TORINO: Alpine: Frenchwoman faces the challenge, gains moral victory

TORINO: Alpine: Frenchwoman faces the challenge, gains moral victorySESTRIERE, Italy – It was a face only a mother could love. It was 20 shades of purple.

Carole Montillet-Carles’ face was so swollen and bruised that she had to tape her eyes open for the Olympic women’s downhill.

Montillet-Carles’ mother, Michele, hugged and kissed her daughter, pausing long to celebrate the 28th-place finish as if the Frenchwoman had won the race again, like she had in 2002.

‘It was very important for my girl to do that race, so that she would have no regrets’ said her mother. ‘It was very courageous.’

Montillet’s face was 20 shades of purple, battered by the crash she took in Monday’s training run. She had hurt a rib also, and wore a therapeutic wrap around her midsection.

She didn’t decide to race until Wednesday morning’s inspection – ‘reconnaissance’ as the French skiers call it.

‘I was in pain, but I knew I would be able to clench my teeth and bear with it’ said Montillet-Carles. ‘I have been preparing for this for too long, and I thought I was capable of doing something, but the light was not good.’

She said the choice to race was entirely hers, and that she thought she could do something big in the upcoming super G.

‘The time I didn’t spend training I tried to spend on the video yesterday’ said Montillet-Carles.

Like many of the athletes on the course, she was unable to make out the sharp terrain in the course.

‘All of a sudden I put myself on a defensive attitude and I was not mastering the course’ she said. ‘I didn’t have to wait until the finish line to know that I was not doing something very good today.’

Still, she fared better than some of the other skiers, who got rattled so far off the track they ended up in the Blue Room.

The B-netting lining most World Cup courses is red. When a racer plunges into it, snagged like a stingray in a fisherman’s net, the world becomes a sudden blur of red – racers call it ‘making a visit to the Red Room.’

At the Olympics, the nets are blue, and racers and coaches have adjusted their lingo accordingly.

On Wednesday, at the women’s downhill at San Sicario, Tina Weirather made a visit to the Blue Room. ‘It wasn’t too scary’ said the 16-year-old Liechtenstein racer, whose father won the 1982 downhill World Championships title, and whose mother won four Olympic medals, including gold in both slalom and giant slalom in 1980.

‘I can’t remember’ said the youngster, a student at the elite Stams Ski Gymnasium in Austria, when asked what her earliest Olympic memory was. ‘Now my ankles hurt from that crash. I have to go. I have to get ready for the super G.’