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Primoz

Skiing the powder
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I would bet my bottom dollar today Mikaela is on Ledecka's skis from yesterday.
It is common knowledge that the top athlete gets the pick of the fastest ski setup from the mfg. Obviously Ledeckea's skis were the fastest skis in the Atomic pool on Friday.
That doesn't really go like this ;) There is "Atomic pool" once skis are in factory. But once serviceman picks those skis, they are not "Atomic (or any other company) pool" anymore, but skier's pool, and there's no way anyone would let anyone else ski their skis. Sure, skis are still owned by company, and for majority of top racers (some Austrians are exception, as Austria has whole bunch of pool servicemen, but that's due other reasons irrelevant for this discussion), their servicemen are employed by ski companies rather then ski federations, and it happens from time to time, but only for (very) lower ranked skiers, that guys from company come and take skis that proved to be really fast and give them to higher ranked ones (not for race but for whole season). But in general skis are assigned to certain serviceman and therefore certain skiers. Most of servicemen have 2 or 3 skiers that they prepare skis for, and even between these skiers, who are with same serviceman and same ski company, there's now way they would ever "borrow" skis to other one. So no, there's no way Shiffrin would get Ledecka's skis for race, or vice versa. That BS from Olympics, that Ledecka was on Shiffrin's skis is just that... BS ;)
 

geepers

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Forgive my newbie ignorance of World Cup but why is there a 1st downhill on Friday (with winner Ester Ledecka ) and a 2nd downhill on Saturday (with winner Nicole Schmidhofer ) at Lake Louise?
 
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4ster

4ster

Just because you can doesn’t mean you should!
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Today’s SG start list
B09EBC81-6F07-4602-82A0-3C1EC46C331E.jpeg


Shiffrin
Rebensburg
Venier
 
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Teppaz

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Is Ledecka training with the Slovenian team? At the second Lake Louise DH, she was radioing intel to Stuhec, who was about to start her race. You could hear it on the NBC Gold feed.
 

Primoz

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Pretty much everyone, including Austrians who have biggest support team of anyone, cooperate with someone. For proper speed training and track coverage, you need so many people, not even Austrians manage on their own. So yeah teams work together. Not everyone with everyone and Austria and Switzerland will never work together, but smaller teams most of time work together, and depending on time and occasion try to work together with bigger teams. But that doesn't mean they train together as single team. So no Ledecka doesn't train together in general with Stuhec (she's not part of Slovenian team) but they work together when chances are for this.
 

Blue Streak

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Forgive my newbie ignorance of World Cup but why is there a 1st downhill on Friday (with winner Ester Ledecka ) and a 2nd downhill on Saturday (with winner Nicole Schmidhofer ) at Lake Louise?
It’s a Twofer :daffy:
 

Swede

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Brsides the obvios ones, I think the Italians Marsaglia and Brignone looks interesting and Gagnon is my dark horse. But it depends on the set.
 

Black Dog

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That doesn't really go like this ;) There is "Atomic pool" once skis are in factory. But once serviceman picks those skis, they are not "Atomic (or any other company) pool" anymore, but skier's pool, and there's no way anyone would let anyone else ski their skis. Sure, skis are still owned by company, and for majority of top racers (some Austrians are exception, as Austria has whole bunch of pool servicemen, but that's due other reasons irrelevant for this discussion), their servicemen are employed by ski companies rather then ski federations, and it happens from time to time, but only for (very) lower ranked skiers, that guys from company come and take skis that proved to be really fast and give them to higher ranked ones (not for race but for whole season). But in general skis are assigned to certain serviceman and therefore certain skiers. Most of servicemen have 2 or 3 skiers that they prepare skis for, and even between these skiers, who are with same serviceman and same ski company, there's now way they would ever "borrow" skis to other one. So no, there's no way Shiffrin would get Ledecka's skis for race, or vice versa. That BS from Olympics, that Ledecka was on Shiffrin's skis is just that... BS ;)

Ok, thanks for the info. Just trying to understand how it all works.
So if i understand it correctly Ledecka who was as of Friday morning probably the most bottom ranked DH in the World Cup, has her own exclusive pool of Atomic equipment that no other athlete has access to no matter what the circumstances? Even if they turn out to be the fastest setup of the day by a wide margin?
I can understand Ledecka not having access to MS's setup but not the other way around?
I think back to when Bode is an announcer he stresses that a racer needs the fastest setup to perform well, especially on glider tracks which LL is.
 

Primoz

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@Black Dog she probably doesn't have same size pool of skis as best downhillers, but I'm pretty sure Shiffrin doesn't have that either, but otherwise yeah, she has her own set of skis, from which her serviceman picks best for the day. With donwhillers ranked around 50, that's 6 to 8 pairs, and with top company skiers, that's 25-30 pairs (for downhill, for tech it's normally less, and we don't count Hirscher or Kristoffersen into these, as these two guys are special), but each one has it's own set of skis, that other skiers have no access to them, even if your name would be Hirscher or Shiffrin.
Otherwise yeah, fastest setup is always preference, but even for LL it's not ski that bring victory, it's skier. ;)
 

Swede

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Yes, bettering the track. Weather looks amazing though. Set looks straight.
 
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4ster

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Yes, bettering the track. Weather looks amazing though. Set looks straight.
I think too straight for Shiffrin. Delago came in late & pushed Venier off the podium. Rebensburg just looked good all weekend!

Results...
7DEA4A76-E1B4-48A9-9F2D-2EC80CC5FD11.jpeg
 

Lifer

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A shout out Michelle Gisin (SUI) - she matches Shiffrin for scoring World Cup Points in all disciplines contested. The only two on the women's circuit. Impressive.
 

hbear

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Porino has mentioned numerous times the struggles of the Canadian team to secure funding, etc. Can someone in the know shed more light on this?

A entire conversation could be built upon this question......
Big picture, ski racing is a very niche sport that does not draw significant viewers in Canada (not many viewers = not a lot of sponsor money/funding....unlike say Figure Skating). On top of that, unfortunately we aren’t dominating either and nobody here can appreciate a top 10 finish. Sad reality. Lots of sport politics as well (same is everyone else I suppose). Remember when Larisa Yurkiw was effectively cut from the team when they collapsed the speed program and she had to self fund....then had a great season?

I remember somebody bringing up a comment along the lines of, as a sponsor would you rather have your money tied up with the Alpine team and their results and lack of eyeballs on their sport....or something like Ski Cross which is more exciting to the average viewer and your logo could be on the top of the podium?
 

Muleski

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Just happened to think of this, and played around a bit with the FIS site.

These two DH results by Ledecka at LL will lower her DH points to, I believe, 2.56. Her world raking will drop from the 40's to about 6, or so. Nice move. Sets her up very well for her future starts.

She is simply an amazing athlete, from all conversations and reports. I would say that her snowboarding has clearly been a big plus in her speed skiing development. Pretty neat.
 

hbear

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Super hard worker and driven.
We saw her train SG hard at our mountain and when the rest of the WC crew was leaving she strapped on the snowboard and spent the afternoon training on her that.
 

S.H.

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Just happened to think of this, and played around a bit with the FIS site.

These two DH results by Ledecka at LL will lower her DH points to, I believe, 2.56. Her world raking will drop from the 40's to about 6, or so. Nice move. Sets her up very well for her future starts.

She is simply an amazing athlete, from all conversations and reports. I would say that her snowboarding has clearly been a big plus in her speed skiing development. Pretty neat.
Pushes her into 10th on the WCSL (from outside the top 20) ... so ... I anticipate seeing her go out bib 1 in VDI
 

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