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No problem, glad it helps!
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Feb 19, 2018 16:32
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Shiffrin just finished 0.05 behind Vonn in the last training run after making a huge mistake (and they both missed a gate, but it was literally exactly the same gate so they ran the same course, essentially) and god drat it's an absolute tragedy that the schedule change means Shiffrin isn't racing the DH anymore.
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Feb 20, 2018 04:52
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Shiffrin shouldn’t offer excuses, she should go for glory at the Games.
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Feb 20, 2018 05:02
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I mean, I can understand her reasoning. If she's finishing top five in the downhill section of the combined literally her only competition will be Michelle Gisin and even there it's not going to be close. Her chances of getting gold are actually almost 100% in the combined right now (assuming she finishes of course), whereas they're not that high in the downhill. That said, if it were me, I'd do both. Downhill is a one-run event, so you're done by noon, and if you've hosed up then oh well you have an afternoon to recover and get ready for the combined the next day. If you do medal, well it's an extra medal before the combined. But it's easy for me to say from my couch.
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Feb 20, 2018 05:06
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i think you’ve laid it out correctly. i expect more confidence and mental toughness from an Olympic athlete whose ultimate ambition is to be The Greatest Female Alpinist ever.
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Feb 20, 2018 05:26
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If Mikaela had won the slalom, I think she would have run the downhill. But now she's gunshy and playing it safe.
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Feb 20, 2018 05:48
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Remember though, she's 22. She's actually insanely, ridiculously young in this sport, and her success to this point allows us to forget things like last year was literally her first year of no longer being a junior racer. Literally no one expected her to be winning speed races at this point. This wasn't supposed to be a decision she was even going to have to make. It actually also is very difficult to race everything well. Tina Maze was expected to potentially win five gold medals at the World Champs in 2013, and she won 3 medals, I think 2 gold and a silver. By the end you could see she was just abso-loving-lutely spent. She had absolutely nothing left. And that's an athlete who was used to racing every event on World Cup, which Shiffrin definitely isn't. So yeah, I can understand why Shiffrin isn't doing it. I'd probably make a different decision if it were me, but I'm also not the world's best female skier at the moment. And I'm not feeling the probably pure exhaustion Mikaela is right now, either. She didn't just race the GS and slalom, she also had two days of going up the hill and mentally getting ready for it, then being told that the race was cancelled. Mentally going through that is almost as difficult as actually racing. A handful of the athletes who raced the tech pulled out of the training run today (Veith, Weirather, Brignone didn't start) and I'd bet that's why.
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Feb 20, 2018 05:51
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Hookshot your posts have been awesome in this thread. From your perspective why is Canada struggling to put racers on the podium? They seem able to make top 20 reliably but don't have any Shiffrin prospects.
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Feb 20, 2018 06:20
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It can be such a fluky sport it seems like the more hooks you have in the water the better your chances are, at least if they’re baited like shiffrin’s. I understand the reasoning behind being fresh for the combined, but it still seems like a tired shiffrin should be a medal threat. Oh well she probably has two or three more olympics in her, but plenty of world class skiers have missed olympics, nothing saying she won’t do a knee in november 2022 or w/e. The opportunity’s right there, seems like she should take it. Then again im not an expert professional skier or ski coach so 
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Feb 20, 2018 06:31
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Canada has a few major issues in alpine skiing, a lot of which could be solved with better funding, but not all. Now, all of this information below is stuff that I have heard/been told. I can't vouch 100% for its accuracy, but it's what I've heard. For one thing, there were actually a couple years there when they had no development team at all. So the four guys who should have been on it basically made their own team, and paid for it all themselves/by their parents. That's seriously super tough, especially in Canada where sponsorship is not an easy thing to get. I actually think it was pretty detrimental to those guys, and while I know one of them was at the games this year I don't think any of the others were (but I can't remember exactly who else was in that group, it was three years ago now). Alpine Canada basically told the provinces that it's up to them to develop the athletes, but in Jack's case, he had 29 points after his first year. He wasn't going to go on BC team, he should have gone straight to devo, but there was no devo team to take him to Europe and race there and develop him. So I know Alpine Canada doesn't really get that much money, but I personally think that situation was not helpful to the development of those athletes. They also made some decisions with regards to keeping some athletes on over the last few years that I found questionable. Another problem, which shows itself especially on the women's side, is that a few years back they kicked basically the whole women's speed team. You know in ski cross, Georgia Simmerling, Kelsey Serwa, Marielle Thompson? Yeah, they were all originally CAST, told they weren't going to make it, and dumped. They moved to ski cross and are now superstars of that sport. The problem is, it's really hard to develop a program from nothing. So they had absolutely no female speed skiers, and now they still don't, really. They kicked Larisa Yurkiw off the team after her results weren't what they wanted, she went solo and immediately began hitting the podium in World Cup races. So now there's Valerie Grenier who shows sparks of greatness, but also doesn't really have anyone to train with other than the tech girls, and she's only 22 herself and can't really be expected to be the leader of the team, but there's literally no one left in the entire Canadian program on the women's speed side who can show her the ropes and help her grow. I also personally think they're trying to shoehorn some athletes into roles they aren't ideally suited to. I know of one athlete that they basically decided should go into the speed program who is much better at slalom than speed, and had one result on WC this year that exemplified that. There's another that I know actually hates speed - or at least did a few years ago, I don't know if she's learned to like it - but was actually terrified every time she had to run a Super G. But they decided she should be a speed skier, and to be fair she is really good at it, and so that's what she's doing now. That said, there are now some actually pretty good up-and-coming athletes in the program that I think could be podium contenders in a few years. Sam Mulligan won silver at World Juniors in the DH a few weeks ago, Stef Fleck came 13th (IIRC) in on the womens' side and top 20 in the Super G. The Seger brothers are also both really good, and my hope is that in the next five years or so Canada will have some contenders again. On the men's speed side it helps that there actually are some experienced athletes. And the men's tech program is lucky that Erik Read is unsurprisingly a very good skier, though it's again disappointing that he's basically the leader of that team and he's still in college. So Canada is a young team, and hopefully in the next five years or so will be competing for podiums regularly once again. Also important to note is that on the women's tech side, Marie-Michelle Gagnon, who is a podium contender, tore her ACL in November and isn't competing at all. I mean really, most of it can come back down to funding. The Americans have soooooooo much more funding for their athletes, and that actually really, really makes a difference. But there were also some managerial decisions that impacted the development program in this country and set it back a looooooong way. Another thing is that when you go to Europe, you realize it's a god damned miracle that we manage to ever put anyone on the World Cup podium at all. They're insane about their ski racing over there. Absolutely insane. Nor-ams are essentially considered a joke here. You win a nor-am and you're in no way going to do well on WC straight away, you're still going to be so far back. It's all about Europe. They're so good, and they're so serious about their racing, and there's so many racers over there. In Austria, you have to qualify for your zone races. You suck at racing as an eight year old? Oh well, you don't get to race at all. It's a whole different kettle of fish over there, and it's incredible to see. It sounds like I'm bashing Alpine Canada a whole lot, but there are a lot of people there that care about racing, and there's a lot of super, super amazing coaching talent at the lower levels especially that I've come to know, at the provincial/club level who build up these athletes. It's honestly a shame what happened to the development program here because there is a lot of talent in Canada, it's just hard to get the funding to really take all of them to the same level as the Shiffrins and the Vonns. America has a huge advantage over Canada there, and in Europe it's not even comparable. It's just so huge over there.
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Feb 20, 2018 07:02
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From what I've heard the US ski team doesn't have a ton of funding really, at least thats what they say when they are always begging me to donate. I think it's pretty bare bones. They'll pay for them to go to Chile and NZ in the summer to train but it doesn't really get results. We have a lot of athletes who hang around for years finishing in the 20s and never really improving. I wish they'd spend it at the youth level. The real problem both nations have is a lack of structure getting young kids racing. It's basically a miracle we can ever compete with the swiss and austrians since our talent pool is so much smaller, basically kids from wealthy families willing to send them to ski academies etc. My state had ski racing at the high school level but the level of competition and coaching we had was pretty poor.
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Feb 20, 2018 08:56
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African AIDS cum posted:From what I've heard the US ski team doesn't have a ton of funding really, at least thats what they say when they are always begging me to donate. I think it's pretty bare bones. The USA has a ton more sponsorship opportunities though, simply based on sheer size of the economy, and also the fact that alpine skiing is considered a much bigger sport in the US than it is in Canada. I can't speak for their support of young athletes since I have absolutely no idea how it works down there, but the American program is certainly having a lot more success than the Canadian one. River Radamus is going to be amazing soon, and there's those 3 or so tech girls that are really starting to do well, and Alice Merryweather on the women's speed side, as well as all of those guys that are making a splash in men's speed (Biesemayer (RIP), Cochrane-Siegle, Maple, those sorts of dudes. We just don't have that at all in Canada. I'd like to see Robby Kelley get another shot though. But yeah, America has the same kind of holy poo poo how do we even compete sort of thing as Canada does. The Shiffrins are absolutely loaded (her dad's a heart surgeon) so that really helps. For those who don't know, ski racing is insanely expensive, to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars per year per child. But yeah, how anyone from North America really reaches the peak of the sport is just a huge what when you go to Europe and see what their programs are like. That said, I think there is something to actually developping athletes. I was talking to a coach from Norway a few years back, he was one of their development team coaches. He told me that basically athletes that were up-and-comers got one race to prove themselves. If they did well, they continued in the program. If they didn't, that was it, dropped. Their talent pool is so deep that they could afford to do that. We definitely don't have that. High school level racing here sucks too. You need to go into a real club here for good coaching and competitiveness.
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Feb 20, 2018 19:12
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I think another thing is skiing has to compete with hockey up there, I go up to Fernie every winter and the local rink is busy 24/7 it seems like
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Feb 20, 2018 19:17
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Yeah, but hockey is nothing price-wise compared to ski racing. When I played hockey it was like $700 a year for the coaching for the whole year. Gear was initially around $500 for mostly new equipment, then maybe a couple hundred a year each year for new things as I slowly grew out of them. Maybe $1000 for a few tournaments over the course of the year. My ski racing fees are $6k for just coaching this year, not including any races, or gear. My race gear, in total, is probably worth about $10k. If you're a kid, and you're going to a ski academy, you're paying for tuition and board on top of that. And races. And summer camps, which if you're going overseas you're looking at another $2-$10k depending on where and for how long. Ski racing is truly a sport for the rich, especially if you're aiming to be good at it. Sure, there are kids who do a two-day-a-week program, go to one race a year, and don't do any summer camps. You're not likely to see them on a world cup podium though.
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Feb 20, 2018 19:22
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Women's Downhill today 9pm EST This is really Vonn's race to lose. They could not have made more of a course tailor-made to her strengths. Will she go out on a high, or will she crash and burn? Also remember that if she does win it will piss off a lot of Trump supporters in the process (a month or so ago Lindsey said she wouldn't visit the WH if she won gold and they got super butthurt over it).
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Feb 20, 2018 22:12
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HookShot posted:Also remember that if she does win it will piss off a lot of Trump supporters in the process (a month or so ago Lindsey said she wouldn't visit the WH if she won gold and they got super butthurt over it). GO LINDSEY!
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Feb 20, 2018 22:18
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Seriously, go here and read the comments on any of her recent posts if you want to see what it's like to really not have anything to live for in life: https://www.facebook.com/LindseyVonnUSA/
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Feb 20, 2018 22:22
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HookShot posted:Women's Downhill today 9pm EST Now I really, really hope she wins.
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Feb 20, 2018 22:25
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I hope Lara Gut wins and wears a MAGA hat on the podium
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Feb 20, 2018 22:27
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HookShot posted:Yeah, but hockey is nothing price-wise compared to ski racing. What is your goal? Are you trying to be on the world cup circuit, or do you just really like ski racing?
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Feb 21, 2018 00:58
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Kazak_Hstan posted:What is your goal? LOL, I just really like ski racing. I have literally absolutely no hope of ever being on world cup, I started doing it in my mid-20s and still regularly get my rear end kicked by teenagers (though I'm now better than most U14s!) I also prefer the speed events, which there are not a lot of options for in masters ski racing (at least in Canada, I know Masters is wayyyyyyyy bigger in the States). There's essentially one downhill race a year, and it's extremely mellow. Last year I got (I think) 9 Super G starts and 2 DH, and that was with the main speed series of the year being cancelled after we got a meter of snow in the middle of it. I'd like to ideally be a decent FIS-level ski racer. If I could get under 150 points, or even better, under 100 points, I'd be extremely happy. Ski racing has made me so much better a skier than I ever could have imagined I would be otherwise. I went from being barely able to get down a black run to being able to rip almost anything in-bounds in just a couple of years.
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Feb 21, 2018 01:08
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HookShot posted:LOL, I just really like ski racing. I have literally absolutely no hope of ever being on world cup, I started doing it in my mid-20s and still regularly get my rear end kicked by teenagers (though I'm now better than most U14s!) I also prefer the speed events, which there are not a lot of options for in masters ski racing (at least in Canada, I know Masters is wayyyyyyyy bigger in the States). There's essentially one downhill race a year, and it's extremely mellow. Last year I got (I think) 9 Super G starts and 2 DH, and that was with the main speed series of the year being cancelled after we got a meter of snow in the middle of it. That is so very cool. I envy you as I love skiing but live in a place where regular excursions to decent slopes is difficult at best. Thanks for your Knowledge Posts in here. I’ve been appreciating them.
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Feb 21, 2018 01:22
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Yeah that's very cool. Most people don't get to pursue a passion like that. Very neat to someone do it.
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Feb 21, 2018 01:47
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Thanks guys, yeah, I'm super lucky that I'm able to pursue it on a number of levels. From being able to work whenever so I can train a few times a week, to my local club accepting me in the FIS program when they got rid of Masters, there's a lot of things that I'm very thankful for and a lot of people that have really helped me do this, which is awesome, and I love it so much.
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Feb 21, 2018 01:57
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Well, sadly there are going to be a lot of happy Trump supporters tonight, which always sucks. But I'm thrilled for Goggia. Assuming she wins (it's far less likely that someone pulls a Ledecka in downhill because of the training runs, Super G is much more ripe for surprises) it's going to be the first time ever the woman who won the test event also won the Olympics, and the first time an Italian woman wins downhill gold. She seriously sent it at the bottom of that run. Mowinckel also. You could see her really, really fighting for that tuck, and I honestly thought as she was coming to the line that she had it.
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Feb 21, 2018 04:21
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That trump remark was just tempting fate. Same thing happened with Tom Brady
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Feb 21, 2018 04:23
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As a ski racing dad in the U.S., I have to back HookShot up on the high expense and commitment level required for ski racing. My kids are U12s (under 12) but if they want to continue to seriously race as teenagers they will likely have to be accepted to one of the elite ski academies instead of a normal high school. Even at the U12 level, we have season passes, ski team/coaching fees, race fees, equipment costs, travel that add up to thousands and thousands and we are filthy casuals who are doing it for fun without aspirations of elite competition. That doesn't even include camps and clinics. You can still get elite skiers from non-rich kids living in ski towns but the financial sacrifice for their families will be especially acute.
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Feb 21, 2018 04:45
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Winter Olympics are indeed reverse affirmative action
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Feb 21, 2018 04:48
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it’s cool and totally predictable that The New Yorker profile of Shiffrin that purported to question whether all parents could/should tiger-parent their child into an elite competitor would neglect the whole “she’s rich as hell” angle
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Feb 21, 2018 05:30
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Reprisal posted:it’s cool and totally predictable that The New Yorker profile of Shiffrin that purported to question whether all parents could/should tiger-parent their child into an elite competitor would neglect the whole “she’s rich as hell” angle
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Feb 21, 2018 06:36
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Woop, another medal for Mowinckel! She made big progress mid season, going from top 15 to podium contender having figured out some mysterious something. Great timing!
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Feb 21, 2018 08:15
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Reprisal posted:it’s cool and totally predictable that The New Yorker profile of Shiffrin that purported to question whether all parents could/should tiger-parent their child into an elite competitor would neglect the whole “she’s rich as hell” angle In ski racing, that should be implied
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Feb 21, 2018 15:31
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Ola posted:Woop, another medal for Mowinckel! She made big progress mid season, going from top 15 to podium contender having figured out some mysterious something. Great timing! Yeah, about a month ago she really did go from regularly in the 10-15 range to regularly in the 4-8 range, and then took it up another notch at the Olympics. I was expecting her to podium in GS, and thought she was a potential in Super G, but I didn't expect her to in DH, which was her worst event of the three and the only one where she still wasn't really pushing for that podium regularly. Super happy for her, it's really awesome that she peaked at the right time.
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Feb 21, 2018 16:26
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Men's Slalom Run 1 start 8:00pm EST Women's Alpine Combined Run 1 start at 9:30pm EST Men's slalom run 2 start 11:30pm EST Women's Alpine Combined run 2 start at 1:00am EST (Feb 22) Watch for the Hirscher/Shiffrin double. It's the expected result, and honestly I would be surprised if there was anything else. Kristoffersen should give Hirscher the biggest competition, and Manuel Feller will be the most entertaining who will either do really well or blow out like he did in the GS. On the women's side, I honestly don't think anyone's going to come close, assuming no huge mistakes from Shiffrin. I'm expecting a Shiffrin/Gisin/Brignone podium. HookShot fucked around with this message at 16:37 on Feb 21, 2018 |
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Feb 21, 2018 16:34
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0.74 second lead on the DH is I'm guessing not enough lead for Lindsey but we'll have to wait and see.
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Feb 22, 2018 03:58
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Vonn had a strong run. Sets up a good slalom for the finish. I liked Valerie greniers run for Canada for the downhill there. She lost a lot of time in the middle, didn't seem strong enough. Of course she is young and getting better.
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Feb 22, 2018 04:04
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What's with the extra poles in the slalom? It's hard to tell how they know to ignore them.
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Feb 22, 2018 05:59
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PostNouveau posted:What's with the extra poles in the slalom? It's hard to tell how they know to ignore them. They’re the gates that “close” the combinations. I’m on my phone so can’t do it now but I’ll draw a picture later to explain it.
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Feb 22, 2018 06:11
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https://www.mhssca.org/uploads/7/6/2/3/76230063/ussa_course_setting_manual_2016[1].pdf has a decent explanation/diagrams.
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Feb 22, 2018 06:36
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Vonn nooooo
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Feb 22, 2018 07:34
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