It's like the Great Pumpkin shows up in Aspen

ASPEN, Colo. -- Lindsey Vonn has never won a giant slalom on the women's World Cup tour, and she didn't here Saturday. For those anticipating Vancouver and the 2010 Olympics -- all of you getting all geeked up already, what with the seeming Phelpsification of Lindsey Vonn -- some advice:

Relax.

What happened here Saturday, in the only American stop the women's tour makes on the World Cup circuit, underscored the incredible number of variables that make elite ski racing so thoroughly unpredictable.

Alpine racing is unlike anything else on the international sports scene. Which is why it makes for incredible theater.

So, yes,  of course Lindsey Vonn is the two-time World Cup overall winner. Yes, she is legitimately a contender in every race she enters, and she races in all five disciplines.

But, no, and this is very much unlike the way Michael Phelps was widely perceived in the lead-up to and through the Beijing Olympics in 2008, where he would win a record eight gold medals, Vonn is no lock for anything.

That's no knock on her.

It's simply a reflection of the way ski racing is, and will forever be.

To start, the Olympic courses will be set -- much like the World Cup tour -- on terrain that is, to be kind, highly variable. There will be pitches so steep it takes your breath away just to look, much less summon the courage to actually throw your body, down such a thing. Those pitches, meanwhile, will veer into flats and turns that produce G-force stresses like those a  military fighter pilot might feel.

By comparison: It is assuredly tough in the pool to grind out laps, not just physically but mentally. But let's be honest -- you pretty much don't have to worry about serious injury midway through a lap in the pool. 

Every time your ski tips edge out from the start house gate you have to stuff that fear down.

One of the top American women, Resi Stiegler, who had been due to start here Saturday, broke her left leg in training just a few days ago and is out for the season. One of the top American men, TJ Lanning, suffered a horrific crash in a men's World Cup downhill event Saturday in Lake Louise, Canada; he was airlifted off the course.

Moreover, and this is an element that's almost impossible to understand until you're up close, these courses are deliberately made all the more diabolical because they are, to use the term of art, "injected."

That means they're infused with water. They are thus rivers of ice.

Megan McJames, who didn't finish the second of her two runs here Saturday, described the Aspen course as "rattle-y." Vonn called it "pond ice." Another of the Americans, Sarah Schleper, who did manage to finish both runs, finishing 23rd, called it "ice-arena slick," adding, "Even for us, it's hard."

Of course there is the light -- which is bright or flat or something else altogether.

And the prospect of snow -- sweet little flurries or the hard stuff that comes down sideways and stings just to be out in it. In Lake Louise on Saturday, you could barely see the start house because of the snow; in Aspen, there was no snow and it was so warm you didn't even need gloves to be comfortable amid the scene at the finish line.

Worst of all, maybe, is wind. Vonn, speaking Friday to reporters, said she hates the wind most. "Flat light, you can overcome that," she said. "But the wind is something that you can't overcome. No matter how good your run is, you'll get 10th place."

Finally, there are things you can hardly imagine might come into play, and then do, and you go, what?

Like, maybe you're Lindsey Vonn and you hit a rock.

A rock. As if this wasn't a women's World Cup stop but instead a scene from a "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown." No podium finish for you. You get a rock.

Vonn, skiing maybe halfway down the first of what everyone supposed would be two runs, looking to improve on the fourth-place she took in Aspen last year in the GS, a career best, hit a rock with an edge of her right ski.

The rock gouged and nicked maybe two feet out of the length of the ski.

Lindsey still had half of the first run to go but she was, at that precise instant her ski ran over the rock, done.

She would end up in 39th place after Run One, more than four seconds behind Kathrin Hoelzl of Germany, the 2009 GS world champion, who would go on to win Saturday's race; only the top 30 qualify for the second of the day's two runs.

The rock left Lindsey in a hard place. She said, "My right foot just wasn't holding anymore. I slid out about four times. I was just trying to make it down. I was like laughing at myself because I knew how big of a tool I looked like."

Lindsey Vonn never looks like a tool -- even if she might laughingly say so. 

But it tells you just how demanding ski racing is at this level that she thought she looked like a tool. Because a stupid rock that there's no way you could possibly see means four seconds-plus, and in ski racing four seconds-plus might as well be an eternity.

"It's what's exciting and challenging about the sport," Bill Marolt, the president and chief executive of the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Assn., said here late Saturday afternoon. "People don't understand how hard it is to do it.

"Every time a swimmer jumps in the pool and swims his distance, it's exactly the same distance. I don't know -- I'm not sophisticated enough to know about water, and fast water, but it's always the same distance. The basketball court is always the same length. In all the sports there's a certain consistency; in this one, there's not.

"It's weather. It's snow. It's equipment. It's a million different things. That's what makes these people so unique and so -- so cool."

It's also why it's not in the least bit fair to Lindsey Vonn to predict she's going to win five medals in Vancouver. She might. Which would, indeed, be cool.

Then again, she might hit a rock. Which would be as weird and unpredictable as, say, slicing your thumb open on a bottle of celebratory champagne.

As if that would ever happen.