SKIING NEWS ITEM

Showtime! at Beaver Creek's Birds of Prey

THURSDAY, 30 NOVEMBER 2006

BEAVER CREEK, Colo. - T.J. Lanning (Park City, UT) and former Junior World Championships downhill bronze medalist Erik Fisher (Sandpoint, ID) clinched start spots Wednesday in a training run before this week's World Cup downhill at the VISA Birds of Prey races.

The VISA races will include four days of top-level competition, starting Thursday with a super combined event followed by Friday's DH. Saturday it's giant slalom with slalom completing the weekend on Sunday.

WCSN.com will provide streaming coverage from the races; Thursday, the downhill run will be available at 12:45 p.m. ET with the slalom at 4:15 p.m. ET. Live timing is available via http://livetiming.usskiteam.com.

A snowstorm, which began Monday, wiped out the first official training run Tuesday and course workers cleared about two feet of snow so racers could get a training run Wednesday. The U.S. Ski Team used the run to determine the last two starting slots for Friday's scheduled DH.

"TJ rockets out of eighty-something start [No. 83 start spot] and rockets into ninth place...ninth! Just a stellar run, and that earns him a start spot," said Men's Head Coach Phil McNichol. "And Erik, who has an automatic start in super G as the reigning NorAm champion - but we don't have super G this year at Birds of Prey, qualified for the last open slot. That gives us eight men running Friday...and we'll have eight going [Thursday] in the super combi."

Thursday's U.S. starters: Lanning, Olympic combined champion Ted Ligety (Park City, UT), former combined world champion Bode Miller (Bretton Woods, NH), Steve Nyman (Provo, UT), Marco Sullivan (Squaw Valley, UT), Scott Macartney (Redmond, WA), Andrew Weibrecht (Lake Placid, NY) and Jimmy Cochran (Keene, NH). The super combined is a one-day event mixing one shortened downhill run and one shortened slalom run.

Friday's downhill, after the last spots were filled, includes: Miller, Nyman, Macartney, Sullivan, Lanning, Fisher, 2006 NorAm DH runnerup Chris Beckmann (Altamont, NY) and JJ Johnson (Park City, UT).

"Y'know, almost everywhere we go, we talk about about how well the organizers prepare the course, but [Chief of Race] Jimmy Roberts and his crews really went above and beyond after that storm to get things ready for today's training run," McNichol said. "We had two feet or more, I don't think it was quite a meter on the course, but they cleared all of it away and didn't just push it into the nets. This was an epic effort that they pulled off."

This article is courtesy of the US Ski Team.

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