Men's Journal

U.S. Ski Team member Ted Ligety is a 2006 Olympic gold medalist and the defending World Cup giant slalom champion. This season, he’ll be blogging regularly from around the world for mensjournal.com as he attempts to defend his title and win the overall crown.

By Ted Ligety

[Read Ted Ligety's previous blog here.]

It was kind of weird to have already started the ski racing season in October. The first World Cup event was in Sölden, Austria and came with a lot of extra anxiety compared to the normal World Cup, especially since it’s the first race of my Giant Slalom title defense. We came to Austria a week before the race to train and make the final tweaks to both our equipment and technique. It’s always a bit of a mystery knowing how fast you’ll ski not having raced in six months. On the U.S Ski Team, we’ve been training together, but we haven’t had any overlap with the other teams. We know where we are within the team, but without having the pace of other teams to ski with, it’s hard to have a good gauge.

Along with our traditional training, we did a race simulation on the first run of every training session, dubbed “October Cup.” We created a points system so that a win was 7 points, second was 5 points, third was 3 points followed by 2 then 1. All five of us put in 20 Euros, which the coaches matched, so we had a 200 Euro prize for the “Cup” winner. The “October Cup” was hotly contested; Erik Schlopy, also known as “Poppa Schlopes,” and I were tied going into the last two days with Jake Zamansky hot on our tails. Erik stepped it up and won the last two days, beating me out for the “Cup.” Not bad for the old man at 36 years old (a father of two and 12 years older than me).

After the six-day “October Cup” on the Stubai Glacier, we arrived in Sölden a couple days before the race. Unfortunately there was no time to relax: the days were packed full of press conferences, interviews, and autograph signings — all of which piled on the pressure. Race day was actually a relief. The hill was prepared awesomely with consistently hard, semi-grippy ice, which makes for the best, fairest races. Sölden has always been a great hill for me as well; it starts off flat for a few gates, then drops onto a medium steep pitch for five gates, then there’s a big roll going onto the longest, steepest face we race on all year long. From the parking lot it looks like a wall. After the pitch it rolls out onto a flat section to the finish. The first year I raced, I started 64^th and barely qualified for a second run (only the top 30 get a second run). I won the second run and finished eighth. Last year I won the first run, then made some mistakes on the second run and ended up second, so I was expecting a good result.

This year, I had a pretty good first run, nothing special but solid, and ended up fourth, 0.26 seconds out of the lead. Perfect position, because I didn’t have the pressure of being in front, but was still within reach. Unfortunately, Erik Schlopy and Jimmy Cochran didn’t qualify for the second run, despite the fact that both guys were skiing great in training before the race. On the second run, I skied awesome on the top and woulda/coulda/shoulda won had the race finished there, but I made a big mistake coming onto the steep face and lost a little confidence skiing down it, which cost me huge. So I finished third. It’s always good to end up on the podium, so I was happy about that.

That night after the race I had to go back up the hill and do a Rossignol photo shoot with two of America’s best racers on the women’s side, Julia Mancuso and Lindsay Vonn. They set up three gates with photography lights near each one, and a photographer snapping away. The girls did their pictures first, but on Julia’s last run the snowmobile broke so I had to hike the course. The perfect recovery to a long day of racing.