Top Five Fridays: March 15, 2024
Lead Image: The men’s ski podium from the Freeride World Tour’s fourth stop, which wrapped up earlier this week. Full recap below! Image: Freeride World Tour on Facebook
#1: FIS World Cup - Mikaela Shiffrin Didn’t Miss a Beat in Her Return to Racing:
While she may not be in contention for an overall crystal globe, Shiffrins return to racing this week proved that she hasn't lost a step following her injury. Image: U.S. Ski and Snowboard Team on Facebook
Hello, and welcome to Top Five Fridays, the March 15, 2024 edition! This week, we’ve got a lot of competitive skiing to recap as we have important action in World Cup alpine racing, the Freeride World Tour, and freeskiing results from the Dew Tour to cover. Unfortunately, our final highlight this week isn’t particularly fun, but we promise we’ll round things out with some excellent edits after a quick safety meeting. Before getting too far ahead of ourselves though, let’s start with World Cup alpine action.
As we reported last week, the men’s events in Kranjska Gora were canceled, meaning their circuit remains on break ahead of the season ending events in Saalbach, set to get underway starting tomorrow. As such, we only have women’s action to bring you this week, although we do have some pretty significant news on that front: Mikaela Shiffrin is officially back in action. After suffering a mild knee injury at the start of February, Shiffin made the tough call of taking some time off from racing in order to make sure her knee was fully healthy before returning. While Shiffrin started the season on a tear and was the favorite to win the overall title, her time away resulted in a slip in the standings, dropping her down to third. That’s the bad news. The good news is, in her return, Shiffrin immediately picked up where she left off, proving her decision to rehab was the right one. In her first race back, a slalom in Are, Sweden on Sunday, Shiffrin won by a full 1.24 seconds. Also earning a strong result in that race was Paula Moltzan, who finished tenth. In addition to the slalom race, there was also a giant slalom held in Are last weekend, a race in which Paula Moltzan also finished 10th, followed by AJ Hurt in 11th.
Looking ahead, both the men and women will be spending the next 9 days in Saalbach, Austria, competing in the final slalom, giant slalom, super g, and downhill races of the year. For Shiffrin’s part, while she’s locked up the slalom crystal globe, it’s yet to be seen how her final results in the overall standings shake out. With a roughly 430 point lead over Sara Hector in fourth place, it looks as though Shiffrin should finish in at least 3rd, but has a chance to move up into second place. The one catch though, is that she only plans to race in the slalom event, limiting her opportunity to earn points. As always, we’ll wait to see what happens, and keep you updated as things unfold. For now, check in with the FIS website for a preview of events.
#2: 2024 Freeride World Tour Stop #4 Recap - Fieberbrunn:
In other competitive news, we’ve got a full recap of the fourth stop from this year’s Freeride World Tour, which was held early Thursday morning, East Coast time. As you’ll recall, this week’s stop was the first stop of the two-part finals, meaning the field of competitors had been trimmed significantly. With the reduction in athletes, Fieberbrunn, Austria once again played host to the tour’s only “best of two runs” format, in which athletes are given the chance to take a second run to improve upon their score. In previous years, we’ve seen this format either canceled or underutilized as athletes opted out of their second run for various reasons. This year though, that format was largely embraced by competitors as only Kristofer Trudell opted out of run 2, apparently satisfied with his first run score of 93.00. Keeping all of that in mind, let’s jump into coverage of the event.
As per usual, we’ll start with the women’s field, where just five riders took the course after Lily Bradley suffered a knee injury earlier this week. Amongst the five remaining women, we were treated to a show that paired the veteran strategies of Hedvig Vessel against the youthful French energies of Astrid Cheylus and Manon Loschi. In the first of two runs, the challenging snow conditions were evident, especially on the lower half of the venue, as each athlete took their time managing the bottom portion of their run. For Vessel, the strategy was simple: put down one of her classically challenging lines, while playing her airs safe, and tossing a backflip off the windlip for good measure. Ultimately that veteran play was enough to land her a score of 82.33, which would secure 2nd place for her. Joining Vessel in the strategic approach, while mixing in a touch more risk, was Astrid Cheylus, who took a similar line, although opting for an adjacent cliff as her main feature. While the cliff itself was arguably more impressive, her entrance took more effort to get into, which was likely the .33 difference that relegated her to a third place finish, earning an even 82.00. The story of the day for the women’s category though, was Astrid Cheylus, whose first run had all the ingredients of a winning run, but lacked the required cleanliness. Not to be deterred, Cheylus took full advantage of the two run format and put it all together on her second run. For her line, she took a much different approach to her top section, opting for a technical double in an entirely different zone, rather than the large drop that was preferred by the rest of the competitors. From there, Cheylus followed her technical entrance with a number of small to mid size airs, before launching the largest windlip backflip of the day. For her efforts, Cheylus was awarded an 86.33 and first place on the podium.
On the men’s side of the event, we were once again treated to show stopping performances from a number of athletes. To be fair, when the men’s division first got underway, we weren’t exactly sure what to expect. Noting the difficulties the women’s field had with the snow, we held our breaths as Maxime Chabloz dropped in for the first run of the field. Right off the bat, Chabloz launched a massive straight air along the ridge before dropping into a beautiful and perfectly landed double backflip. “Ok,” we thought, “this could be good.” From there, Chabloz skied a picturesque chute before launching a textbook cork 7 off an off-camber cliff. For a split second, the landing was perfect. Then, almost as soon as he landed, the firmness of the snow made itself known as his feet kicked out from under him and he got absolutely tossed into a flat spin like rotation. As it turns out, that run was a bit of a microcosm of the day.
Amongst the men’s field, we saw some incredible makes - such as Max Hitzig’s absolutely perfect, massive 360 channel gap, multiple 360’s above exposure from Ben Richards, Marcus Goguen’s 360 drop into the main cliff feature, and Finn Bilous’s beautiful cork 720 blunt grab off the main windlip. We also, however, saw plenty of epic crashes, most notably Oscar Mandin’s heroic double backflip attempt that ended in an eruption of snow as his entire body hit the ground all at once. Still, as remarkable as that outtake was, it was Japanese rookie Tenra Katsuno who won the blooper reel as his helmet and goggles flew off his head at the start of his second run. Seemingly unaware that his run was disqualified at this point, Katsuno kept charging, putting together a remarkable run sans-helmet, complete with a huge 360 along the ridge, a backflip, and a cliff hit, before he finally front punched on a 360 attempt. While Tenra’s run wasn’t scored due to the lack of a helmet, he may have pulled off some of the best highlights from the day, considering just about his entire run was without goggles.
Ultimately, at the end of the day, Ben Richards claimed first place with a score of 97, followed by Max Hitzig in second, and Marcus Goguen in third. As it happens, these are also your top three in the overall standings (albeit not in that order) heading into the final stop of the tour: the Yeti Xtreme Verbier, whose weather window starts in just one week’s time. As always, we’ll bring you a full recap of that event once the action comes to a stop. Until then, you can check out the latest FWT standings here, or preview the Verbier event here.
#3: 2024 Dew Tour Coverage - Gu Continues to Dominate, While Alex Ferreira Makes History With Halfpipe Win:
Ok freeskiers, thank you for your patience. Now it’s your turn, as we turn our attention to results from this week’s Dew Tour. Amongst all of the competitions we cover, the Dew Tour might be one of the more unique ones as it consists of a halfpipe event which isn’t a part of the World Cup circuit, and a streetstyle event, which is essentially the rail section of a slopestyle course. What makes the Dew Tour interesting though, is that despite not offering a full slate of regular events or any value in terms of the World Cup circuit, it still draws top tier athletes and creates a show that’s well worth the watch.
This year, the Dew Tour was dominated by two names in particular: Eileen Gu and Alex Ferreira. For Gu, the games were wildly successful as she proved that, despite all of her extracurricular activities, she’s still the best female halfpipe skier in the world. The last time the Dew Tour held a women’s halfpipe event was in 2021, an event that Gu won. This year, three years later, Gu returned and successfully defended her title, beating out Zoe Atkins who took second and Amy Fraser in third. Perhaps what makes Gu’s weekend even more impressive though is that not only was she the only athlete to compete in both the superpipe and streetstyle events, but she won both as well. In the streetstyle event, in which the final round was a best of two run format amongst the top three competitors, Lisa Zimmermann put down an excellent second run, giving her an intimidating score of 90.00 with only Gu left to drop. Then, despite being known for her prowess in the pipe, Gu put down a clean run that saw her edging out Zimmermann’s score, ultimately earning a 91.66 and the gold medal. For Gu, it was another impressive weekend that proved she’s very much still leading the charge for women’s freeskiing.
The other big storyline coming out of this year’s Dew Tour was the success of Alex Ferreira. Coming into the weekend, Ferreira was on the homestretch of a perfect season, having won all 5 FIS halfpipe events, as well as the X Games superpipe. Again, while the Dew Tour is a standalone event that doesn’t count towards FIS scoring, it’s still one of the biggest events of the year, making it the final event on Ferreira’s schedule, and the last event standing between him and a perfect season. In other words, if Ferreira won last weekend’s superpipe, he would win all 7 halfpipe events that he entered - a feat that had never been done. As it turns out, he did exactly that. In perfect conditions and under bluebird skies, Ferriera dominated the event with the best two scores of the day. Already holding the lead after his first run, Ferriera’s second run was flawless and earned him an impressive score of 94.33. From there, it was up to the rest of the field to catch him, a feat which no one was able to accomplish. Coming the closest was Nick Goepper who came in second with a score of 91.00, followed by Brendan MacKay with a 90.33.
Finally, before wrapping up our coverage of the Dew Tour, we just want to briefly mention that the men’s streetstyle event was possibly the most entertaining event of the weekend. With a stacked field of competitors, this year’s event featured everything from highly technical rail tricks, to creative approaches, particularly from Alex Hall whose style of skiing continues to become more esoteric as he ages. To be frank, there are far too many unique tricks from this event to list, so rather than rattle off extensive trick names, we simply recommend giving the replay a watch.
#4: After a Deadly Week in Skiing, it’s Time for a Safety Meeting:
We’ll be honest, we didn’t want to share a news report covering one of the many tragic accidents that happened this week. Instead, here’s the FIFTY episode from Tuckerman’s Ravine, which does a sufficient job of putting the terrain into perspective.
Finally, after what was an unusually tragic week in skiing, we have to end this week’s news recap on something of a low note. Sometimes when we are in research mode, we’ll come across an article or two about a tragic accident in the mountains, but we very rarely share the news as ultimately this is a marketing effort for us here at SkiEssentials, and the idea of leveraging tragedy for clicks just doesn’t sit right with us. There are times though when the deaths do feel necessary to report, such as when Hilaree Nelson or Rob Gaffney passed away. This week is unfortunately one of those weeks, where we’re compelled to share tragic news, although this time it’s not because one singular, legendary person has died. Instead, we have the regrettable task of sharing the news of several deaths, in an effort to convince our ski community to dial it back just a little bit as the season comes to a close.
In all of our years reporting ski news, there’s quite likely never been a more deadly week in skiing. As we scoured the headlines for news to report, we were stunned to see headline after headline regarding a ski accident resulting in death. In Jackson Hole, local restaurant owner Kelly Krause died after falling into a treewell and suffocating. In Oregon, avalanche forecaster Nick Burks triggered an avalanche while skiing, which ultimately caught him, buried him, and took his life. Closer to us here in Vermont, tragedy struck in New Hampshire when a University of Vermont student fell 600 feet down Tuckerman’s Ravine and died of traumatic injuries. In the Alps, five skiers were found dead with a sixth missing after extremely high winds and snow overtook the group as they were touring near the infamous Matterhorn. Finally, in Japan, two skiers from New Zealand were caught and killed in an avalanche.
Ultimately, we’re not going to sit here and pretend that all of these incidents are the same. While the Oregon, Japan, and Swiss incidents can all be linked to avalanches and stormy weather, just the opposite is true for the accident at Tuckerman’s Ravine, where firm, icy conditions are to blame. In Jackson Hole, Krause was skiing with a group of friends in terrain that he was undoubtedly familiar with when something went wrong and he was submerged in a treewell. With a wide range of factors causing these tragedies, there isn’t a “one size fits all” solution to guarantee your safety on the slopes. What we can say though, is that this week’s news should be a reminder that the best form of safety on the slopes is awareness. Whether that means being hyper vigilant about avalanche conditions and terrain, deciding to opt out of an adventure if there is impending weather or the snow conditions aren’t there, or even just making sure you’re always within eyesight of someone on your group while skiing trees - the bottom line is that the best form of safety is being mentally engaged with your environment. It’s been a tough winter in the Northern Hemisphere, with dry conditions only turning to snow within the last month or so, and so we understand the pent up eagerness to get out there. While we both appreciate and encourage that, we’d also like to remind you to do so safely. At the end of the day, what’s even more important than making potentially the best turns of your life, returning home with your life.
With that said, let’s get on with this week’s edits.