Olympic Briefing: Slalom Skiing

Press Clippings: Ted Ligety is one of the top U.S. Alpine skiers and one of our best hopes for an Alpine medal in the Sochi Olympics.  Ligety was 2006 Olympic Gold Medalist in the combined and four time World Cup giant slalom champion. To give you some perspective of what’s involved in the alpine skiing disciplines,  the opening video of this post shows what a slalom run looks like from Ted Ligety’s perspective, shot with a GoPro camera attached to his backpack. One thing you’ll notice: it all happens very fast. For background, here’s a wiki on slalom skiing. For even deeper background here are a couple of nice videos on slalom skiing, one of Petra Vlhova racing in Innsbruck in 2012 and another of the Swiss Skier Sandro Simonet at Innsbruck in the same race meeting. When you look at these videos one things is clear besides the technical excellence of the skiers: we sure miss real, snowy, grey, winter, conditions for the skiing events.

Olympic Briefing: Say What?

Press Clippings: As the Olympics get deeper into the heart of the competition schedule, figure skating is going to move to the head of the line.  Along with figure skating will come the figure skating commentators, who will toss out a series of terms, nomenclatures, and phrases that are indecipherable to anyone but…..figure skating commentators. Fear not: our friends at TheWire.com have produced a rather magnificent, GIF-llustrated guide to ice skating jumps. Read it; review it; take it all in and then you will be among the very few who know the difference between a Salchow and a Triple Lutz. Such knowledge might not get you into MIT but it would get you a position as……a figure skating commentator.

Olympic Briefing: Figure Skating

Press Clippings: The next wave of endorsement queens is headed your way from Sochi. Although the formal name in the United States is the Women’s Figure Skating Competition  at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, we in America already know–or will soon know–these competitors as endorsers for everything from breakfast cereal to energy drinks to airlines. Hey, it’s an amateur sport and a girl’s got to make a living, right? Only…there’s a problem for the Americans. It’s a very young (they get younger every year), very talented, and very Russian young skater named Julia (Yulia if you’re following us on our Cyrillic alphabet blog) Lipnitskaia. She is a heat seeking missile on ice and the heat she is seeking emanates from a Gold Olympic Medal in the Women’s Figure Skating. You can watch the talented young Julia in the opening video to this post but take our word for it: she’s the real deal. As for Figure skating in general and women’s figure skating in particular, you’ve covered:  More information from generally reputable sources  is available at this wiki on Olympic Figure Skating and in the link-to commentary by Alice Cook who presents her own preview of the American women looking for medals in Sochi, courtesy of the Boston Globe. Now about that endorsement contract…do you have an agent?

Olympic Briefing: Giant Slalom

Press Clippings: The Giant Slalom, along with slalom, is considered one of the two technical disciplines of Alpine skiing. The difference between the two is that slalom gates are very closely spaced, requiring extremely quick changes in direction and giant slalom (GS) gates are more widely spaced and taken at a higher speed. Some experts and enthusiasts believe that Giant Slalom is the most perfect representation of Alpine skiing, because it combines the speed and vertical drop of the downhill with the turning/directional control of slalom, which is performed in a very staccato series of abrupt turns.  The GS gates are not quite as widely separated as the Super-G gates, but the technique is basically the same. Get the GS basics down in this wiki and then check out this video of American Bode Miller at the Solden GS in 2013 or his American Teammate Ted Ligety in the Giant Slalom in Austria.