Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, Alpine skiing: discovering the slopes

Those who have already arrived say that there is to be left open-mouthed, that everything is pharaonic, that the Chinese have spared no expense for infrastructure and that in the Olympic Village you can eat quite well. Yanqing, the mountain of mysteries, the puzzle that teams from all over the world have tried to solve with the few clues available – photos, satellite images, impressions of the few who have gone there – is revealed day after day. Thursday (tomorrow’s Italian night) the first of the three tests towards the men’s downhill on Sunday is scheduled.

The hill

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Due to Covid, the test events of 2020 and 2021 have been skipped. Therefore, until a few days ago, very little was known about the place where the eleven medals for alpine skiing will be awarded: a hill just over 2000 meters high, located about ninety kilometers north-west of Beijing, in an area where snowfalls are very rare – an average of five centimeters a year – exposed to the sun but also swept by the wind, and very cold. There are seven slopes in the area, but four are those used for the Games: from the left, looking at the mountain, there are the training tracks for fast disciplines, the racing one for downhill and super-G, the one for racing for giant and slalom and the training one for the technical disciplines. The maximum gradient is 68 percent, in the area where the descent starts. The Italian team arrived on Saturday. And on Sunday he put his skis on the snow for the first time, on the giant slope. Yesterday the Azzurri did some super-G. “But from the middle of the track down, because there was too much wind – says the head of the downhill skiers Alberto Ghidoni -. On the contrary, with those conditions a race could not be done. I don’t know how they will respect the program. It was very cold, at least -15 °. Sunday, on the other hand, was a beautiful day, with little wind. They say that there are only five of them a year, let’s hope that’s not true “.

Difficult track

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This is how Christof Innerhofer recounts his first sensations. “At first glance it seemed to me a different track from the World Cup ones – explains the financier from Gais -. I saw a forerunner go down for a while, difficult to interpret but on a scale between 0 and 10 I would say that the difficulty of the descent is 7. You can see that it is a track designed by Bernhard Russi: moving, without pure smoothness sections like the Kitzbuehel road, with medium slopes. There are no jumps but several bumps and a traverse at the top, as in South Korea , even if overall it seems a bit more difficult to me. I don’t think Sunday’s descent will go beyond two minutes into the race. We will have to manage the practice, maybe “pulling” only in two, because otherwise it’s too much “. “They are not easy slopes, very steep – adds Ghidoni -, not for tourists in my opinion, even if here they would like to teach people to ski. In addition to the wind, another factor to be taken into consideration will be skiing. The first day the cross-country skiing it seemed a bit dirty to me, as if there was sand in the snow, so the edge of the skis is at risk “.

More competitive

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Innerhofer, Paris and Marsaglia are the three blues who will participate in the fast races (downhill on Sunday, super-G on Tuesday 8). Casse is missing as is well known, excluded to make room for the slalomist Sala in an extremely thin men’s team. “I heard Mattia both before and after the communication of the team – says Innerhofer -. I’m sorry for him and for the fact that there are only seven of us, very few. I’m happy to have this chance, I feel more competitive than four years ago at PyeongChang. I know what I did wrong there: I came with the reputation of the man of grand events, I felt I had to prove something. Now I am more serene and I find a slope more suited to my characteristics. The snow will be very cold, so you will need the right base. . I don’t think there will be so much to experiment on skis, for me it will be important above all to choose the right shoe, something that I was wrong in South Korea. I know that this year I have not achieved great results, but I also know that as a team we are in growth. After the first test we will know where we are “.