Without wanting to go need a PSIA vs. Race debate.
Honest question, how do you find the technical discussion and techniques as they relate to the race side of things. In particular to how they relate to getting an athlete down a course set in the quickest possible time.
That's a great question.
It all feeds back: from top racers, through these guys and back to me as a coach and back to making some racers fast. As you see a couple explaining, they watch and learn from top racers, which they consider to have the cleanest and best technique, for good reason. Then they learn and talk about what they're working on, in their own words and there's always something to pickup, reinforce, different points of view or wording of the same concept etc.
In the racer's world, there are three big dimensions of greatness and being super-fast:
technique,
athleticism and
tactics. You can get ahead with reasonable technique and make up with great athleticism and tactics etc. Rarely, some will have all three and completely dominate the field and MS and MH are good examples.
This explains why one needs to pick the models carefully and why
technical purists will be able to find issues even with most WC skiers. However, even so, most racers, say at FIS and up will have good technique - usually far above recreational levels, because they
intently and constantly worked on it for tens and hundreds of days a season, for many seasons. As a racer you rarely "just ski" - even free skiing is
technical free skiing, with a purpose and drills and if you compound the effort of a driven individual to improve over tens of thousands of hours at one thing, you'll get a very good skier. You will not be fast with poor technique and often, even at the WC level, many of the differences are obvious differences in setup and "default" technique. Sometimes tactics.
Anyways, the way I see it: in terms of technique, it is simple and all higher level coaches agree - as I've worked my way up and started working with and learning from higher and higher level coaches, including several experienced on the WC and similar, I have not met a higher level coach that does not agree on the fundamentals and it simply is (big secret of high level racing revealed... not, I think) around carving as cleanly as possible and especially at the top of the turn. And you will hear I think Ballou saying he's working on exactly that, to get a clean round arc.
If you do a lot of reading and thinking to understand biomechanics, anatomy and physics as they relate to skiing etc, you can work it back from that simple single concept of carving the top of the turn and, using simple biomechanics, you'll discover all the elements of great technique - it's very much like Newtonian physics.
And then you see these great skiers, doing pretty much that and using those top racers as models, figuring it out and learning and explaining in their own words things they work on and it's the same elements, like staying lower etc and it all feeds back into "clean" technique and then eventually back into making other racers faster.
Not everything they say is applicable on a race course, for sure.
But often, the freedom they have of being outside of a course makes their technique elements more visible and that makes them better models (good or bad) - if that makes sense. If you are to watch a racer, always choose to watch their free skiing or training at well below race speeds.
The other thing I find relevant and this would be most important for many pros is... uhh... not sure how to put it without stepping on some taboos... high level technique elements are not in most coaching or instruction manuals I've had access to. Sure, the basics are and can explain everything - I'm sure you hear that on and on, but if someone doesn't tell you to do X, you'd never likely discover it on your own, and there's many Xs that need learned and reinforced as you work your way through them. There's also many cues and directions that lead you to X. Even if someone tells you to do X, you would not understand the range of motion required for great skiing and how coming short slightly on X destroys Y and without Y you can't carry speed through that gate combination etc! All manuals I've seen get fuzzy beyond the basics. Many reasons for that, including the fact that it pays pretty well to know these and be hired at this or that academy or national team... so then why would you put them in a 20$ book ... but these guys, in their talks, do touch on some of these elements - that you won't find in a manual.
Also, because of that, most coaches and instructors that know these elements, do not have a standardized language or framework to communicate them: they were learned over decades of experience, during which the manuals and words have changed tens of times and it stands to reason that the more you learn from, the better your mental models become, including not just the technique, but how to teach it.
So... like I said: it all feeds back, either if you're lucky, from some WC coach that teaches X or from these guys that watch and figure it out and then explain it in other words. And then you, the coach, improve some racer's technique and make them faster.
The bonus, for me, is that then they take it and apply it to for instance all shapes and sizes of turns, like "korean turns" for lack of a better word. And that gives me a different perspective. And model: these guys don't do the standard "race turns", they do all shapes and sizes and it's awesome to watch, too.
And when you think you've seen it all, you see Andreas killing it off piste with the 30m WC sticks
