Attack From the Back: Erik Read flips bibs like no other

When Erik Read was cut from the Canadian national team roster two years ago, he told himself that he would be back no matter what it took. He has returned this season with the strongest performance of his young career, and arguably the most solid performance by any Canadian so far this winter.

Read has been trying to make a home for himself on the World Cup circuit for the past few years. At the same time, he has posted a 4.0 GPA at The University of Denver, won the 2016 NCAA slalom title, and claimed the 2016 NorAm overall title. It took him just one year to be renamed to the Canadian team; and if his results are any indication, he won’t be leaving anytime soon.

Read first broke into the top 10 on the World Cup circuit in Val d’Isere, France, this season. On Dec. 4, he skied into ninth place from bib 52 in the first GS there (the replacement for the lost Beaver Creek race), only to best himself six days later with an eighth-place finish on Dec. 10 from bib 50. It was a huge breakthrough for Read, who prior to this season logged a career-best World Cup finish of 23rd in Wengen last year.

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“These initial results were a surprise. I guess it was a lot quicker than I thought it would be,” he says.

Read’s goal at the beginning of the season was to finish within the top 30 and then qualify for World Cup finals in Aspen. He has skied the hill many times while competing on the NorAm circuit and hoped to take on the best in the world on a familiar slope. Now he’s ranked 28th in the men’s overall standings, 22nd in giant slalom, 28th in slalom, and sixth in alpine combined with a real shot at qualifying for finals in multiple disciplines at the end of the season.

Given his success, his goals have changed slightly, “I want to be competitive weekend after weekend,” Read now says.

Some athletes find their way to the World Cup in unique ways. It was crucial for Read that his path went through Denver. He will be a senior when he begins attending classes this spring. It is nice to have something else to work towards outside of skiing, he said, and skiing with the DU ski team is a totally different environment. While skiing with the national team, Read trains with a smaller group of athletes and receives constant feedback from his coaches. At Denver, there are more athletes and a much broader range of abilities, and a lot more is left to him to work through on his own.

Read will miss the Wengen slalom this year in order to compete for his university. He needs a minimum of four starts in collegiate races in order to be eligible for NCAA championships at the end of the year at Cannon, New Hampshire. Taking his collegiate career just as seriously as every other part of his life at a time when one might think focusing on the World Cup should take precedent, he has every intention of defending his NCAA slalom title, and possibly even taking the GS as well.

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“Denver has done a lot for me, and I am definitely going to take those races seriously. NCAA championships last year was one of the coolest experiences I’ve had. It was a ton of fun and my goal is to go there and podium in both [events], try to win it again. To do that I know I have to be fighting for the first-place spot in those collegiate races too,” Read notes of his motivations this season.

While dominating the collegiate field, Read also competed on the NorAm circuit last year and won the overall title, guaranteeing him protected starts in all World Cup races this season. Transitioning from the NorAm Cup to the World Cup is something that he has been working towards for a long time.

In 2012, he won the NorAm overall title for the first time and qualified for the Canadian team. His next season was tough. The FIS GS ski radius change went into effect on the World Cup, but not at the NorAm level. It was difficult to switch between the two ski models depending on the circuit. The next season, he enrolled as a freshman at Denver and continued to compete at the world’s highest level, scoring his first-ever World Cup points.

During his sophomore year he committed to the World Cup and to Denver, leaving less time for NorAm starts. At the end of the season, he was dropped from the Canadian national team but was determined, as ever, to fight his way back.

Two summers ago while training with the Croatian team, he realized that he was able to keep up with anyone he was with. This past summer he trained again with the Croatians, but afterwards he joined the Canadian team which was skiing with the Italian tech team. Keeping pace with multiple international teams only strengthened his confidence.

“Over this summer, GS has been clicking. I was dialed in with my skis, with my boots, everything,” and Read was ready for his best season. Though slalom has been his breadwinning event throughout his life, he is not as comfortable with his set-up in slalom yet but is working through it. Recent results show improvement as Read scored his first World Cup slalom points of the year at Madonna di Campiglio in 18th. As the World Cup slalom season gets underway, Read could be in line for quite a campaign.

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Since that finish in Italy, he has skied even faster. On Dec. 29, he skied into 6th place in the alpine combined at Santa Caterina. After the super-G, he stood in 29th, at 3.22 seconds behind the leader. He made up an immense amount of ground in the second half of the day by posting the second-fastest slalom leg of the race. The only one to beat Read in the slalom run was race winner Alexis Pinturault of France, and by just 0.03 seconds. Read will head into the Zagreb slalom on Jan. 5 with some additional confidence in his main event.

“One of the biggest things I found the second year I was at Denver is that I really felt like I belonged on the World Cup. Before that it was wide-eyed, big show, really tough hills, these superstars that I grew up watching,” he says. But now it’s just another race and when he steps in the starting gate, he is ready to fight for every hundredth of a second.