SKIING NEWS ITEM

Rain, High Temps Cancel Soelden Openers

THURSDAY, 26 OCTOBER 2006

SOELDEN, Austria - Rain through the night and into mid-morning, coupled with a weather forecast for unseasonally warm temperatures, forced World Cup organizers Tuesday to cancel what had been scheduled as the season-opening alpine races next weekend on the Rettenbach Glacier.

The women were to have raced giant slalom Saturday with 10 U.S. women scheduled to compete in the first race of the 41st alpine World Cup season; the men were to run GS Sunday with seven Americans entered. The next scheduled races are slaloms Nov. 11-12 in Levi, Finland, before the World Cup heads to North America.

"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]," U.S. Women's Head Coach Patrick Riml said. "But it started to rain [Monday] over night 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."

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," Riml said.

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 Ski Team has 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 Soelden 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 makes its lone stop in the United States with women's giant slalom and SL Nov. 25-26 at the Aspen (CO) Winternational and men's downhill, GS, slalom and super combined Nov. 30-Dec. 3 at the VISA Birds of Prey races in Beaver Creek, CO.

This article is courtesy of the US Ski Team.

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