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When skiers Mikaela Shiffrin and Marco Schwarz gained the world titles in Alpine mixed final February, they didn’t count on to have only one extra such race of their careers.
However the 2022 Beijing Olympics is likely to be the final time top-level skiers compete within the conventional self-discipline that pits pace and technical racers towards one another.
The brand new World Cup season, which begins in Austria on Oct. 23-24, doesn’t have any mixed occasions, and they’re unlikely to return to the calendar any time quickly.
“It’s positively a disgrace for me,” Schwarz mentioned concerning the attainable removing of the occasion, which mixes a downhill or super-G run with a slalom run.
“The calendar is already fairly tight with out it, so from that perspective it’s OK,” the Austrian skier mentioned. “However in fact, I actually preferred racing it and I’d like to race it sooner or later as effectively.”
A workgroup of the Worldwide Ski Federation is at the moment trying into the way forward for the mixed occasion, amongst different disciplines.
The Alpine Future Imaginative and prescient Working Group was arrange final June following the election of Johan Eliasch as FIS President “to evaluate and suggest aspirational plans to develop participation and competitors,” in accordance with its mandate.
The chairman of the group is influential Austrian official and long-term FIS Council member, Peter Schroecksnadel, who stepped down as president of the Austrian Ski Federation after 31 years final spring.
The workgroup has three conferences scheduled this fall earlier than presenting its proposals.
Mixed occasions as soon as have been a showpiece of Alpine snowboarding. When the game was first included within the Olympics, in Garmisch-Partenkirchen in 1936, a mixed occasion was the one race.
Supposed to reward the most effective all-round skier, the self-discipline helped popularize the game within the early days of the World Cup — the late Sixties and the Nineteen Seventies.
“It was an amazing picture. Whenever you return to the instances of Karl Schranz and Jean-Claude Killy, they have been the heroes, they have been the celebrities,” mentioned Markus Waldner, FIS males’s race director.
However the professionalization of Alpine snowboarding for the reason that Eighties has pushed the mixed occasion to the sidelines.
The ski business has been creating particular gear for every self-discipline, and the preparation of programs has made ski racing extra demanding by the years.
The evolvement of the game has seen downhill racing and slalom snowboarding diverge, requiring a unique strategy in coaching and making it tougher for skiers to compete at high degree in each.
“These two disciplines will not be matching anymore, they aren’t becoming. This can be a downside,” Waldner mentioned.
“The our bodies of the pace guys, of (Beat) Feuz, (Dominik) Paris, or (Matthias) Mayer, are educated specializing in the downhills and the super-Gs. They have to be highly effective. The slalom guys are fully completely different from a bodily perspective. It’s also getting harmful, for a tiny slalom man to leap down in a downhill.”
And the opposite means round: A pace skier struggles on a slalom course.
“After watching a high star in downhill, seeing this poor man in a slalom, even whether it is a simple slalom, is simply trying ugly. Simply ridiculous,” Waldner mentioned.
“Is that this what we need to present to our followers? That Paris is trying like a newbie? No. We’d like a beautiful present, we want high performances.”
The World Cup calendar 10 years in the past nonetheless had room for 4 mixed races, however its quantity has steadily decreased.
FIS began experimenting with new, extra TV-friendly codecs to draw youthful audiences, like floodlit metropolis occasions and parallel races, which have been supposed to interchange outdated race codecs.
Nonetheless, the mixed occasion survived, although its format has modified many instances by the years.
Initially a self-discipline contested over two days — with a full downhill on the primary and a two-leg slalom on the following — the mixed occasion later received a shortened downhill or a super-G and a slalom diminished to at least one leg, each on the identical day.
The most recent adaption was a change of the beginning order for the second run, with the most effective finishers of the pace leg beginning first within the slalom. It didn’t do the occasion any good, because the winner was often recognized after the primary few starters within the slalom.
The lads’s and ladies’s mixed occasions received the bottom TV rankings by far of all races on the world championships in Cortina d’Ampezzo.
“Zero, zero. No individuals have been watching,” mentioned Waldner, criticizing the concept the modified beginning order would give a constructive impetus.
“No, this isn’t the issue. The product isn’t good,” he mentioned. “Only some guys, like (Alexis) Pinturault, Schwarz, they will do each on a fairly good degree. However we’re speaking about no more than 5 guys in whole. That’s the downside.”
For Waldner, the outdated mixed occasion has no future in Alpine snowboarding. And he waits for the workgroup led by Schroecksnadel to attract the identical conclusion.
“Hopefully they offer us a solution, reasonably earlier than later,” Waldner mentioned.
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Extra AP snowboarding: https://apnews.com/hub/snowboarding and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports
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Eric Willemsen on Twitter: https://twitter.com/eWilmedia
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