Mikaela Shiffrin looked tired. She wasn’t arcing as smoothly in this, her last race of the season; she wasn’t fighting as much. The fact that even that performance at Aspen on Sunday still put her in sixth—one many athletes on the World Cup circuit would love to have, yet considered a lackluster one for Shiffrin these…
ST. MORITZ, Switzerland — If you wanted to script the most fitting, the most unnerving-yet-uplifting race to cap off the two-week World Alpine Ski Championships, you couldn’t have done better than today’s men’s slalom.
ST. MORITZ, Switzerland — With a line-up like today’s, it’s easy to make the mistake of predicting the podium.
ST. MORITZ, Switzerland — There was a crash today at the men’s giant slalom in the Alpine World Ski Championships, but it wasn’t a racer that hurtled to the ground. It was a cable camera, its wires severed by a too-close flyover from the Swiss Air Force. That was frightening enough, but it was just inches from true…
“The first time I was at the start I was really scared,” says former ski racing phenom Didier Cuche at the beginning of the documentary STREIF: One Hell of a Ride. “All of the guys are making jokes in the evening. They’re saying, ‘Don’t unpack too much your stuff, because I don’t want to pack for you tomorrow if you…
The 2015 World Ski Championships have had some historic firsts. The first World Champs to be held in the U.S. this century. The oldest women's winner (Tina Maze, 31, downhill). And then the oldest World Champs winner, period (Hannes Reichelt, 34 downhill). The first skier to win the same discipline in three straight…
Late into a giant slalom run that looked like it would clinch her second gold in the 2015 World Ski Championships, Anna Fenninger suddenly snowplowed.
Shortly after his run, just before mounting the most important podium of his career—and the first World Championships downhill podium for the U.S. since 2005—Travis Ganong was already thinking of powder. In particular, the two feet of powder that had hit the slopes at home in Lake Tahoe the night before. "I've dreamed…
Tina Maze made history yesterday, and not just as the first world champion to double as a Slovenian pop star. At 31, she's now the oldest female skier to have won gold in a Championship event.
At the World Championships downhill events that started today—the women raced this morning, the men tomorrow—it all comes down to a minute and a half. That's about how long it will take most of the racers to come screaming down more than 8,000 feet of steeps that reach up to a 34-degree gradient.
The sky over Beaver Creek's Birds of Prey course was bluebird-bright, the grandstand was stuffed with 3,500 people screaming their lungs out, and Bode Miller–Olympic medalist, self-taught skiing dynamo and great divider of opinions–was in the starting gate.
Mikaela Shiffrin's style is sure-footed and rhythmic. Like the best slalom skiers, she sets up her turns high. She thinks a few turns ahead. And Shiffrin—who in Sochi last winter became the youngest racer ever to win Olympic gold in slalom and who thus spent several days as a cheery, effervescent staple of NBC…
In a way, it's fitting for Bode Miller's Olympic career to end like this, if this is indeed the end. Having re-injured his knee in Wednesday's giant slalom, in which he finished 20th, the 36-year-old absented himself from the last ski race of the Sochi Olympics, today's slalom. He'd spent his career sliding and…
This morning, 18-year-old Mikaela Shiffrin became the youngest skier to win gold in the Olympic slalom. Ever. How? She took on a course with the kind of calm usually shown by athletes who have been on the race circuit for, well, as long as she's been alive.
Ted Ligety is all about technique. He's precise. Controlled. Clean. He's also a complete risk-taker. Each of those so-called precise, controlled, clean turns? They're perpetually a razor's-edge (or a millisecond) from disaster.
The first measured ski jump was explicitly a show of manhood. In 1809, the story goes, a lieutenant in the Norwegian military launched himself 9.5 meters through the air "to show his soldiers what a courageous fellow he was." The sport that grew out of that jump was likewise a test of manliness—far too dangerous, it…
Olympic skiing began this morning—men's downhill, airing on tape delay at 11 a.m.—and if you're like most viewers, you either watch the sport with quadrennial befuddlement or you change the channel entirely. As a former ski racer, and someone who started scooting around on skis at about the same time I was working out…
