By Martyn Herman
BORMIO, Italy, Feb 5 (Reuters) – One thing is certain about the winner of Saturday’s men’s Olympic downhill: the champion won’t have lucked out.
Bormio’s iconic Stelvio course — an icy 3.4 km brute with 60% pitches and speeds beyond 140 kph — exposes pretenders and rewards only the most complete downhillers.
After three consecutive Olympic downhills held on newly-built tracks in Russia, South Korea and China, the world’s fastest skiers finally return to a slope they know — and fear – in Alpine skiing’s traditional heartland.
“I like the Stelvio, the Stelvio doesn’t always like me,” Austria’s Vincent Kriechmayr said after his opening training run on Wednesday, hoping to join the long line of his countrymen who have won the sport’s most prestigious medal.
“It’s a fight from the start to the finish. It’s not like Wengen or Kitzbuehel where you can ‘relax’ a little bit.”
The fight begins immediately.
Dropping 1,000 metres in altitude in under two minutes, the Stelvio is a relentless series of iced-over turns, bone-rattling compressions and jumps like San Pietro, which launches racers 40 metres through the air.
Technical traverses demand precision and by the time the final pitch appears to fling skiers straight into the charming Alpine town below, legs and lungs will be burning.
“It’s the best track for an Olympic downhill. The last one in Beijing was a bit too easy,” Austrian Daniel Hemetsberger told Reuters.
Twice a fourth-place finisher on the Stelvio, he knows the price of misjudgement after suffering a serious knee injury in a crash there in 2018. “You need to take risks, but it could be the win or the helicopter.”
ONE OF WORLD CUP CIRCUIT’S DEFINING TESTS
The Stelvio opened in 1982 and hosted the 1985 World Championships. Its annual World Cup downhill, usually staged in late December, has become one of the circuit’s defining tests.
The later Olympic date means more daylight and possibly softer snow, but the fundamental difficulty remains unchanged — it will take a rare, complete skier to master it on Saturday.
Swiss great Marco Odermatt, the sport’s dominant force, is the favourite but the man who understands the Stelvio better than anyone is Italian veteran Dominik Paris. He won the first of his record six Bormio World Cup downhills in 2012.
“It’s always a pleasure to be back here,” Paris said after training. “It’s a really mental course. You need a good package of speed, technique and to read the ground very well. It’s a complete downhiller’s course.”
American Ryan Cochran-Siegle topped the first training run, helped by overnight snow that briefly mellowed the course. But he knows the Stelvio will bare its teeth.
“I’ve had really good days here but also some very humbling days, and I know how relentless it can be. It’s an awesome slope,” the 33-year-old told Reuters.
Switzerland’s Franjo von Allmen, one of the few who might challenge Odermatt, echoed that respect.
“It’s a bit of a love-hate story,” he said grinning. “It’s difficult in flat light on that bumpy road, but in the end it’s the Stelvio – it’s nerve‑wracking and pretty fun.”
But the line between thrill and danger is thin.
Norway’s Fredrik Moeller, a former World Cup winner on the Stelvio, crashed high on the course Wednesday and was airlifted to hospital, luckily suffering only a dislocated shoulder.
His fall underlined the risk even for experts — and why organisers avoid allowing gallant underdogs down the track.
“In Olympic speed events, there is a minimum requirement of having 80 FIS points or below,” International Ski and Snowboard Federation CEO Urs Lehmann told Reuters. “You need to be on a very high level to meet the criteria.”
On the Stelvio, that seems like the bare minimum.
(Reporting by Martyn Herman; Additional reporting by Lisa Jucca and Marleen Kasebier; Editing by Ken Ferris)
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