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By Mackenzie Moran – Staff Writer
Over the past couple of days in Killington, Vermont, close to 40,000 fans showed up over the course of the weekend to cheer on their favorite athletes on the women’s tech circuit. Fans could only see as far as seven gates from the finish during the slalom event Sunday morning, but that did not deter them from showing up in droves. 15,000 people braved the ice and rain to catch a glimpse of the fastest women in slalom chase victory. And the athletes put on a show.
Not only did crowd favorite Mikaela Shiffrin earn her and 45th career victory and third consecutive slalom at Killington (0.59 seconds ahead of second place finisher Petra Vlhova), but two other Americans also finished in the top 30 for the first time in a long time.
20-year-old Nina O’Brien was first out of the gate second run, followed by Paula Moltzan of the University of Vermont who started three racers behind her. Both Americans laid down some of the best runs of their careers. For O’Brien, it was her first time scoring World Cup points. She even got to sit in the “winner’s” chair for a run. By the time each racer finished, O’Brien ended up 23rd overall.
“It feels pretty awesome, definitely a breakthrough for me today,” she said smiling. “I’ve been trying to get into the top 30 for a while now. I started my first World Cup ski race a few years ago, and it’s not easy, but it feels really good.”
Nina O’Brien scores her first World Cup points of her career in Killington.
Moltzan who finished 17th overall will head back to class at the University of Vermont in the morning, alongside her UVM teammate Laurence St-Germain, who finished 14th for Canada. She was feeling both humbled and amazed, stoked to have finished so well on home soil with friends, family, and teammates there to cheer her on. She said the crowd’s energy played a major role in her performance and drove her to ski some of the best turns of her life.
“I know my top felt not that great but as soon as I came over, that last break over, you could hear the crowd and I was like ‘Alright, it’s go time. They’re all watching,’” she told Ski Racing, still out of breath as she made sense of what had happened. “The first run felt really connected really put together, the snow was awesome, and being able to run third is kind of next level for me and a surreal moment…having Nina go first and just watching her crush the top gates and then thinking “okay it’s my turn”. It was really fun.”
Posted from SkiRacing
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By Jean Strong
November 22, 2018
Al Raine and Nancy Greene Raine taking in the sights and sounds of the 50th Anniversary of the World Cup in Aspen in March 2017. | Photo submitted
Nancy Greene Raine was inducted into the Tourism Industry Association of Canada Canadian Tourism Hall of Fame on Nov. 27.
Raine serves as the director of skiing for Sun Peaks Resort LLP and has played a pivotal role in the development of ski and race programs at Sun Peaks and Whistler.
“It’s a very unexpected honour, I’m very pleased,” said Raine. “The industry is pretty big across Canada and a lot of people have done a lot of great things.”
From working to promote Canada to tourists from Asia to promoting skiing Raine has spent the majority of her life highlighting Canada.
Nancy Greene Raine accepting the first funding for Nancy’s Dream Fund, Feb. 2018. SPIN photo.
“I’ve been plugging away at it for 50 years…working to promote skiing as a valuable part of Canadian tourism, that’s been my goal.”
She was named Canada’s female athlete of the 20th century, won gold and silver medals in alpine skiing at the 1968 Grenoble Olympics and overall World Cup titles in 1967 and 1968. Raine holds the Canadian record of 13 World Cup titles.
Raine is also an Officer of the Order of Canada, Member of the Order of British Columbia, a member of Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame and Canada’s Walk of Fame and is Chancellor Emerita of Thompson Rivers University.
From Jan. 2009 to May 2018 Raine served on the Canadian Senate.
She will join other industry leaders in the hall of fame such as Peter Armstrong, founder of Rocky Mountaineer Vacations, Rick Antonson, president of Tourism Vancouver, Hans Gmoser, founder of Canadian Mountain Holidays and Ian Ross, owner and operator of The Butchart Gardens.
Raine will receive the award in Ottawa on Tuesday.
Posted from Sun Peaks Independent News via Facebook
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SnowBrains | November 23, 2018
Taos Ski Valley, NM. Credit: Facebook
World-class ski resort Taos Ski Valley, NM in the Sangre de Cristos, is three hours from the nearest major airport in Albuquerque. Not the greatest accessibility for a major resort.
So, how best to solve this problem? Taos think they have the perfect solution. They went out and bought a frickin’ jet and announced a new airline – Taos Air – that will offer daily direct flights from Dallas and Austin from December through March, to an airstrip 30 minutes from the chairlifts.
Few, if any medium-sized ski resorts are making investments at this level right now, writes Powder.com.
“The response has been incredibly positive,” says sales manager Robb Greer, who was recently in Texas promoting the flights. “Taos Air is the fastest, easiest way to ski in the Rockies.”
Just 30-mins from the slopes. Credit: Ski Taos
The announcement comes in the middle of a 10-year, $300-million renovation that includes a new main chairlift (Taos’s first high-speed quad), much improved snowmaking (they just had one of their worst winters ever last year), a new luxury hotel, a “gondolita,” an upgraded children’s center, and makeovers at two restaurants. Next summer, they’ll be building new mountain biking trails, a Via Ferrata and new condos.
“I don’t think it’s going to change the entire equation, but it will make it a little bit easier,” says CEO David Norden, who believes Taos’ independence is now a unique asset in the ski world. “If we do our job right, it leaves us with a place that is greatly differentiated from the pack, because the pack looks the same, and the pack is getting bigger. We’ve got the culture, we’ve got the scale, we have a great mountain.”
Tickets for the 30-passenger chartered flight will start around $400, and passengers will land in El Prado, just down the road from the ski area. The price includes one checked bag and complementary Rossignol demos, and passengers staying at the Blake or the Village of Taos Ski Valley will receive free transportation to their hotels. The flight will leave from private terminals and passengers will only need to arrive 30 minutes before takeoff.
Posted from SnowBrains via Facebook
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Paralyzed three years ago, Rob Enigl ticked off Big Sky’s most iconic lines
By Jack Foersterling
Rob Enigl (right) is a sit skier. And he shreds harder than you. PHOTO: Dustin Jones
VIDEO: Logan Bonwell
While on a hunting trip with a friend in 2015, Bozeman local Rob Enigl was in car accident that left him paralyzed without the use of his legs. While injuries of this magnitude understandably leave many people struggling to adapt, it ultimately turned Enigl into a skier.
Just months after his accident, Enigl, who had previously been a snowboarder, learned how to monoski, also known as sit skiing. That was three years ago and on a trip to Big Sky this past season, Enigl ticked off the first known monoski descents of Gullies 2 and 3, among the steepest features off Lone Peak. And though it wasn’t a first descent, he also tackled the most famous run at Big Sky, the Big Couloir. With the support of Eagle Mount Program, an adaptive sport program based in Bozeman, Enigl hopes to show others that even if you’re in a wheelchair, you can still shred on the snow as hard as anyone else.
I find that a lot of people that aren’t too familiar with people in wheelchairsdon’t expect too much out of us, so it’s nice to show people that you can keep up with a normal person. You just need some additional special equipment to do it.
A week after my accident, I called my friend David Poole, who is in a wheelchair, and he told me all about monoskiing. I spent two months in the hospital, but after that, it was only about four and a half months from my accident until I was on a monoski.
I used to snowboard. I had never actually skied in my life, so up to this point I’ve only ever snowboarded and monoskied.
When we went to Big Sky, skiing Gullies 2 and 3 weren’t really planned out; the plan was just to do the Big Couloir. I did my first run down Gully 1, and when that went pretty good we moved to Gully 2, which no one had actually ever monoskied from top to bottom. After that we went to do the Big Couloir, and then we came back and did Gully 3 at the end of the day. That got pretty sketchy, with a lot of rocks in there. My monoski is of course one ski, so it sinks in a little deeper into the snow so I was hitting rocks all over the place. Luckily I didn’t catch up on any of them.
I had never actually snowboarded the Big Couloir. I used to think people that hit that were crazy.
Since I’ve been a monoskier, I’ve really liked the steep stuff. The descent down the Big Couloir was awesome, and the view looking straight down it was pretty nuts. The steepness and the length of the whole thing was definitely the craziest part.
Learning to sit ski was kind of like learning how to snowboard. That first day you’re on your butt most of the day, but then after a couple days doing it you start to figure it out. Sooner or later you’ll catch an edge and eat it, but that’s just how it goes.
Monoskiing is great for people in wheelchairs. Especially on powder days, you can just point the thing down the mountain over and over again and you don’t have to worry about your knees getting tired.
I like doing the steeper and scarier stuff just because I feel like a lot of people on monoskis kind of stay in the safe area, and I want to show that you can do more than what you think or what’s been done before.
There’s a couple things that go along with being paralyzed. I had an incomplete spinal cord injury, so parts of my legs still work, but the problem is there’s also a lot of additional pain because the nerves don’t really work correctly. That combined with being ADD, my brain jumps around a ton. When I’m monoskiing, my brain kind of shuts off and I only focus on the next turn and doing what I need to do to keep going down the mountain.
The pain just kind of goes away completely. I was on a lot of medication after my accident, and monoskiing helped me get off all of it. I found that my brain could just focus on skiing, and I didn’t have to take any medication.
Monoskiing is by far the most freeing thing I’ve found since my accident.When I get on, everything kind of shuts off and I think, “Sweet, I’m not disabled anymore. I can ski as hard as anyone else can.”
Posted from Powder via Facebook
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‘While the man might be gone, Warren Miller’s legacy will live forever
October 17, 2018
By Jack Foersterling
If you pull any skier off the mountain and ask them what the first ski movie they ever saw was, odds are good that one man’s name will be the first words out of their mouth—Warren Miller. The founding father of the modern ski movie, the late Warren Miller spent over six decades of his long 93 years dedicated to telling the story of the skier. The newest film from Warren Miller Entertainment, the company Miller founded back in 1949, takes that dedication and crafts it into a beautiful homage to the man who pioneered the genre of the ski movie.
Ripe with throwback footage from every decade of Miller’s work dating as far back as the ’50s, Face of Winter’s focus isn’t on pro skiers cramming as much crazy footage into their segment as possible, but rather examining what it is about skiing that brings us all together every winter, year after year.
Exploring distant places from Alaska to Iceland to Switzerland, and everywhere with a skiable mountain in between, Face of Winter follows professional and amateur skiers alike in telling their stories on skis. Hitting Warren Miller classics like Mike Wiegele’s Heli Skiing in British Columbia and the steep couloirs of Chamonix, France, both throwback and current footage seamlessly tell the stories of some of skiing’s most famous locales. And while the clothing, skis, and style might be a little different today from when Miller first started making movies so many decades ago, Face of Winter shows that the abundance of passion skiers have for their sport hasn’t changed a bit.
While Warren Miller may be gone, the countless interviews throughout Face of Winter prove that his impact, both through his personal interactions and his films, is far from over. For as long as people continue to ski, there will be people to film it, and with each and every press of the record button, Miller’s legacy endures. While it’s said plenty of times throughout the film, it’s worth saying again: Thanks, Warren.
Posted from Powder via Facebook
The post ‘Face of Winter’ Pays Homage to One of Skiing’s Greatest Legends appeared first on Ski Federation.
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