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Ice injecting no good for ski racing

 

Jan 14, 2010 / 11:43:21 AM
Is it a mistake to inject slopes with water in a bid to make courses more consistent and weather-resistant?

U.S. star Lindsey Vonn is a central figure in this debate consuming the Alpine skiing circuit with the Vancouver Games a month away.
The practice can result in conditions Vonn - a two-time overall World Cup champion and Olympic medal favourite - likened to "pond ice" after she skied off-course during a slalom at Aspen, Colorado, this season.
"It's not ski racing anymore," she said. "I don't think it does anyone a service to have it this difficult. It doesn't look good on TV."
And that was before Vonn fell during a giant slalom on another injected course, at Lienz, Austria, last month, leaving her injured arm in a sling. The tumble prompted her husband, former U.S. Ski Team member Thomas Vonn, to say skiing officials' use of water injection would be the equivalent of car-racing officials deciding to "spray oil randomly every couple hundred yards" on a track.
"They made the conditions pure ice directly at the gate and then grippy everywhere else, which, in my opinion, is the most dangerous condition a racer can encounter," Thomas Vonn wrote then in an e-mail. It's also being used on ski cross courses and last week in St. Johann, Austria, local Olympic hopeful Errol Kerr sounded off on his blog www.errolkerr.com . "They have decided to take the sport of ski cross and make it a 'non-passable,' very boring race and make the hill as icy as possible so you are going off of six-foot step downs, and landing on snow that feels like a parking lot," said Kerr, who lives in Truckee and is trying to qualify as a member of the Jamaican team.
When a course is injected, water is forced 1 or 2 feet deep into the snow through tiny nozzles on a high-pressure hose. As cold air seeps in, a layer of hard snow and ice is created, so the slope will not deteriorate as dozens of racers ski over it or be rendered useless if the temperature gets too warm or too much rain or fresh, soft snow falls ? vagaries of weather that can otherwise lead to postponement of races.

Source:: RGJ.com

tags: olympic, alpine, ski, cross, lindsay, vonn, giant, slalom, world, cup