End the season on a high note, win number 88: https://skiracing.com/shiffrin-ends-...d-21st-gs-win/
Then endure your boyfriend conducting your podium interview: https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cp-kZ...d=YmMyMTA2M2Y=
End the season on a high note, win number 88: https://skiracing.com/shiffrin-ends-...d-21st-gs-win/
Then endure your boyfriend conducting your podium interview: https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cp-kZ...d=YmMyMTA2M2Y=
She is incredible. The interview was great. Hard not to like her, a lot.
I know it’s only September …
https://youtube.com/shorts/4Lv4VLZiv...hJrPSIomjnsfPW
Her mom posted more pictures. The snow doesn’t look too bad to me.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CwlW_FNu...ZjMTM2ODFkZg==
And she’s off to a fast start (Petra was faster but flew a little too close to the sun, gate-wise):
https://amp.theguardian.com/sport/20...ory-in-finland
Looks like the Zermatt round is canceled. I am hopeful that my ski season here in the PNW will not be a bowl of soggy oatmeal.
Oof, that drone footage at 1:10
^^
So clean and graceful. What a stud.
Also, that following drone footage is the only videography I've seen that gives a sense of how fast the racers are going.
Amazing. That really shows the air time and the speed.
The speed is crazy. The first Winter Olympics I worked was Placid (although I was in charge of panicking about no snow and buying every snow machine I could find) and I worked on a good many after that. Somehow I have missed over all of these decades that they actually spray water on the course to let it freeze/ ice to make the speed more. I only learned that about a week and a half ago when our local ski hill hosted a Women’s World cup and I watched them do it the night before. Oh, Shiffrin came in 3rd that weekend. But she absolutely wowed the locals with her human/ just a nice kid who skiis way of accessability.
On a side note for Dan…our local ski hill does not hold a candle to my memories of Crystal when I was living/working in Seattle.
« If I knew what I was doing, I’d be doing it right now »
-Jon Mandel
I go out on our porch in the late evening and hear the low rumble of the snow machines at our local slope, Catamount. I forget the exact history, but the original owner years ago designed one of the water-mist snow "cannons" still used today. With all the lights on, the hillside looks like a nocturnal cloud.
https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoo...oomed-success/
Original article was from 2011 when she was 16. She really did go on to become the goat.
With so many uncontrollable factors, she really did control most.
Same race, with added interview. See whee woohoo at 4:25. Do what you love, love what you do?
Sorry to derail a Mikaela thread, but I hear that Catamount is killing it right now. But damn there is no future even in machine-made snow for small ski areas in the northeast. The latest data I’m legally required to use for designing heating systems shows 28 fewer days below freezing in 2030, and 50 fewer in 2050.
Even these places will soon be like those rusty abandoned rope tows we ride our mountain bikes by. While picking up ticks on the same days of the year when people used to ski.
With love, Debbie Downer.
Last edited by thollandpe; 12-11-2023 at 08:19 PM.
Trod Harland, Pickle Expediter
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. — James Baldwin
No worries, Debbie. WRT man-made snow, as long as the temps support it, is it a better or worse use of water than other recreation? Than golf courses? Than Las Vegas? Perhaps I'm too hopeful that spraying mountain slopes with irrigation-grade frozen water is slightly less wasteful than other things. And I do realize that your note was about temperatures rising.
Dan Fuller, local bicycle enthusiast
Yeah, better than a golf course is splitting hairs. I get that. But I’m an energy guy, and my first thought isn’t about redistributing that water in a better manner, like let’s say for fellow humans to drink. It’s about the massive amount of energy required to pump that water back up the mountain, and the beyond massive amount of energy required to run those air compressors to atomize that water by those snow guns when those few and getting fewer hours make the outdoor air cold enough to freeze it into “snow”.
And the irony that, before we changed the climate, that this simply happened naturally.
Last edited by thollandpe; 12-11-2023 at 09:26 PM.
Trod Harland, Pickle Expediter
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. — James Baldwin
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