Top Five Fridays: November 15, 2024
She’s back baby! After five years, several surgeries, and one new FIS rule, Lindsey Vonn is set to come back from retirement and compete in this year’s FIS World Cup. More on that below! Image: Lindsey Vonn's Official Website
#1: It’s Official: Lindsey Vonn is Back:
The rumors are true: after five years, Lindsey Vonn is coming back to racing. Image: Lindsey Vonn on Facebook
Hello, and welcome to Top Five Fridays, the November 15, 2024 edition! We’ve got an absolute smattering of ski news for you this week, with so many fun articles to share that two of our highlights this week are combo highlights, featuring two to three articles a piece! We’ll get to those in just a second, but before we do, we’re beyond obligated to share the news that quite literally every publication on the internet is screaming about today: Lindsey Vonn is back.
For readers of Top Five Fridays, this announcement shouldn’t be overwhelmingly shocking as we first mentioned rumors of Vonn’s return back in the middle of October. For the rest of the world though, it’s apparently the craziest thing that’s happened since November 5th, as word of her return absolutely dominated headlines this week. While the news certainly is pretty exciting, here on TFF we’re eager to dive in a little bit deeper, exploring some of the subplots that come about as a result of this announcement.
First, let’s just quickly acknowledge that Vonn’s return is coming as a direct result of the FIS’s new Wild Card rule, which allows ski racers who’ve earned legend status (you can see the actual criteria here) to unretire without needing to compete at lower levels of FIS competition in order to earn enough points to qualify for the World Cup Tour. It’s a rule that was quickly implemented this summer to allow Marcel Hirscher to return to racing, and now Vonn has officially become the second athlete to utilize it as well. With that, the experiment truly begins, and we’ll see whether or not father (or mother) time has caught up to either of these athletes. For what it’s worth, it should be noted that earlier this year, Federica Brignone became the oldest woman to ever win a World Cup race when she took home the gold in Solden. Brignone is 34 years old. Vonn, is 40.
The other aspect of this story that’s interesting to watch is how Lindsey’s return impacts the rest of the U.S. Ski Team. When Hirscher made his return, he made the decision to compete for the Dutch team rather than the Austrian team, citing a reluctance to take a roster spot from rising Austrian talent. Vonn, on the other hand, has rejoined the U.S. Ski Team, effective immediately. Now, just to clarify, this isn’t necessarily an unfair decision by any means. It’s not as though Vonn’s return has resulted in a direct demotion of another athlete. If you were on the team pre-Vonn, then you’re still on the team post-Vonn. Furthermore, the addition of Vonn might actually be beneficial to her teammates as her veteran experience could prove incredibly helpful should she take on a leadership role. Ultimately, that’s one of the biggest questions here: how does Vonn fit in with the existing U.S. team?
As it stands, the U.S. Women’s racing team is as strong as it’s ever been, with several athletes capable of finishing in the top 10 or even podiuming in any race. With the addition of Vonn, there are essentially three outcomes: the team gets even stronger with the addition of yet another contender, Vonn joins the team and not much changes, or in the worst case scenario, Vonn’s presence consumes resources and disrupts the team, causing a regression in the strength of the group suffers. For what it’s worth, with skiing being as individual of a sport as it is, we don’t at all expect the third outcome or any kind of fall off in the overall performance of the women’s team. In fact, Vonn’s stated goal is to compete to her highest abilities, with an eye on earning a spot at the 2026 Winter Olympics, where she could find herself racing in the Downhill and Super G events at Cortina d'Ampezzo - a venue where she’s had great success throughout her career.
So what happens next? That’s really anyone’s guess. For now, we know that Vonn will be returning, and we know she’ll compete in Downhill and Super G races. We don’t however know which race she will choose to be her first race back, and it’s really anyone’s guess as to how well she performs. That said, the first speed races for the women’s circuit are scheduled to occur in Beaver Creek, Colorado from December 11th-14th, and we’d be shocked if Vonn isn’t there. As always, be sure to check back as this story unfolds. For now, learn more by checking out the report from the U.S. Ski Team, or by simply Googling “Lindsey Vonn”.
#2: FIS News Part 2: Shiffrin Excitement, Men’s Slalom, & Airbag Regulations:
Moving right along, we come to our first of two highlights this week that contain multiple stories. For this particular highlight, we’re focusing on the theme of “FIS News”, of which we actually have three stories to share. Because we have so much to fit in here, we’ll apologize in advance if we don’t do each of these topics justice, but you can always learn more by clicking the accompanying links. With that, let’s get started.
First up on our list of FIS stories to cover is, you guessed it, Mikaela Shiffrin. Ahead of this weekend’s slalom races in Levi, the FIS itself covered Shiffrin’s story as she enters one of the biggest seasons of her career. In doing so, they highlighted a fact that we hadn’t thought about yet: Shiffrin has a tremendous opportunity to earn her 100th FIS gold medal in front of a home crowd in Killington. Currently, she has 97 gold medals, with a slalom race in Levi coming up this weekend, and another slalom race on November 23rd in Gurgl, Austria. From there, she’ll find herself in Killington for another slalom race as well as a giant slalom. Essentially, that means she’ll need to win any 3 of her next 4 races in order to win her 100th one at Killington. While that sounds like a daunting task, it’s worth noting that Levi is a venue in which she’s already won 7 gold medals. With that in mind, her best chance to earn her 100th win in Killington starts with a victory this weekend in Levi. You can read more about Shiffrin as well as the entire Women’s slalom scene in this article from the FIS.
In similar news, the FIS also published a piece highlighting the men’s side of slalom skiing. If you read along with us each week, then you’ve seen us write about how the U.S. Men’s team is much stronger in speed events than technical ones. While there are some athletes such as Luke Winters and Ben Ritchie who are starting to gain ground in technical events, by and large the strength of the team is still speed disciplines. This week, the FIS shared an article that gives a little bit of added perspective to that storyline: World Cup men’s slalom skiing is having a moment. Currently, at the top of the sport, are the Austrian Manuel Feller and the German Linus Strasser. While Feller ultimately dominated the overall slalom standings last season, Strasser was in hot pursuit throughout. Meanwhile a third man, Norway’s Timon Haugan, also claimed four gold medals in what was a “bounce back from injury” type of season. Joining the three aforementioned contenders this season, is the legendary Marcel Hirscher, who has 32 slalom wins to his name. As if four serious competitors wasn’t enough, veteran racer Henrik Kristofferson is also showing signs of a resurgent season after earning silver in Solden. In other words, while slalom might not be the strength of the U.S. Men’s team, there’s at least a good reason for it: the World Cup Circuit is absolutely loaded with slalom talent right now. To learn more about this, check out the report from the FIS.
Finally, for our last story in this triple header, we wanted to share an announcement that was made just last week: for the first time ever, the FIS has mandated the use of airbags for all downhill and super g athletes. At first read, it’s tough to imagine what this means, so to get an idea of what an alpine racing airbag looks like, we encourage you to give the accompanying video a watch as it’s a lot easier to understand this piece of equipment by simply looking at it. In short though, this new safety device is a slim article of clothing that athletes will wear underneath their speedsuits. On it is a small device that reads the athlete’s movements and is able to recognize when they’re crashing. When they do, the wearable airbag is triggered and an added layer of protection against impacts is immediately deployed. While this technology has been in development for ski racing since at least 2016, it has not been a requirement until this week. Now that it is, it’ll be interesting to see how it impacts athletes or their times, if at all. To learn more about this update, check out the announcement from the FIS.
#3: Deer Valley & Rad Smith Debut New Hand Painted Trailmap Showing Resort’s Massive Expansion:
The newly unveiled, updated trail map of Deer Valley puts the resort's expansion into a new perspective. Image: Park Record
Moving on from FIS news, our next highlight this week is one of those stories that’s not exactly an earth shattering update, but just a fun topic to discuss. That news, is the unveiling of a new Deer Valley trail map recently completed by Rad Smith. Now, there’s a couple of cool stories within this one. First up is the fact that Deer Valley enlisted Rad Smith to create the map. For those unfamiliar with the name, Rad Smith is the man that the legendary and prolific ski map artist James Niehues tapped to carry on his legacy. After training under Niehues since 2015, Smith unofficially took over as skiing’s premier map painter just last year, when he debuted his first big project: a new map of Keystone that includes the newly added Bergman Bowl. Now, about a year and a half later, Smith and Deer Valley are unveiling the trail map for what will be one of the largest ski resorts in North America. While the new map is exciting news on its own, we can’t help but find ourselves even more excited by the idea that hand painted ski maps appear to remain in demand, despite living in an age that’s dominated by digital art.
The other half of this story is the map itself, and the additional context it gives in regards to what the new Deer Valley looks like. Prior to this map, we’ve seen digital concepts and birds eye view photos with overlays that show expansion plans. While helpful, none of those mockups do the new resort justice quite like this new Smith map does. Now, for the first time, we can see the exact trail layouts for the new terrain, while also wrapping our heads around how they interconnect over the many peaks and valleys that make up the resort. Not only that, but the highlighted expansion areas really put the size and scale of this project into perspective. Again, the conceptual images did a decent job of showing us what the new layout of the resort will look like, but this Rad Smith map gives the project an entirely new perspective. Now, it’s easy to see just how massive the new resort will become when all is said and done. Like we said, this particular highlight isn’t exactly earth shattering, but it is a pretty interesting update to a story we’ve been following for a while. To learn more, check out this writeup from ParkRecord.com.
#4: Powder Magazine Shows Us What it Takes to Develop a Ski, With Stories From Salomon and K2:
A look inside K2's ARC development facility. Image: K2 Skis
Finally, we end this week with our second multi-story highlight, as Powder Magazine shared two recently published articles that highlight the process of ski development. First up on that list, is the story of how the Salomon Depart 1.0 ski came to be. Last week, our final highlight of the week was a discussion of the most iconic skis of all time. On that last was the Salomon 1080, which was the first mass-marketed twin tip ski. For a while, Salomon leaned into their success in the freeskiing world, adding skis like the Pocket Rocket and Rocker series to their lineups. But then, over time, the freeskiing lineage slowly died out. By the late 2010’s, there really weren’t any Salomon freeskis at all, save the singular TNT model. Interestingly enough, unbeknownst to just about everyone, it was at about that same time that Salomon was beginning to secretly plot its resurgence into the freeski scene.
In the Powder article, we learn that plans for the Salomon Depart 1.0 date all the way back to 2017, when Salomon skier Nico Vuignier began asking about development of a new freeski. After much persistence, Vuignier’s questioning resulted in a secret project which also involved Sami Ortlieb, who was selected to help Vuignier develop a new ski. Between the two of them, the goal was simple: rather than develop a line of freeskis, they would focus on just one specific ski that was to be built for the way freeskiers approach the sport in the modern era. That is, it should excel not only on big park features, but also in the streets and smaller terrain parks. The result of their effort is the Depart 1.0, Salomon’s first true freeski in nearly a decade. All in all, the development of the ski is a really interesting story that touches not only on the ski itself, but also on Salomon’s business and marketing strategies that produced one of the more exciting announcements of the past year. If you’re at all interested in how a project like this comes to be, we highly recommend giving the story from Powder a read.
The other article from Powder that we wanted to share focuses on the ski development efforts of K2. There, ski development looks quite a bit different than the aforementioned story. Rather than a team of two working tirelessly for years to bring an idea to fruition, this story focuses on K2’s “Advanced Resource Collective (ARC)”, which is a small production facility where they can crank out new ideas and test new innovations. Located in Seattle, this facility is responsible for developing some of the brand’s most iconic skis over the years, including the Pon2oon and Hellbents.
Most recently, the facility is also behind the development of the brand new K2 Reckoner 114 KF, Karl Fostvedt’s pro model ski. In recent years, Fostvedt could be seen skiing the K2 Reckoner 112 down big mountain faces. Those familiar with the ski likely found themselves asking, “how is Karl riding such a soft, surfy ski down such a serious mountain?” Well, as it turns out, he wasn’t. Instead, he was riding an iteration of the new Reckoner 114 KF, which borrows characteristics from the Reckoner series, but adds a significant amount of carbon fiber to stiffen the ski while simultaneously making it more energetic and reducing its weight. While it might sound simple enough, the process of testing and discovering this solution was anything but. As described in the Powder article, it took several rounds of iteration, with countless skis featuring slightly different amounts of material before finding the sweet spot between soft, stiff, and energetic. The result of all this effort? A brand new ski for K2’s lineup, and further affirmation that a development facility like the ARC is an invaluable asset. To learn more about what went into the development of this ski, head on over to Powder Magazine.
#4.5: Phil Casabon’s Off the Leash Contest Entries Are Live on YouTube:
Before we sign off this week, there is one last thing we want to turn your attention to. A couple of weeks ago, Phil Casabon opened up entries for his “Off the Leash” contest, where he asked skiers to submit edits featuring their best 90 seconds of street skiing footage. The result? 64 entries featuring some truly insane street skiing. They’re currently all available to watch on YouTube, and we highly suggest taking a trip down the rabbit hole.