Landing in Austria

Hello from Austria! It has been a week or so since my last blog from the races in Beaver Creek. As a team we started off having a great week with some of the younger guys really stepping up and punching in there in the super-combined. The downhill was good as well, the highlight being Nyman's second and Andrew Weibrecht's huge move into 10th. I ended up 20th, which was OK, but nowhere near great. I crashed on the first training run, as I mentioned in my last post, then the second run was canceled and I didn't get to race the combined due to some changes in the quota spots. So my race run was my first trip down the mountain this year, which was tough. I ended up skiing OK but was uncertain in a few sections on the top and I was slow up there -- eight-tenths up there and I ended up 1.05 seconds out. I think if I went right back up in the top I could have trimmed at least a half-second off in three turns. Oh well.

The super-G was a bit of a disaster for me and the team. There was a section at the bottom, coming out of the "abyss" part of the DH that was a really quick transition coming over a blind roll, and we got a confusing course report that put us in the right place but didn't emphasize the importance of how quick you needed to move. I got to the right place but was still on my right foot rather than my left and was out in the powder for the next four turns, losing 2.5 seconds on the last split. I was 15th when I went out, with my last two splits before that being top 10. It happens. I am feeling good about my skiing though.
We stayed and trained on the race hill (two days of super-G) and it was the best training I have ever had. It was great weather, world cup quality snow and all to ourselves. It was the equivalent of a year's worth of SG racing in two days (six runs).

Then it was on to Europe! We hit the check in and took up every scale of an entire section of Denver International and got checked in the night before. Travel was pretty uneventful except for the guy that sat next to me in 20 I. He managed to sit sideways in his seat, putting his knee into my leg and breath a mixture of old beer and festering garlic buttered pasta into my face for 6 hours. I felt like I was in that commercial where the lady puts the breath freshener into a guys mouth, minus the actual possession of said breath freshener. It was brutal.

After the travel we drove to Innsbruck where we have a condo we stay in just out of town. As I drove through the streets I noticed an ad featuring the Austrian men's team in their "budgie smugglers" as my friend Bud (Craig Branch) would say. I will just leave on that note, which is kind of unsettling.

Thanks for the comments by the way!