Overall World Cup winner Marco Odermatt calls for a fundamental reform in the Ski World Cup. He would delete the Alpine Combined and parallel competitions.
In an interview with the Swiss “Blick”, Marco Odermatt, the winner of the opening race in Sölden, made it clear: “For me it is clear: All the half-battle (insufficient, editor’s note) disciplines such as the combination and the parallel competition should be finally deleted.”
Suggestion: 10 times 4 competitions
For the Swiss, the Ski World Cup should only consist of the four core disciplines of downhill, super-G, giant slalom and slalom. Specifically, Odermatt proposes running exactly ten World Cups from each of these disciplines so that the chances of the overall World Cup for speed specialists and technicians are the same.
The sports show expert Felix Neureuther had repeatedly questioned the Alpine combination in the past: “I don’t want to see athletes finishing four, five seconds behind. There’s no tension there. It would have been better if it had been abolished.” In fact, there is no Alpine combination on the racing calendar this season. The parallel events are also hardly present, only a race for women and men is planned in Lech/Zürs in mid-November.
The Swiss Marco Odermatt
Lack of equal opportunities in the discussion
The two fringe disciplines, combination and parallel event, no longer seem to be the big problem of the Ski World Cup. The much longer topic is equal opportunities for technicians and speed specialists in the overall World Cup. There have been discussions here for years.
As early as 2015, the former Super-G world champion Hannes Reichelt criticized the division of the races in the “Kleine Zeitung”: “If you get two speed balls and aren’t also good at giant slalom, you don’t have a chance for the overall World Cup. On the other hand, if you win the slalom and giant slalom, you are automatically the overall winner. That’s unfair”
Kill the exception
In the spring of 2019, Marcel Hirscher was the overall World Cup winner for the eighth time in a row. His Austrian compatriot Vincent Kriechmayr said in the “Salzburger Nachrichten” that Dominik Paris, who was outstanding in the speed disciplines at the time, had no chance of preventing Hirscher’s victory due to the unfair distribution of the races: “Domme (Dominik Paris) is incredible. But even if he had won every speed race, he could not have won the overall World Cup. Maybe we should reconsider.”
In the past ten years, only one pure speed specialist could win the overall World Cup, the Norwegian Aleksander Aamodt Kilde (2019/2020).
Marco Odermatt’s chances for the crystal ball remain good
In the current season, however, the technicians could actually feel slightly disadvantaged: 22 speed races and “only” twenty technical races were planned (including the canceled Matterhorn descent).
Marco Odermatts can hardly care. Either way, his chances of winning the big crystal ball again remain good, because the Swiss is an all-rounder and regularly climbs onto the podium in giant slalom, downhill and super-G.