difficulty of downhill race courses, skiing these courses when they are open to the public is great fun. Surprisingly, only the Face de Bellevarde is steep enough to be really fun on a powder morning. The other two, the Orange course and the Cupe du Monde are too long and low angle to work for powder skiing unless they are covered with really light snow no deeper than about 6″.
Speaking of powder- it looks like we’d better check out the validity of this morning’s snow reports. Both sides of the Tetons are reporting 4″ of new snow.
Teton powder midday update: The reported 4″ was a meager 4″ above 9000′ and a scant inch at 8000′. Sort of a heavy dusting on the crust. Smart skiers enjoyed the north facing exposures where the old snow under the new snow was still reasonably soft. The new snow did make the north facing moguls nice and soft and fun- if you where the first to hit an untracked line through them.
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