The World Cup weekend in Cortina degenerated into an orgy of falls. Now drivers are expressing criticism. The reasons for the large number of accidents are being discussed.
This year’s Ski World Cup weekend in Cortina d’Ampezzo will not be remembered for its brilliant sporting achievements. Rather, the speed races (two downhill runs, one Super-G) in the Italian Alpine resort were overshadowed by a huge number of crashes, some of them serious.
The best in the downhill circuit was one of the first to get caught. Michaela Shiffrin fell on Friday and was transported away by helicopter. Her colleagues Priska Nufer and Corinne Suter (torn cruciate ligament) fell in the same place. They weren’t the only ones.
Now the reasons for so many falls are being debated. Was the route too dangerous? Did the drivers lack mental and physical freshness after many races in January?
The Swiss Michelle Gisin, also one of the fall victims, made it clear in an interview with “Blick”: “The FIS has to analyze exactly what went wrong. So many injured – that can’t be the case, that shouldn’t happen.”
Gisin’s friend attacks FIS: “Shame on you!”
Her partner Luca de Aliprandini, also a ski racer, took on the FIS even harder. He wrote on social media in the direction of the International Ski Federation: “Shame on you!”
Gisin saw the route profile as the main reason for the many accidents: “There have always been a lot of waves in Cortina. But now the waves turned into jumps. And you ended up on flat terrain – at 100 km/h that’s just not good.”
Her Austrian colleague Cornelia Hütter sees it similarly: “Landings on flat surfaces are never good. On Saturday I was in the air a total of 15 times – that’s not usual in the World Cup.”
However, FIS race director Peter Gerdol replied: “The waves make the riders squat down. So that slows them down – that’s exactly what we want.”
Neureuther: “Women want to be challenged”
Ex-slalom specialist and TV expert Felix Neureuther blamed driving errors for the falls. He told “Blick”: “Of course you can say: Should the jumps have gone that far? Nevertheless, the women want to be challenged.”
Neureuther, however, sees mistakes in the race preparation: “The bigger problem is that jumps are not trained – especially in the Super-G. Where do you want to train that? This needs a lot more training, especially in women’s sport, especially if you lands and then has to immediately start the momentum. The women ski well.”
And further: “That’s why I never did speed disciplines, because I couldn’t do that either. You have to be able to jump.”
Lara Gut-Behrami, who won the Super-G on Sunday, noted that every fall made the riders even more unsettled. “I just didn’t want to take any risks. I didn’t drive such tight radii as I usually do,” she told the Swiss news agency Keystone-SDA.
Concentrating purely on skiing became more and more difficult in Cortina: Gut-Behrami: “But that was difficult in the last three days because skiing was no longer really the focus. I think that’s also the explanation for the many falls . If your legs and head aren’t completely fresh, it won’t take much for you to end up in the net.”
The World Cup, however, doesn’t give the athletes a break. The giant slalom at Kronplatz in South Tyrol is already on the program on Tuesday.