Women’s World Cup Shakes Up Calendar

By the end of any World Cup season, the sheer exhaustion on the faces of athletes, coaches, techs, and officials is unavoidable. The tour is a marathon of travel, training, and races that leaves pretty much everyone craving an escape to the beach after finals. On the 2017-18 ladies’ competition calendar, there are 40 World Cup races at 21 different venues plus the added element of the Olympic Winter Games – a two-week extravaganza in PyeongChang, South Korea – that breaks up the regular season. It’s shaping up to be an exciting, though likely tiresome, season.

While the Olympic Games might highlight the winter, there are other element of interest on the women’s alpine schedule next season. For starters, eight downhill races will determine the discipline globe winner, and half of those events will be hosted at just two venues: Lake Louise and Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Lake Louise will host its two annual downhills while Garmisch-Partenkirchen will host one traditional downhill and one two-run downhill. The benefit of a calendar like this is the elimination of several training runs that would be required if those races were divided among four separate venues. It also eliminates travel days and ultimately saves athletes and teams valuable time, energy, and money.

Image Credit: Agence Zoom

While the downhills appear to have been streamlined, the increase in parallel events on the calendar demonstrates the efforts of FIS to increase spectator interest in the sport. Head-to-head races add an easy-to-follow format for new fans. This year, the women’s tour will contest individual parallel slaloms at three venues (Courchevel, France; Oslo, Norway; Stockholm, Sweden) and a team event at finals (Are, Sweden). Two other notable stops on the calendar are Killington and Kronplatz. Tech skiers will return to Vermont after the outstanding Thanksgiving weekend event. Meanwhile, the Italian venue is back on the calendar after the success of last season’s event despite not being on any of the previous drafts for 2017-18 calendar until the confirmed calendar was released after FIS Congress.

With this increased commitment to scheduling parallel events, there is an imbalance between speed and technical races for the overall – 16 speed-specific races, 18 tech races, two alpine combined races, and three parallel events. It may appear that the calendar favors tech skiers for the ladies’ overall title at first glance, but there are several factors to consider before rushing to that generalization. On the women’s circuit, success in GS these days correlates more to success in super-G than it does to slalom. Just consider how long it took Mikaela Shiffrin to translate her slalom prowess into giant slalom victories. At the same time, Italy’s Sofia Goggia earned podium results in every discipline except slalom last season. Lara Gut’s talents lie in the same arena as Goggia’s – with the ability to podium in GS, super-G, alpine combined, and downhill races. In some ways, slalom has fractured off to become an isolated island on the ladies’ circuit as some of the best skiers in that event like Wendy Holdener struggle to find the top 10 in GS. So, yes, the calendar is unbalanced in terms of tech versus speed races, but there are very few technical athletes with the proven ability to podium in both slalom and GS and many more speed skiers who can dominate in super-G, downhill, and even giant slalom.

In order to win the overall title on the women’s side in recent years, a victor has had to ski at least three disciplines – with the ability to win in two consistently and score in a third event as well. So, it’s very likely that “speed skiers” such as Gut or Goggia could win an overall title even with fewer speed races than tech.

Now, who is ready for 40 days (and nights) of women’s World Cup racing? We have fewer than 150 days until Soelden!