Warm weather scuttles World Cup opener

SÖLDEN, Austria — The opening races of the World Cup season, scheduled for this weekend, were canceled Tuesday because of warm weather and deteriorating course conditions.
    A giant slalom for women on Saturday and one for men on Sunday were scheduled on the Rettenbach Glacier above Sölden. The stop has become one of the most popular on the World Cup circuit.  
    "We can't hold the races because it's too warm now and it rained too much last night," said Chief of Press Ernst Lorenzi at 3:15 GMT, following a meeting between the organizing committee and FIS World Cup Race directors Gunter Hujara and Atle Skaardal.

SÖLDEN, Austria — The opening races of the World Cup season, scheduled for this weekend, were canceled Tuesday because of warm weather and deteriorating course conditions.
    A giant slalom for women on Saturday and one for men on Sunday were scheduled on the Rettenbach Glacier above Sölden. The stop has become one of the most popular on the World Cup circuit.  
    "We can't hold the races because it's too warm now and it rained too much last night," said Chief of Press Ernst Lorenzi at 3:15 GMT, following a meeting between the organizing committee and FIS World Cup directors Gunter Hujara and Atle Skaardal. "You could believe it to be a warm spring day when you walk outside. Everything was fine until last weekend, the conditions were good enough to allow us to put together some nice snowboard events, but it rained too much last night.  
    "It rained [at] the top of the mountain, at over 3,000 meters. We never saw something similar. It's just too bad," Lorenzi added.
    The short-range forecast predicted weather in the mid-to-upper 60s in the valleys of Austria and well into the 40s in the mountains. "There was no way the weather was going to cooperate, so they had to cancel," U.S. women's head coach Patrick Riml said.
    "They didn't have a chance. The organizers did everything they could from making snow and moving it onto the course, from scraping the glacier for more snow and from injecting [i.e., injecting water into the snow to make it more firm]," Riml added. "But it started to rain [Monday] overnight and it rained all through the night and up to 10 or 11 o'clock. There wasn't a lot of snow to begin with, but the rain washed everything away."
    "Both races were canceled and will not be rescheduled,'' FIS Communications Director Christian Knauth said.
    Slalom competitions planned in Levi, Finland, on Nov. 11-12 will start the 2006-07 season. A slalom for men and a slalom for women are scheduled in the northern part of Finland, where it's colder than in the southern part where it's also very warm.
    The U.S. women will train another day or two, then fly home at the end of the week, while the U.S. men — who have been training an hour or so away on the Pitztal Glacier — will stick around for several days of additional training before flying to Colorado. The two teams will train in Colorado — the team had just announced an agreement with Keystone Resort for training on North Peak — and head to Finland in the first week of November.
    "We just finished a four-day bloc with an awesome day of training [Monday]," men's head coach Phil McNichol said in Pitztal. "But there's nothing you can do about the weather — that's no one's fault, and Sölden had done an outstanding job getting the course ready, only to lose it in the rain.
    "The guys were really cracking, just skiing so well and being ready to go on the weekend, but that's done now. So, we'll train here for a few more days, then pull the slalom guys into Colorado, train at Keystone and head to Finland for that race. We'll be on good, icy, manmade snow in Colorado, which is just what we want because that's what they have in Levi."
    The World Cup will make its lone stop in the United States with women's giant slalom and slalom Nov. 25-26 at the Aspen Winternational and men's downhill, GS, slalom and super combined Nov. 30-Dec. 3 at the Visa Birds of Prey races in Beaver Creek, Colorado.

— USSA contributed to this report