Another Type of Downhill

What is it like to be a winner? Not, you know, an actual champion or anything like that, but the modern concept of a winner. The fan of a winner. Adjacent to winning. Does it rub off on the rest of your life? Do Dodgers fans still get a thrill after winning their 3rd World Series in 5 years? Does Munich riot if their football team doesn’t win something every year? What is that like?

I envy European ski racing fans. Whether Norwegian, Swiss, Austrian, Italian or…shit…even the French! You’re never more than a few weeks between wins, podiums and success. These people are champions! Or at least live in the same country as champions.

Canadians, on the other hand, are very Canadian in their ski racing. We’re not terrible at it, but we’re not amazing. We show up at every race, give it our best shot, and if the stars align we have a good enough day that people take notice. We’re just bad enough that no one begrudges our success and just good enough for there to be success every so often. We’re “isn’t that nice for them?” successful, which is damning with faint praise if I’ve ever seen it. How is it that a country so thick with snow and mountains can be so middling at ski racing? So average? So okay? I’m one hour into skiing in the Austrian Alps when I figure out why.

It’s my first day of the season. Conditions aren’t great. My feet hurt. The snow is hard, icy even, and there isn’t much of it. I’m on a chairlift, deep in the back of the Kitzski Resort¹, enjoying the heated seat and appreciating having my feet up on a footrest. I’m reminded of one of those early December days back home, when the mountain opens up a run or two in order to calm the locals down and fulfil some contractual obligations. The skiing is marginal, but the views and slopeside huts are majestic.

The runs are surrounded by greens and assorted shrubbery but there isn’t a rock showing anywhere on the actual skiing surfaces. They’ve made low snowpack an artform, with everything smooth, hard and fast, better prepped than any race course I skied during my junior career. I notch myself into survival mode, arcing a few turns where conditions allow, but mostly avoiding embarrassment and injury. Around me though, the people are thriving. My pace is average, at best, where I’m not really used to that being the case. I push myself to ski faster than what I’m comfortable with, but the 110mm underfoot skis that are “good for everything” really aren’t, and I’m sliding more turns than I’m carving. Eventually, I feel like I’m finding my legs, only to realize that some of those skiers that I’m now keeping pace with are in their 70’s.

It dawns on me that this is a different sport than what we do at home. What I’m up to in Austria, while still involving skis and poles and boots and turns and shit, is very far away from what I’d be doing with those exact same things back in North America. I mean, of course these people are better than us at ski racing! Of course they dominate the World Cup². But I’d like to see them manage a 6:30AM traffic jam in the parking lot of the Squamish McDonald’s! And I’d love to see them absolutely gasp with incredulity and sadness when they reach the Whistler ticket window and are asked to fork over $305 for a day of skiing. But I’d also like to think that once we’d elbowed our way onto the Peak chair and out-sprinted the thousands of other people attempting the same thing and were rushing in a random direction hoping to score a few fresh turns that at that moment, the tables would turn and they would understand what we, the feeble Canadians, had gained by losing our chance at ski racing excellence.

Ski Racing – Not for us

Did I really need to travel to Europe to figure this out? Ski racing is not a sport on the radar in the land of bad cheese and SUV’s. This baffles my tiny little brain. I once forced my parents to delay taking me to the hospital (broken collarbone) because I insisted on watching the end of the ski race that was on TV. For most, though, it’s just a strange sport that takes up time mid day on a Saturday before the hockey game starts. It’s just another weird sport that needs to be put into a context that the masses can understand. You know how that works. The one time per year they broadcast the big match they can’t help but describe is as “The Super Bowl of.”

The Super Bowl of table tennis. The Super Bowl of soccer. The Super Bowl of ski racing. I find this to be a particularly lazy reference.

My problem is that the Super Bowl is nothing more than a football game surrounded by hype. There’s nothing special about the game beyond the value that we’ve placed on it. The rules, the field and the players are all the same, with the hype the only thing that has been exponentially amplified. It’s an artificial construct developed to sell things. Tickets. Cars. Doritos. The half time show (brought to you by Pepsi)! The advertisements! The fly by! If they don’t keep telling us that it’s the biggest sporting event of the year, we might forget.

At Kitzbühel, the race (and perhaps the drinking?) is the hype. Sure, Red Bull flies a bunch of helicopters around, and some people jump out of them, but as far as pregame spectacles are concerned, it’s limited. There’s no T-shirt cannons, no sign ups for free credit cards, and no free samples of the latest flavour of Cheetos. 45,000 show up because there’s nothing else like it. It’s the steepest. It’s the fastest. It’s the iciest. I mean…maybe it’s these things. Nobody has yet come up with an accurate way to measure the iciness of a race course. But it is the most likely to end a career or hospitalize a participant. It is the one time on the World Cup calendar where racers humbly admit that they’re a little bit scared, and relief and triumph pours out in the finish line, merely from the act of finishing. Nothing about the Super Bowl makes the game harder, or more dangerous. There is a championship at stake, yes, but the CTE potential is exactly the same. Heck, Kitzbühel isn’t even a championship! As far as the overall is concerned, it’s just another Saturday on the World Cup circuit. The points are no more important and the prize money is the same. It’s the sheer triumph of the challenge that raises the stakes, with no artificial sweetener required. It defies context and explanation. It rises above on reputation alone. It attracts the casuals as well as the die hards, the celebrities and the anonymous. It’s a shorthand for danger, glory and triumph, without comparable in North American sport.

So, the Super Bowl of skiing it is.

Ski Racers – A confusing breed

Before we can understand the race though, we need to understand the racers themselves. Ski racing isn’t really one sport, but two sports forced into a tenuous roommate situation. You have the “Technical” events, slalom and giant slalom, which favour technique, precision and execution. Then you have the “Speed” events, Super-G and Downhill, which reward bravery and tactics. As you move from the slowest technical event (slalom) to the fastest speed event (downhill), the size of the turn, the length of the race, the speeds achieved, the chance of injury, and the level of interest all rise³.

Smoosh together these two halves and you have the sport of ski racing, each with (essentially) their own tour and without much overlap over the course of a season. At the World Cup level, most skiers compete in two events, sticking to either the technical or speed events. A handful of competitors straddle the boundary as 3-event skiers, mostly speed skiers that race giant slalom or technical skiers who dabble in Super-G. 4-event skiers are a very rare breed, as the bookends of downhill and slalom are so specialised it’s hard to compete in both, let alone excel. Bode Miller was probably the last true quadruple threat on the men’s circuit, and he gave up on slalom pretty early in his career. Mikaela Shiffrin looked like she might turn into one, but injury has sidelined those expansive ambitions⁴. Emma Aicher has emerged as a 4-event star on the German team, but is yet to win in all 4 events. Most that try find that it’s difficult to focus on such disparate events, and more than a few find that a bad Super-G or Downhill crash easily upends their plans.

If that wasn’t complicated enough, at one time there was an event that combined both of these disciplines (quite accurately named the Combined). You’d think an event with the goal of crowning the true all around champion would be a roaring success, but people disagreed! I always found that there was something charming about the fish out of water nature of watching skiing superstars forced out of their comfort zone, but a win was often just a reward for whichever skier was the least bad at both disciplines. The most common result was a slalom racer crowned the victor after surviving the downhill and then embarrassing the downhillers by a few seconds in the slalom. So, The Combined is no more, and looks to have been permanently replaced by the Team Combined, which is the basically the same event but spread across two people, each racing their stronger event. So, we wind up watching the same people ski the same events with the same people winning, albeit with a teensy bit more luck and chance sprinkled over top. To me, all this proves is that Switzerland and Austria have a lot of really great ski racers, and whichever of their slalom skiers has the strongest day brings the win home. I think there could be something in it if it were more like doubles tennis with permanent pairings and perhaps some slightly different rules.

Kitzbühel just happens to be one of those rare weekends where the two groups still come together in the same space on the same weekend, with a downhill on Saturday and a slalom on Sunday. A combined champion is no longer crowned (see above), so these days the crossover is limited to some shared meals, some swapped stories and little else⁵. The only common denominator across the weekend is the ski brands involved.

Come the weekend, the slalom is the second thought for most in attendance. This, in my view, is a bit unfortunate. The slower speeds and the shorter length of a slalom race make it a delight for the in person spectator. On many courses, the entire race unfolds directly in front of you, and mistakes are amplified by the close proximity of the boisterous crowds. It’s 60 or so turns around a single pole, with each of those turns a millimeter from disaster. Racers swing back and forth from triumph to failure, and all the way back again. The winner is often the racer who makes the fewest mistakes, and who executes with the most consistency. It’s an extremely specialized sport, and it doesn’t look much like what the average skier does on the weekend. Sure, you’ll resort to slalom sized turns on that black diamond run, but when was the last time you took a plastic gate across the shins?

Downhill, with the speed and the danger, is what draws in the eyeballs. It’s not really what the average skier does on the weekend either, but it is how many people imagine that they take to the slopes. It’s free flowing. It’s dangerous. It has large turns and big air. It helps to have skill and technique, but it isn’t actually mandatory⁶. Mistakes often just show that you’re traveling faster than everybody else. Or, you know, that you made a mistake.

A downhill course is shaped by the mountain, with the gates set (largely) the same, year after year. This contributes to the legend, with a traceable history and a sense of permanence. It can take years for competitors to understand the intricacies of each course, where to turn, where to push and where to bide your time. Downhill racers often don’t peak until they hit their 30’s, but two of the brightest stars on the circuit are in their early 20’s, so maybe that’s just an old wives tale?

The Streif

I’ve spent my entire life watching Kitzbühel on TV. In my legend of the broken collarbone, it was Todd Brookers 1983 Kitzbühel win that I insisted on watching before seeking treatment, but I don’t think that timeline matches reality. At the best of times, I struggle to separate memories of repeated events, so one small corner of my brain contains years and years of mashed together Kitzbühel memories. There’s Kilde escaping death at the bottom of The Traverse. Cuche ski flipping after yet another victory. Miller wallriding the fence at the exit of the Steilhang. Svindal’s front flip down the Hausberg⁷. It’s all very familiar, and I could probably map the course out in reasonable detail if given a pen, paper and a few spare minutes.

This familiarity brings expectations, and I feel like I’m not expecting to be surprised by what I see when I show up in person. As I walk over from the top of the gondola I’m left confused by the jolt to my senses as my brain works to recalibrate. Somehow, things are both longer and more compressed than I anticipated. Everything is steeper. The snow is harder than I thought possible. Looking at the course it feels inadvisable to walk on it without aid of a rope and crampons. Skiing on it seems ludicrous.

To really understand The Streif, let us focus on the very top of the race course, the first 8 seconds. Most of us think that we could do just about anything for 8 seconds. Dodge a heavyweight champ for 8 seconds? Seems reasonable. Take a snap against an NFL defensive line for 8 seconds? You can always run in the opposite direction, right? Ride a bull for 8 seconds? That’s how you win the rodeo, no? Ski the first 8 seconds of the Hahnenkamm? Honestly, an expert skier would be lucky if hospitalization was the worst thing that happened to them.

Kitzbühel starts with pushing out of the Startschuss into the 51 percent gradient Starthang. Perhaps this doesn’t sound like much, but consider that anything over a 40 percent gradient is generally considered to be “expert” terrain.

The Starthang deposits you into a tough left footed turn that appears really, really quickly, and then swings immediately into an even tougher right footed turn. Make that, and you’re into the first jump, the Mausefalle. You leave the ground because that 51 percent gradient turns into an 85 percent gradient, and the ground drops away from your feet. This causes you to fly 80 meters at a speed of 120 km/hour. This is the 8 second point of the race, and good luck with the next 20 seconds if you have managed to make it this far.

Looking down from the top of the Mausefalle is where reality really starts to separate from the figment of TV’s imagination. The steepness is one thing, but the length is another. The bottom of the pitch, and the Karussell turn below, feel as if they are blocks away. You remember how far down this slope the racers land, and the reality of jumping 80 meters (most of the length of a football field) emerges. What you assume would be merely terrifying starts to feel like something impossible. Incomprehensible. Inconceivable, if you will. You wonder what sort of psychopath could ever find it within themselves to not only push out of the Startschuss, but race out of the Startschuss. You start to feel pretty good about your failure to achieve your childhood dreams.

I wind up spending a long period of time patrolling the top 8 seconds of the race course, as my accommodation for the night (The Hocheckhutte) is an alpine hut about 100 feet from the Startschuss. The dormitory style bunks and the limited access make this one of the cheaper ways to spend a night in Kitzbühel, or at least near Kitzbühel, depending on how you define it. There were a surprising number of options during the booking process, so I splurge by spending an extra 30 dollars on the second cheapest option. As the proprietress is stuffing me into the first available corner I realize this was a misplaced strategy, and I should have saved my money and got an extra schnitzel. My pillow is the current resting place for the feet of a large Dutch man sleeping off the previous evening⁸. As I’m unpacking my gear, he hops out of bed and rushes over to catch the gondola down to the village for another night on the town, so that opens up some space for me to stretch my legs.

I ditch my belongings, head over to the course, walk around and take it all in. Just walking near the course feels unsafe. There’s a spot where you can actually walk right across the race course, about 50 feet above where the course disappears over the Mausfalle. All that holds you back from disaster is a narrow strip of carpet, and a floppy length of fencing, and it’s quite entertaining to witness the struggles of the skiers and snowboarders making their way across. I keep quiet though, as I can only imagine how goofy I look picking my way across in my running shoes. Once across it feels like a 50/50 proposition as to whether or not I’ll maintain my footing, or find myself rocketing down the slope towards the Steilhang.

The next day, I get to see more of the course on skis. Access is limited, but various runs and access roads parallel much of the course. I slowly move down the course in 100 foot increments, each time overwhelmed by what I’m seeing. I point at things and exclaim to no one “That’s that thing! Oh my god!”

At the Karussell turn you lose touch with the course for a long span. The access road that you ski down takes you down icy switchback after icy switchback. After a minute or two of this, I’m finally heading back towards the course and I assume I will rejoin at a point quite low down the mountain. I emerge from the trees, look to the right and I see the bottom of the Steilhang! What has taken me minutes to cover is the 30 second point on the racecourse.

From there, it’s just more surprises. The Seidlalmsprung looks like some junior employees made a mistake with the course routing, as the gap looks far too narrow for a ski race. Even the easier parts of the course, the lower grade pitches of the Alte Schneise and Larchenshuss, are still quite steep, and anything but easy.

They all lead into the Hausbergkante, which at 70% gradient, feels like an elevator shaft. I stand above for quite some time, imagining what it would take to race off of that. The danger is palpable.

From the Hausbergkante down, the course is visible from the town of Kitzbühel itself. What you see is perhaps the most harrowing 20 seconds of ski racing in existence. After the Hausbergkante, you land and gingerly set yourself up for left hander, which leads itself into The Traverse. Not “a” traverse, “The” Traverse. More than a few careers have ended right here. Not only is it steep and bumpy, but it’s steep and bumpy pointing entirely in the wrong direction. The slope goes right and you’re holding on for dear life trying to go left. Make it through that, and then the speeds really pick up. Once you hit the Zeilchuss you’re up to about 145 km/hour and into the Zeilsprung. This jump doesn’t look like much, but at that speed it is. Make that, and it’s an easy ski through the finish.

Race Day

The amount of drinking involved in watching a ski race takes me by surprise. It begins on the bus ride into town, where half of the passengers are getting an early start. It continues in the village, where it proves exponentially easier to find a beer than it does a coffee. And it certainly doesn’t slow down once you enter the venue, where walking around with a 24-pack of beer over your shoulder proves to be the accessory du jour.

My desires are more innocent. After my pre-scouting mission, I have some idea as to where I want to watch the race, so I stumble around in the snow searching for an ideal spot. They do warn you to wear good winter footwear as a spectator, and they really aren’t kidding. I’m thankful that I packed my hiking boots, but even with good socks my feet freeze up pretty quickly and I’m regretting packing so light.

As I wander along the side of the course, a good view looks to involve more strategy than I had anticipated. The crowds are already quite thick, and the old German men smoking cigars, the posh Swiss ladies smoking cigarettes, and everybody north of 14-years-old pounding beers have me questioning my location. I have a few hours to spare before the start, so I decide to hike up to the Oberhausberg to have a look from there.

This is yet another massive recalibration of my perspective of this race course. The hike up is an adventure all on its own right. There are some goat trails (perhaps literally) carved through the trees, and it turns into more of a 4-limbed scramble than a hike. Crampons would do just as nicely as a pair of insulated boots, at this point. By the time I get to where I want to be, I’m a sweaty mess and I’m lucky to have escaped a tumble down the mountain a good handful of times.

This part of the course is full of excitement, and the angles I see on the hike up have my photographic fingers twitching. With no big screen to monitor the race though, I worry that it will turn into long periods of standing around followed by 4 seconds of glory and chaos. The uncertainty has me twitching, so I decide to slide my way back down to the Zeilsprung. The views there are quite good, with The Traverse laid out above you and big screens galore. I remind myself that I’m there for the atmosphere.

By the time I get back to the finish, the party is well advanced. The icy snow has largely been replaced by crushed beer cans and plastic Jagermeister bottles. Wherever I stand, I wind up fielding drunken questions about where I’m from and what I’m doing there. By the time the race starts, I’m ready for anything but large groups of people, but I stuff the antisocial down and dial up my Canadian charm.

Watching a ski race amongst this many people is an experience. It’s like watching a hockey game with a knowledgeable crowd, gasping at the right moments, yelling at the refs for the correct reasons. Most of my viewing is tape delayed, alone on my couch, personal interactions limited to requests to turn the volume down. Watching a ski race as a participatory event is a new experience, and I’m not used to live reactions playing out across thousands of faces. It’s as much about what we’re seeing as what we’re feeling, and the tension builds as competitive runs approach the finish line. Interval times roll out with the same anticipation as lottery numbers, and we’re all just waiting to start screaming if the right ones come up.

The racers themselves are distant objects, save for their brief time in the finish corral. Up close, they are objects of consistent beauty. If you were to remove their heads you would find remarkably interchangeable bodies, like muscular Mr. Potato Heads. Many of the racers are within spitting distance of 6’0” tall (with head attached), weigh somewhere around 200 pounds (again, head included), have well defined muscles on slender, athletic frames, and are as white as the snow under their skis. This gives your average World Cup Downhill race the feeling of a eugenics show-and-shine, or a cocktail party at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

This is not to defend or to glorify the limited demographics of a ski race, but merely to describe the aura surrounding these specimens. There’s a studliness of purpose brought about by a thoroughbred stallion of a man, built up by hundreds of thousands of dollars of the finest science, and then poured into a form fitting downhill suit. These are things that you need to understand if you are to talk about Giovanni Franzoni.

Franzoni was nowhere and then he was everywhere. A week before Kitzbühel he wins the Wengen Super-G (in fairly dominant fashion), and from that point I’m convinced that he might win every race from now until the end of the season. He’s a little bit wild, more reckless abandon and raw athleticism than composed control. He’s like a 10-month old Labrador Retriever puppy, fully grown but perhaps still figuring out how all the parts work, and once he reigns in the mistakes he’s going to really be something. On this day in Kitzbühel he’s wearing bib #2 and after he crosses the line I’m 85% certain that nobody is going to beat him.

Yes, Kitzbühel is a place of surprising results. If you’re brave enough and lucky enough to string it all together, the course can be an equalizer. On this day Bib #29 (Max Muzaton) hits for 3rd. Bib #40 (Luis Vogt) manages 8th. Odermatt brings a scare and numerous others have green through the first few sections, but the drama is minimized after bib #2 crosses the line.

A winner from bib #2 cheats you out of a great finish line celebration. No matter how good the run, you can only cheer so hard for the second skier across the line. There are enough close calls to keep the crowd engaged, but the drama drops off pretty quickly, and peters out long before the final skier (bib #58) crosses the line.

It does feel like we’ve witnessed history, though. We’ve just watched a 24-year-old win his very first world cup downhill, at Kitzbühel no less. He did it with apparent ease and swagger, and then shared tears with his mother at the finish line. This will be one of those “I was there” moments, 20 years down the line.

After the race, the crowd lingers in the finish, there’s a series of awards awkwardly presented, and then things break up with a mix of police escorts for the superstars and lesser known skiers threading their way through the crowd with their skis tossed over their shoulders. Everyone filters into the village where the beer, wine and Austrian folk techno continue to gain momentum. Beer and the people drinking it aren’t high on my list of things I’m looking for right now, but I wander around for a while, eat another sausage, and ponder what it would take to stay for the party that goes late, late into the night⁹. I think about my cold feet, the long line for the train, and my early wakeup for the slalom race the next day. That, and the ominous presence of a lot of drunken teenagers sends me back to my hotel room for the night.

The Slalom

Before my trip, nobody asks me about the slalom race. Nobody really asks me about the downhill either, but they especially don’t ask me about the slalom. People can understand the attraction of somebody risking their life at 100+ km/hour, but aren’t terribly interested in the finer details of Europeans bashing plastic.

This is just fine. The mood in the morning is much more laid back. The town itself feels like it has a hangover, so a quiet start isn’t unwelcome. Many of the food stalls aren’t open, and the streets feel like they need some recovery time. Once at the race venue though, the mood is cheerier and wholesome. People are still drinking, sure, but with what feels like less intention. To force an anology, it’s like the difference between the gold medal and the bronze medal game at the Olympics. One draws all the eyeballs, facepainting and glory, while the other is just as intense and skillful but has cheaper tickets. I quite enjoy the change of pace.

Without much effort I find a nice patch of hill that gives me a solid line of sight on a big screen, and good visibility of about ¾ of the course. I pull a sausage out of my bag and wait for things to get interesting.

Now, I do watch a lot of slalom over the course of a ski season, but I never, ever, ever watch the first run. That’s too much slalom, even for me. Yes, the time you accumulate on the first run counts just as much as the time from the second run, but I can easily become invested in a race by popping in at the midway point. The mystery of how they got to that point is actually sort of appealing. So, to be out on the side of a ski hill at 10:30AM watching 69 people make their way through a slalom run is, again, not for the faint of heart.

Slalom first runs are exercises in failure. Of the 69 competitors, 22 either don’t finish or are disqualified. 17 don’t ski fast enough to qualify for the second run. Only 30 make it to the afternoon (as the rules dictate), and only a handful of them stand a real chance of winning. Even those potential winners are just as likely (or even more likely) to experience some sort of calamitous mistake as they are glory. Slalom is failure, and that’s perhaps why it feels so bloody good when you string two good runs together.

The racers themselves are an entirely different breed than the downhillers. They’re all still muscular, athletic and as white as the driven snow, yes, but just in the past year a World Cup slalom has been won by a Frenchman that is 6’3”, as well as a Bulgarian who is 5’5”. This gives off a whiff of suggestion that it might be a sport for anybody.

Heading into the second run, it looks like it will be a romp by Mr. Smooth himself, Loic Meillard. I forget though, that this is a second run and he often seems allergic to those things. If not him, then surely one of the Norwegians is going to pull it off? Three different Norwegians have won a slalom this season, four if you include the Brazilian who was once a Norwegian. Even when one of the big three fail it seems like there are two that can step in to take their place. But it isn’t to be, and to my surprise, it’s the Austrian firecracker Manuel Feller that comes through with the win.

Feller puzzled me for years. He seemed like the anti ski racer, with his gap toothed smile, wild hair and (what comes across) as an ambivalence for the sport. He always seems to be battling so hard against himself, the run and the expectations, and it’s a bit of a surprise when he manages to finish a race. I think what really throws me though is the reggae. It’s not my place to form judgement on these things, but a small town Austrian man earnestly belting out reggae music feels like it’s (at the very, very least) an eyelash away from problematic. If there’s one constant in ski racing though, it’s commentators telling us about Dominik Paris singing in a heavy metal band and Manuel Feller’s love of reggae.

The crowd, of course, goes nuts when he wins. It’s been a rough year (or two or three) for the Austrian men, and a win on hallowed Kitzbühel ground means a lot to the fans. I think they’d all prefer if the win came in the downhill, but at this point they aren’t overly picky. Feller himself seems transformed by the win, humble and emotional, and I feel like I’ve witnessed a man reborn.

But what does it all mean?

When I was a kid, I had a book that was filled with maps of ski resorts from around the world. It was heavily Eurocentric, and I would spend hours flipping those pages, imagining what these resorts would be like in person. I was in awe of the idea of a ski resort that spanned valleys, towns, and even countries. It’s strange that I waited so long in my life to experience something that has captivated me for so long. It probably built it up too much in my own head.

It’s similar with these large events that we hear about our entire lives. Things shown to us on television take on importance. Things other people flock to must be worth the hype and the effort. We’re both drawn and overwhelmed by the spectacle. Whether car accident, fire, or ski race, we want to see the things, right there, in front of our face.

I sometimes struggle to separate the nuts and bolts from the experience. I flew all that way to stand amongst that sea of people that I see every year on TV, but I also got a bit annoyed that they kept stepping on my feet and blocking the view. It can be hard to step back, take in the moment, and remember that you can watch the replay when you get home if you really feel like you missed out on some critical detail.

I was lucky enough over this past year to tick off two events that I’ve always wanted to see. The first was an F1 race in Montreal. The second…well…you just read about it. There was an incredible amount of overlap in these two experiences. It’s hard to put into words the unnatural speed of an F1 car and a downhill ski racer. It’s also hard to comprehend how much physical effort, exposure to the elements and battling of crowds is involved just to stand on the side of something and watch it happen. In both cases I had moments where I was struck just by my own presence in a space. In Montreal, you can surge onto the racecourse after the race is over. I wandered around, stood on Turn 10, reached down and felt the track surface¹⁰. In Kitzbühel, you can shuffle your way across on a narrow section of carpet. I (also) wandered around, stood on the Mausefalle and felt the course surface. There’s power in just being where something meaningful just (or is about to) took place.

We also need to recognize that our chances to witness these things in person are much more limited than we can imagine. Circumstances, both personal and geopolitical, change all of the time. Especially with ski racing, I really do worry for the future. More and more what we see on TV is a narrow strip of snow surrounded by brown. It’s only a matter of time before a classic venue disappears from the circuit due to inconsistent snow. Or, on my way to work I’ll finally lose out to one of those cars that runs a stop sign every morning. Who the hell knows?

So, if there’s something out there that you’ve always thought of doing, and you have the means to do it, well, now’s the time. It might be exactly what you expect, or completely different, but either way it’s important for you to find out. The surprise for me in all of this was how much I enjoyed watching the slalom race. While witnessing something in person is amazing, total immersion is a whole other thing. In a way, the slalom was exactly the sensory experience I was expecting in Kitzbühel. I was so close I could feel the skiers go by (in theory). I could smell the smoke off the flares, the mustard and the boiling hot dog water, and hear the individual bells, horns and drums. Indeed, I feel like I visited the cathedral of downhill, and returned a disciple of slalom.

The Footnotes

The style guide poo poos footnotes, but I didn’t see any other way to meander to thoroughly.

1 – So begins the terminology confusion around Kitzbühel. Kitzbühel itself is the small town where the races finish. Kitzski is the resort on which the races take place. The mountain above the village, where the race takes place is the Hahnenkamm, which is also the name the organizers have chosen for the overall race weekend. The downhill course itself is the Streif. So, you may here people referring to any and all of “Kitzbühel”, “Hahnenkamm” and “Streif” both interchangeably, and talking about completely different things.

2 – This originally dipped much further into my typical pit of negativity, and brought the Americans along with me. One of my proofreaders complained that this whole “North America sucks at ski racing thing” might be a faulty premise. “Two of the most dominant ski racers ever are American!” To me, this feels like a bit of an exception proving the rule. What the US does is produce a generational talent every 10 years or so. They rack up wins while the rest of the team struggles for the odd podium. They’re basically Canada with a few ringers. As of March 1, 2026, the USA has won a total of 304 world cup races (which is a very solid number, and I would probably be telling a different story if Canada had won 304 world cup races!). However, 192 of those races were won by either Mikaela Shiffrin or Lindsey Vonn! Remove them from the equation and you’re left with 112 wins (which isn’t much more than Canada’s 80). Meanwhile, Austria has won 959 races and Switzerland 706. Remove each of their 2 best racers and it’s a sizeable dent, yes, but will probably buff out with a bit of elbow grease. As well, it’s a bit unfair to lump our Canadian women in with the men right now. The women managed to score a win and a podium (well…Val Grenier did) which actually takes us to 81 wins overall, and that’s pretty great. This actually raises a larger point of how there is often a gigantic gulf between the men’s and women’s teams in terms of results for many nations. Norwegian men have 213 wins. Their women, only 15. German women have 195 wins, their men only 56. It’s pretty weird!

3 – It takes a special person to get excited for a mid-week, mid-season slalom race on a glacier in Austria. I know this because I am one of those people.

4 – American ski racing is very strange to me. Half of the team has this country club like collegiate athlete vibe, and on the other half are a wild band of yahoos. The country club set takes things very seriously, and out of this group comes a staggering number of successful 4 event skiers. Only 5 men and 7 women have won at least one world cup race in each of the 4 major disciplines. 3 of these 12 are American, though with the Super-G only existing since 1986 the stats are a bit compromised.

5 – This is what I assume happens, anyhow.

6 – Dominik Paris is one of the winningest downhill racers ever, and he skis like a linebacker on rollerskates. Fast, yes. But beautiful? Technically excellent? Heavens no. But many a skier has lost a downhill race with good technique and beautiful turns.

7 – If people were still into making websites, a really great one would be to have an interactive map of the Streif, and as you hovered over points on the course it played highlights of all of the gruesome crashes and injuries that had happened at each of those points.

8 – The next day I ski with a nice German man who is also sharing my room. He informs me that the Dutch have a reputation as the hard partiers of the Alps. This surprises me, but nothing that I see over the following week contradicts this theory.

9 – Europeans are obsessed with Apres. I am quite jealous of the quantity of amazing slopeside establishments where you can have a good meal and a beverage for a reasonable amount of money. Us North Americans are a captured market once we hit the hill, and most Europeans would be appalled by the quality and cost of on mountain food and drinks. Still, they get pretty weird about it, and I spent most of my time feeling like I was on a business trip and had accidentally stumbled into a restaurant that had been booked out for a wedding, but were too polite to cancel my reservation. During the race I was staying a few train stops away from Kitzbühel, in a sleepy little village at the base of the SkiWelt resort. There weren’t many dinner options within walking distance, so I sauntered over to the pub across the street. It was about 7PM, and I opened the door to a fucking conga line to some thumping Austrian utz utz. It was mayhem. Shirts off. Guys swinging around on stripper poles. Table dancing. I quickly left…and then realized there wasn’t really anywhere else to eat. So, I went back inside and found a quiet-ish table at the side of the bar. There were another 10 or so tables of people chatting, eating dinner, and 20 feet away total Apres chaos. It was really, really strange.

10 – This didn’t actually tell me anything. It just felt like asphalt. But, since I was there, it felt important to physically touch it.

I went to Kitzbühel and you can too

Travelling to Europe to watch a ski race is a bit frivolous, but probably both less complicated and expensive than you’d think. The one expense you can’t avoid is your race weekend accommodation, but read on for some tips on that. Here is your step-by-step guide to watching the races at Kitzbühel if you so desire.

A – Fly to Munich.

B – Hang out in Munich for a day. It’s a great City, with lots nice streets to explore. Grab a beer at the Schneider Weisse Bierhall. The food is okay, but the witbiers are unlike anything you can find over here. Stop at the Manufactum Warenhaus Department Store. I’d describe it as as a hyper curated Home Hardware, where you can buy a Rocket Espresso machine or a 200 Euro pitchfork (amongst many other things). I bought a sweet M&R pencil sharpener that I’m disappointed to learn is available here. Finish with a sausage from Schlemmermeyer at the Viktualienmarkt. Best thing I put in my mouth all week.

C – Catch a train(s) to Kitzbühel. This is pretty easy, and not very expensive. There are a few options, but the easiest is to find one of the trains to Worgl, and from there something will be heading towards Kitzbühel (and the valley beyond) every half hour or so. This journey will take you 2.5 hours and will cost around 45 Euros.

D – Buy your race tickets. Hopefully you did this before you left. The DH sells out early, but the other events don’t. For 2026 it was 45 Euros for the DH and 35 Euros for the SG or SL.

E – Stay somewhere. This is the biggest challenge. The nice thing is that they run extra trains on the race weekend. If you’re staying anywhere on the train line between Kirchberg and Sankt Johann, it’s pretty easy to get there and back. You’re going to stand in line with the thousands of other people thinking the same thing, yes, but you’ll eventually get there. My hot tip would be to stay in Sankt Johann. It’s a picturesque little village about 10 minutes down the road from Kitzbühel and it seemed like a lot fewer people were going in that direction. I spent a couple of nights there before the race, and really wish that I’d stayed there the whole way through. Hotel Theresia Garni was great. The rates were reasonable, the hostess was super friendly, and the breakfast was the best of the trip. Eat dinner at the Huber Brau Bier Hall. Again, the food is okay, but the beer is pretty solid and you get to drink it while sitting in the top of a tower.

F – Go skiing. You’re in the Alps, after all. For my trip I skied a day at Kitzski, then took the train to Fieberbrunn and skied over to Saalbach from there. I spent a couple of days skiing around Saalbach-Hinterglemm, and if you plan things right you could link up another couple of resorts and then loop back to Kitzbühel from the backside of Kitzski. Kitzski, SkiWelt, Saalbach Skicircus, Zell am See, Kaprun, HochKonig, Zillertal, Mayrhofen and dozens of other smaller resorts are all very, very reachable and reasonably priced (lift tickets 70 to 80 Euros) by North American standards. Heck, Schladming is only 2 hours away by train, and that’s “far”! Bring your own boots and rent skis. Your 110mm underfoot skis aren’t actually good for everything.