Sochi roundup Monday: The boss weighs in; travel stories

By Published On: February 10th, 2014Comments Off on Sochi roundup Monday: The boss weighs in; travel stories
A view of the alpine venues at Rosa Khutor from the 3S gondola. (Tim Etchells)

A view of the alpine venues at Rosa Khutor from the 3S gondola. (Tim Etchells)

An alternate path to enlightenment

As the Winter Olympics reached Day Four, another early morning trip to the Rosa Khutor Alpine Center beckoned. After a late night at the ski jumping center (Dawaj Polsko!), maybe loomed is a better word. From our hotel, you travel the length of Gornaya Karusel 960, a mountain village filled with media hotels, via sidewalks, roads and stairways made mostly of paving bricks. Then you board a gondola that takes you down to the main road in Krasnaya Polyana. From there, it’s a brisk one kilometer walk to the media center, where you go through a security screen not unlike the ministrations of the TSA. Then it’s a (usually) short wait for the TM16 bus, followed by a 35-minute drive, give or take, to the base of the Rosa Khutor Alpine Center. Then another, quicker security check, and finally a short hike uphill to the venue media center. Door to door, it’s about an hour. On a good day.

But we’d heard a rumor that there was another way. Bypassing the media center trip, at the bottom of the Gornaya Karusel gondola you catch the TM13 bus that goes up the valley to the village of Rosa Khutor, mostly a collection of tourist hotels. Then you catch another bus, the TM19 – driven, if you’re really lucky, by a guy who is a dead-ringer for Christopher Walken, if perhaps a bit meaner looking, but who is actually quite friendly and extremely tolerant of pidgin Russian.

He’ll take you a couple of miles farther up the valley, where you can go through security, then cross the road via a three-story tall pedestrian bridge that takes you to the base of the Rosa Khutor 3S gondola. This is unlike any gondola we’ve been on, more of a gondola-tram hybrid, brand new, and built by Doppelmayer, with shiny, navy blue 22-passenger cars with cushy faux-leather seats, lots of stainless steel, and the best views you can get of the valley and the surrounding Caucasus Mountains.

Rosa Khutor extreme park, seen from RK 3S gondola. (Tim Etchells)

Rosa Khutor extreme park, seen from RK 3S gondola. (Tim Etchells)

After a vertiginous take-off, giving you a view of an oxbow on the Myzymta River far below, you ride across several ridges, with sweeping mountain vistas. Then you rumble into a mid-station that’s a short walk from the Rosa Khutor Extreme Park, and then, out of the station, you fly over the park’s several competition venues: mogul hill, halfpipe, slopestyle course. From there, you float over to the Rosa Khutor Alpine Center, getting a panoramic view of the mountains and the alpine race courses on the way.

For media types, it’s free, and it can’t be beat, view-wise. It turns an hour trip into an hour and a half, but it’s well worth getting up half an hour early. Well, at least once.

The boss was understandably pleased

Bill Marolt, the U.S. Ski Team’s president and CEO, was in the finish at Rosa Khutor when USST athlete Julia Mancuso shimmied on the podium as bronze medalist in the women’s super combined. Mancuso, best known for her prowess in speed events, won the downhill portion of the combined pretty handily in the morning, against some talented downhillers, and hung on tenaciously on the tough Rosa Khutor slalom hill to finish just behind a couple of pretty good slalom skiers: Maria Hoefl-Riesch and Nicole Hosp. Which put a smile on Marolt’s face.

“She is everything you want your athletes to be,” he said. “She has the ability to focus. She has the ability to, at the moment, bring herself to her best possible level of preparation and put it all out there. It’s a great message to all of the people involved in our sport, in competitive skiing, to the parents, to young kids, to volunteers, to coaches, people all the way up to the elite team, our coaches and our elite team. People learn a lot by just watching what she does and how she does it. I just watched her being interviewed over there and she said, ‘Slalom is not my strength, I hardly ever train it.’ You think about what she did today to get this medal, she’s a gamer.

“As you saw her season evolve, she just gets a little better, a little better, a little better. And you see how she’s trained here. That’s preparation, that’s getting ready, and that’s what she does. It’s awesome to watch it.”

Coming up tomorrow:
(all times Sochi time; subtract nine hours for EST)

Cross-country. The U.S. Ski Team’s sprint world champion Kikkan Randall goes for Olympic gold in the women’s cross-country sprint at the Laura Cross-Country Ski and Biathlon Center. The finals start at 5:22 p.m.

Ski jumping. For the first time ever, women have their own ski jumping event at the Olympics, and the U.S. skiers – world champion Sarah Hendrickson, Lindsey Van and Jessica Jerome – are all medal contenders. Things get started Tuesday night at the RusSki Gorki Ski Jumping Center with the first round at 9:30 and the finals at 10:20.

Freestyle. Women’s ski slopestyle also makes its Olympic debut on Tuesday, at the Rosa Khutor Extreme Park. Finals are at 1 p.m.

Snowboard. And what’s become one of the premier events of the Winter Games, the halfpipe, takes place at the Rosa Khutor Extreme Park, with the finals at 9:30 p.m. And the guy who pretty much single-handedly made it one of the must-see competitions every four years, U.S. rider Shaun White, is back to defend his gold medals from 2010 and 2006.

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About the Author: Tim Etchells

Former Ski Racing editor