U.S. alpine: five is plenty fine

KRASNAYA POLYANA, Russia — There were a couple hours Saturday evening when it seemed possible the U.S. alpine ski team — already with a performance here at the Sochi 2014 Olympics that history will judge as fine, indeed— might, just might, sneak away with what would amount to a bonus medal. After Run 1 of the men’s slalom, Ted Ligety, winner three days ago of the giant slalom, had put himself in position for a medal. He was only 11-hundredths back of third.

The U.S. alpine team went into Saturday night with five medals, tied for its second-best performance ever at a Winter Games, with the Sarajevo 1984 team. Only the Vancouver 2010 team, which racked up eight, had done better.

Tantalizingly, six suddenly seemed within reach. Because he already had the GS gold, Ligety was skiing the slalom with no expectation, no pressure. The buzz started building — remember those two killer slalom runs Ligety put down to win his first Olympic gold, the combined, in Torino in 2006?

And then came the buzzkill.

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Ted Ligety's 'awesome' GS gold

KRASNAYA POLYANA, Russia — A couple years ago, they made a rules change in the giant slalom. Citing the interest of athlete safety, they made the skiers change to longer, straighter skis. Those skis are way harder to turn. Ted Ligety, the American who had ruled the giant slalom, complained bitterly.

And then he figured out a way to ski on those new skis, lower and longer in the turns, that further separated himself from everyone else in the world. He could now win races by astonishing margins.

At Wednesday’s men’s super-G at Rosa Khutor, Ted Ligety put on a clinic to win the first American alpine skiing gold of these Olympics. Indeed, he won big. It was one of the great moments of the 2014 Games. Here, for the entire world to bear witness, was sheer excellence — the excellence the sport demands as well as the excellence the man demands of himself.

It was, in a word, awesome.

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Ligety wins, Bode's back

All successful sports teams need stars. Quick. Name the quarterback of the Denver Broncos. Easy. He's the guy who did a hilarious interview a few days ago with that Ron Burgundy fellow. Now -- who's the quarterback of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers? Right.

The U.S. Ski Team's alpine racers get noticed most -- particularly when it's almost Olympic time -- when the likes of Ted Ligety, Bode Miller, Lindsey Vonn and Mikaela Shiffrin are rocking it. Except for Shiffrin, the teenage slalom sensation who is newly showing promise across the board, the season had started slowly. Until Sunday.

Ligety and Miller went 1-2 in the giant slalom at the men's World Cup stop at Beaver Creek, Colo., while Vonn, who had gone a cautious 40th and then 11th in the downhills Friday and Saturday in making her return to the women's tour in Lake Louise, Canada, rocketed to fifth in Sunday's super-G and afterward declared she was "ready for Sochi."

Shiffrin didn't race this weekend. She did, however, sum up the excitement that seized the scene.

"I'm crying right now," she tweeted out. "My favorite racer is back on the podium. #gobode"

This was Miller's first top-three finish since February 2011 (a second in the downhill in Chamonix, France). It marked his first giant-slalom top-three since March 2007 (at the World Cup finals in Lenzerheide, Switzerland).

The last time two Americans were on the GS podium together? Bode and Daron Rahlves, at the 2005 GS in Beaver Creek.

Ligety, meanwhile, is without question best in the world in the giant slalom. And he emerged last year, with three gold medals at the world championships, as the rock of the U.S. team.

Sunday's victory marked Ligety's fourth straight World Cup victory in the GS; that ties him with Italian great Alberto Tomba, who won four straight in 2001.

Ligety is so good at this particular event that he has finished on the podium in his last 10 GS races. That is the second-longest streak of GS podiums in World Cup history. With it Ligety joins Tomba, Ingemar Stenmark of Sweden and American Phil Mahre.

This was, moreover, Ligety's third GS win in a row on the Birds of Prey course at Beaver Creek.

Ligety's winning combined time Sunday: 2:35.77. He won both runs, and easily.

The surprise -- unless you were keenly paying attention to Miller earlier in the week -- was that Bode took second. He finished 1.32 seconds behind Ligety. Austria's Marcel Hirscher took third, 1.82 back.

It's not that Miller isn't capable. He is the most successful alpine racer the United States has ever produced, among other things a five-time Olympic medalist as well as the 2005 and 2008 World Cup overall champion.

But after taking last year off to mend a bum knee, you would have to have been a true student of racing, and of Bode, to see this coming.

In Friday's downhill at Beaver Creek, Miller finished 13th. In Saturday's super-G, he held a huge lead of more than a second on the top part of the course before nearly missing a blind gate after a jump; he then -- typical Bode -- made an amazing recovery to finish 14th.

After Friday's race, he said, "I skied the way I need to. Maybe we picked the wrong skis. Maybe it was just weather or nature."

After Saturday, he said, "Yesterday and today I hit the thing really well, so I think that's really encouraging."

Bode is -- finally -- back in shape, as he emphasized after Sunday's finish.

So anyone who has been listening carefully to him for years can easily explain what he was, in his way, telling everyone over the weekend:

The thrill show is back on. He is now a legitimate threat to win any and every race he's in.

Ladies and gentlemen, that is good for ski racing. Bode is not just the best the United States has ever thrown out there, he is the most interesting because every race is an exploration of what it's like to throw yourself out there without fear.

He's on new skis in every one of his events, he cautioned. Even so, the knee feels good.

"I"m ready," he said. "I'm skiing well in every event. It hasn't come out in the races yet. But it will."

The U.S. Ski Team is loaded with talent. Six American women, for instance, finished in a World Cup top-three last last season in the downhill or super-G. And, of course, beyond Miller, Ligety, Vonn and Shiffrin, there is Julia Mancuso, a big-game racer if there ever was one.

That said -- to have Bode Miller back injects a different dynamic. To pretend otherwise is just silly. Everyone knows it.

He took second Sunday, for instance, after starting the first run as the 31st skier down the hill. That is very hard to do.

Whether Miller -- who knows only one way, to ski all-out -- can over the next weeks and months be consistent is the thing. "Sharing the podium with Bode is awesome. I'm a little surprised, actually," Ligety noted. "He probably doesn't like it when I say that, but it was impressive how he was able to bring his intensity up and put down some impressive runs."

"It's a little bit of redemption today," Miller said. "It shows that I'm coming back in GS. I think I can do it in slalom, too," adding a moment later,  "The idea is to be able to ski four events the way I like to do it."

He also said, "There's little tiny pieces that are missing. It's just timing … just little parts that have to come back," adding after, "I feel like I'm ready."

Ligety reigns over giant slalom

It rained Saturday in Kranjska Gora, Slovenia. That's a crummy way to race a ski race like a World Cup giant slalom. To see out your goggles is kinda-sorta like seeing through the windshield of your car, and in the second of the two runs several racers had to made like windshield wipers, reaching up to wipe off their goggles. Aksel Lund Svindal of Norway wiped off his goggles. At least he finished, a more-than-respectable sixth. Fritz Dopfer of Germany wasn't so lucky. He hit a gate with his head; that knocked his goggles off; reaching for them, he appeared to get stuck in slushy snow and went flying off into the protective fencing.

These were the conditions Ted Ligety had to navigate to lock down his fifth giant slalom victory of the season and, in the process, his fourth World Cup giant slalom title.

Ligety led Austria's Marcel Hirscher by six-tenths of a second after the first run. In the second run's rain, Hirscher ended up finishing 45-hundredths back.

France's Alexis Pinturault took third, 77-hundredths behind.

Ligety's winning overall time: 2:35.43.

Ligety's lead in the giant slalom standings: an insurmountable 620-495.

In the World Cup overall standings, Hirscher leads Svindal by 69 points. Ligety stands (a distant) third.

Ligety's three prior giant slalom titles: 2008, 2010, 2011.

"It's a big weight off my back," Ligety said. "I had an awesome season in giant slalom but Hirscher was with me the whole season. It makes it tough going for the title. It was a head game when he was so close all along."

"For me this is a very successful day," Hirscher said. "In the second run I was faster than Ted Ligety and that makes for a fantastic day. Conditions were tough. It was raining pretty strong and it wasn't an easy run on the soft snow."

This was Ligety's 16th career victory, all in giant slalom, and his fifth win at Kranjska Gora (2008, 2009, 2010, 2012). As he said, "This hill is awesome. It has everything. I'm super-proud to win here again."

More history books: Ligety is now third all-time, behind Ingemar Stenmark (46) and Michael von Gruenigen (23) for World Cup giant slalom wins. He had been tied with Alberto Tomba.

For the season: this was Ligety's eighth win. He took three gold medals at the world championships.

As a measure of his consistency: Ligety recorded top-three finishes in all seven of the season's giant slalom races; there's one left to go. He is the first racer to do so since von Gruenigen, in 1996.

"Racing in the rain isn't my favorite thing," he said, but you do what you have to do. "I grew up in Park City, Utah, and only skied in 25 degrees and sunny."

Ligety: first to three

Ted Ligety didn't just win the giant slalom Friday at the alpine skiing world championships. He crushed it. Which means that in the way Lindsey Vonn was the It Girl before the Vancouver Olympics in 2010, Bode Miller the It Dude before Torino in 2006 -- America, you are going to be seeing a lot, and then a lot more, of Ted Ligety before Sochi next February.

Ligety's victory made for his third win at the worlds at Schladming, Austria. He already had won the super-G and the super-combined events.

He became the first man to win three titles in a single worlds since the legendary Jean-Claude Killy of France won four in 1968, when the Olympic Games counted as the worlds.

That's 45 years.

Ligety is the first American skier to win three medals at a single worlds. He is the first non-European to do so.

His four career golds match Miller for most by a U.S. skier.

He is the first skier -- male or female -- to win the super-G, super-combined and giant slalom at a single world championship.

He became the seventh man to win the giant slalom at two worlds, and the sixth back-to-back.

All of this means a great deal, and at the same time very little, come Sochi.

It means Ligety, 28, of Park City, Utah, rocks.

Ligety is already an Olympic gold medalist. He won the combined in Torino.

To be hugely obvious, he is now more mature, smarter, better, totally on his game, and barring injury he will be a medal favorite in Sochi in the giant slalom, and perhaps other events as well.

But, because alpine racing is enormously variable, with course conditions, the course set, the light and more, it could all slip away -- literally -- in an instant.

He acknowledged as much Friday, saying, "Ski racing is such a tough sport. In a way -- it's hard to really replicate these kinds of wins. You've seen Lindsey. She was by far the favorite -- won a gold medal, for sure," in the Vancouver downhill.

"She had the ability to win far more. That's just the tough thing about ski racing. It's so far from guaranteed. It's not like running -- all you have to do is run. Or swimming. There are so many more variables than that. It's just so hard to replicate good performances. The hill changes every single guy. So it's not so easy."

Ligety said he is well aware that, for an American audience, he will now be The Guy heading toward Sochi.

"I don't know what it's going to be like," he said, adding in a reference to Vonn before Vancouver and Miller pre-Torino, "I know they had a lot of external pressures, a lot of things they had to go through for being the favorite -- we'll see how that goes. Hopefully, it doesn't take too much out of my summer. It should be fun."

Sochi will be Ligety's third Games. He said, "I'm always looking forward to the Olympics. It's a really cool experience. This has definitely set the bar high. I don't know if this is repeatable," adding the thing was to "maintain the same level of skiing and give myself good chances there."

Ligety admitted to feeling nerves before Friday's racing.

If so, it didn't show.

The giant slalom is a two-race affair.

In the first piece, Ligety went out and built a lead of 1.31 seconds.

In alpine racing, 1.31 seconds is huge.

In the second run, Ligety's primary rival, Austria's Marcel Hirscher, went out and threw the huge crowd -- more than 35,000 people -- into a roar by moving into contention.

"Running 30th," Ligety said, "it was really bumpy in that second run, and the light was pretty flat," adding, "I had to charge. I was making mistakes," including one that almost sent him, his left ski flying, off the course. "But that's part of ski racing. I had to charge through that. I was glad I had that buffer I did after that first race."

Ligety's combined winning time: 2 minutes, 28.92 seconds.

Hirscher finished 81-hundredths back. At one point, Ligety had increased that 1.31-second lead to 1.68, then slowed to make sure he got to the finish in one piece.

Manfred Moelgg of Italy finished third, 1.75 seconds behind.

Tenth place was another second back. Twelfth place was more than full three seconds back of first. In alpine racing, these sorts of differentials are ridiculous.

"This week has been the best week of ski racing in my life," Ligety told a news conference. "I still don't think I have recognized what I have done so far this week. It has been so phenomenal."

Tim Burke back in the spotlight

Tim Burke finished third in a World Cup biathlon Sunday in Pokljuka, Slovenia, his first podium finish since the 2010 season, highlighting an extraordinary weekend for American athletes on skis. Burke's third-place in the 15-kilometer mass start marked his fourth career top-three finish.

"I feel like I'm back in the form I had before," Burke said over the phone. "And I'm more confident now."

Comparing Burke's achievement to those of other Americans over the weekend is, of course, something of apples to oranges. After all:

In Alta Badia, Italy, on Sunday, alpine racer Ted Ligety dominated a giant slalom to win by 2.04 seconds over Austria's Marcel Hirscher. It was Ligety's 14th career giant-slalom victory, tying him for fourth on the all-time wins list.

On Saturday, in snowy, foggy Val Gardena, Italy, downhiller Steven Nyman, starting 39th -- won. He missed all of last year with a torn left Achilles' tendon. Nyman's last top-three finish: 2007, at Beaver Creek, Colo.

Also in Val Gardena, Travis Ganong put down a career-best tenth.

In freestyle skiing on Saturday in Ruka, Finland, Heather McPhie -- relying on her back-X and signature D-spin -- notched her first World Cup victory in three seasons; on the men's side, Jeremy Cota took third. Four U.S. women placed in the top 10 and three American men in the top six.

In World Cup snowboard-cross racing Friday at Telluride, Colo., two-time Olympic champion Seth Wescott -- who was out much of last year with a shoulder injury -- won a photo finish in a blizzard to prevail over Australia's Alex Pullin, who had beaten him in the quarterfinals and semifinals.

Wescott and X Games champ Nate Holland won Saturday's team event.

"It feels really good to be back," Wescott said after winning Friday's race, adding, "…When I hole-shotted that first one, I said, 'Here we go, I love doing this.' "

In men's halfpipe Saturday in Breckenridge, Colo., on the Dew Tour, Shaun White and Louie Vito went one-two, White throwing an enormous signature double McTwist 1200 in his first run to score 95.25; Kaitlyn Farrington -- who debuted back-to-back 900s for the first time in her competition run -- won the women's event, Maddy Schaffrick taking third.

"I am excited! After coming off a knee injury this summer I am glad to be on top," White said. "I feel great and am pumped for the season. This is the road to Sochi!"

Also in Breckenridge, in the women's freeski superpipe, Brita Sigourney and Maddie Bowman went 1-2, Sigourney winning in her first competition after suffering a knee injury last February and training hard at the U.S. Ski Team's Park City's Center of Excellence workout facility all summer.

And Jamie Anderson won the slopestyle event, her run featuring spins in all four directions: a half cab 5-0, frontside 720, switch backside 540 and, finally, a huge 540 that she floated to the bottom.

In cross-country skiing, at the World Cup sprints Saturday in Canmore, Canada, Kikkan Randall took second, behind Norway's Maiken Kaspersen Falla. Randall leads the World Cup sprint standings; she moved up to second in the overall standings. The top American man, Andy Newell, finished fifth.

With all that … Tim Burke? And third place?

Yes.

Tim Burke.

Because biathlon, and Burke, are all about context, promise and opportunity.

The U.S. biathlon team has never -- again, never -- won an Olympic medal and Burke is one of its best bets to do so at the Sochi 2014 Games.

Burke also said by phone Sunday about his third-place finish, "This is big for me," and those words hold way more than just the obvious.

Amid his breakout 2010 season, Burke turned up with a painful condition, "compartment syndrome," that's not uncommon to Nordic skiers. The surgery and recovery had kept him out of the spotlight since.

But it was clear as the weekend's events progressed that Burke was on the verge of breaking through. He finished fourth in the 10k sprint and seventh in the 12.5 pursuit.

A biathlon primer: only 30 guys start in the 15k mass start, and those 30 must qualify. Of the 30 in Sunday's race, only two were North Americans -- Burke and Canada's Jean Philippe Leguellec, who would finish 21st.

Only one guy shot clean Sunday, Andreas Birnbacher of Germany. No surprise -- he won.

Jakov Fak of Slovenia, the winner of Thursday's sprint, missed just two shots. He finished just five seconds ahead of Burke.

Burke shot clean in the first two stages, then incurred a single penalty on the each of the last two stages.

He crossed the finish line a mere 3.3 seconds ahead of Martin Fourcade of France, the current World Cup leader. The solid weekend in Pokljuka lifted Burke to sixth in the overall World Cup standings.

What-ifs are usually of no consequence -- but in this instance, it's worth noting that if Burke had shot clean, his skiing is once again sound enough again that he might well have won Sunday's race.

The only reason to bring that up is that finishing third is the kind of thing that makes a guy think he can get to first, and -- just as importantly -- challenge for that top spot consistently.

"It's one thing," Burke said, "to know your training is going well, to think you can do this in a race.

"It's another to do it in a race.

"Now I know."

Ted Ligety's "once-in-a-career" giant slalom victory

Alpine ski race wins usually come by the hundredths of a second. Ted Ligety won the opening World Cup race of the 2012-13 season Sunday on the famous Rettenbach Glacier in Sölden, Austria, by a crazy 2.75 seconds.

It was, as he put it afterward, a "once-in-a-career margin."

It was also a demonstration of, as U.S. head coach Sasha Rearick put it, Ligety's "complete ability and confidence in himself."

Even on the best days, there is nothing inherently fair about alpine racing. And conditions Sunday were, in a word, godawful. "It was a tough day for everybody," Ligety said, adding, "I just fought and maybe took more risk than it was worth - than was maybe smart."

That's just modesty talking -- the guy from Park City, Utah, who posed for photos after the race with his parents.

Ligety is the 2006 Olympic gold medalist in the combined. He is a three-time World Cup season giant slalom champion.

He won in Sölden last year. Indeed, his most recent finishes there had read like this: 2-3-2-1.

But this was not only a new season. Everyone had to ski on new -- different -- skis. Rules changes mandated skis that were, to reduce a complex situation to its basics, a little bit longer but narrower skis designed to slow racers down.

Ligety was originally one of the most vocal opponents of the rules change.

Indeed, a blog he wrote last November decrying the change was entitled "Tyranny of FIS," the acronym a reference to skiing's international governing body. He remains a vocal proponent of athlete input into rules changes.

FIS officials have said many times they believe the rules changes will make the skiing safer.

By last February, meanwhile, after testing the new skis, Ligety discovered he was actually faster on them than the old ones. He called a blog he wrote then, in a reference to the new skis' minimum radius, "35 meters of irony."

Shortly before racing got underway at Sölden, in a video blog posted by American teammate Warner Nickerson, Ligety confirmed that, yes, he was in fact faster on the new skis in most GS conditions.

No one, however, counted on a set of variables like what race day Sunday brought: soft snow, variable light and a blizzard.

The GS consists of two runs. The winner is the guy with the day's lowest combined time.

Ligety ran his first run in near-darkness. He crossed four-hundredths of a second behind France's Thomas Fanara.

That, Ligety said afterward, "just fired me up," adding, "I knew I should have been in the lead."

He skied his second run in a virtual whiteout, the blizzard raging. He said, "I was just taking a ton of risk," adding, "It really paid out," the biggest margin of victory in a World Cup GS in 34 years. Manfred Moelgg of Italy took second; Austria's Marcel Hirscher, last season's overall and GS tour champion, third. Fanara came in fourth.

FIS records show that the time difference between the winner and second place in a World Cup GS has only been bigger six times before -- and all those in the 1970s. The biggest margin: 4.06 seconds, set by Sweden's Ingemar Stenmark in the 1978-79 season.

"I'm psyched," Ligety said after the second run. "I didn't want to leave anything out there. I was hammering!"

It's only one race in a long season.

But it went a long way toward re-establishing Ligety as the best GS skier in the world. Because it's not just that Ligety won, and by such a commanding margin. It's that he did it in such absurd conditions, and that he created that margin almost entirely in a single run.

"Ted's arguments he had on the skis were his own opinions but a lot of people agreed," Rearick said. "He's a vocal person and that showed in his arguments against the skis. But once he figured out this is what it is, he put all that energy, all that focus into making sure he was going to be the fastest and that he wasn't going to lose."

Hirscher asked rhetorically, "What can I say about the incredible Ted Ligety?

"Right now," Hirscher -- a local hero in Sölden -- said in quotes posted on the fisalpine.com website, "he is far away from me … he is in outer space. He skied awesome. He skied every gate perfect."