East vs. West- Killington WC was attempt to bring back major

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GlacierBoy
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East vs. West- Killington WC was attempt to bring back major

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Today's NY Times:

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By BILL PENNINGTON
November 27, 2016
KILLINGTON, Vt. — Pauline Condron, the 95-year-old grandmother of the Olympic champion Mikaela Shiffrin, had never seen her 21-year-old granddaughter ski in a World Cup race until Sunday. Condron lives in western Massachusetts, and since 1991, skiing’s World Cup circuit had avoided the Eastern United States.

But with dozens of family and friends in attendance at Killington Resort for the first Eastern-based World Cup in 25 years, Shiffrin won her 10th consecutive World Cup slalom on Sunday.

As was the case at the World Cup giant slalom on Saturday, the race on Sunday was contested before sold-out grandstands and a cheering throng that lined the hilly borders of the racecourse — a fan turnout that was among the biggest for any women’s World Cup race.

But more meaningful was the symbolism and the significance of where the celebration of Shiffrin, America’s next worldwide ski racing star, took place. Yes, it had been in what was once Shiffrin’s backyard, since she went to grammar school in New Hampshire and high school in Vermont. It was also the first step in a grander plan to reintroduce high-level ski racing to the Eastern United States, and not just at mountain resorts.

Imagine a 5,000-kilometer cross-country race in Manhattan’s Central Park in February? Or an Alpine dual slalom competition in the heart of an Eastern seaboard city? Or a snowboarding and skiing competition on a 150-foot, snow-covered ramp in a major league ballpark?

“A dual slalom is not out of the question, or a big air event that we’ll bring into a city,” said Tiger Shaw, the president and chief executive of the United States Ski and Snowboard Association, the parent organization of the United States ski team. “It’s about getting the sport to major centers of population. And the East is a hotbed.”

He added, “This is really the center of ski racing in the U.S.”

The Killington races were also a tangible result of a critical fence-mending effort by United States ski officials. In the last 20 years, a schism had developed between the Eastern and Western regions of the country. The United States Ski and Snowboard Association’s headquarters are in Park City, Utah, and while there once had been almost yearly races in the Eastern United States beginning in the 1960s, the last was in New Hampshire in 1991. The few World Cup races that visited the United States annually were, instead, always held at the higher-elevation Western resorts, most often in Colorado.


“When I took over, there was a certain amount of rift organizationally between the East and the U.S.S.A.,” said Shaw, who grew up in northern Vermont and is a two-time Olympian. “It was driven by a number of things: personalities, physical separation, the perception of what people cared about.”

As Shiffrin said in an interview last week: “I feel like a lot of people counted the East out as a World Cup venue.”

Shiffrin, who has already won 22 World Cup races and is a two-time world champion, represents the duality of American ski racing, where the bigger mountains are in the West but the greatest concentration of racers are based in the East.

Shiffrin was born in Colorado, moved to New Hampshire when she was 8, went back to Colorado as a preteen but returned for several formative years of training at a Vermont ski academy until she debuted on the World Cup circuit. Still, she and her family have maintained a year-round home near Vail, Colo.

“All my parents’ family lives on the East Coast, and I’m accepted as sort of an East Coast girl even though I was born in the West and lived there for a long time, too,” Shiffrin said. “I’m both, I guess. But I do think we should race in the East every year if we can. There are thousands and thousands of ski racing families so passionate about the sport.”

The East-West conflict in ski racing was settled only recently, Shaw said.

“We were out in Utah in our ivory tower, as we were labeled, and it just took getting out in the field to fix the rift,” Shaw said. “It was meeting people and understanding why they were feeling left out. We developed a shared vision that was agreed upon and adopted.

“And now it feels like you have everybody pulling on the same direction on the rope and not against each other on the rope.”

The reconciliation is also good business for the ski industry.

“Something like 70 percent of all the snow sports apparel and equipment sales take place in the Eastern U.S.,” said Herwig Demschar, an executive of Powdr, the corporation that owns Killington Resort, as he gazed at the large crowds at this weekend’s races. “And the Eastern resorts are just hours from about 90 million people. You want your product to be near that marketplace.”

Shaw saw a competitive advantage as well. Referring to the crowds in Killington, which were filled with thousands of children in ski-racing team jackets from throughout the region, Shaw said, “There’s going to be a future Olympic medalist in that crowd.”

As for Shiffrin, walking off the slopes here Sunday, she recognized the overall importance of producing a winning performance as the hometown girl on a big stage, but she also found simpler meaning as well.

“If I’m proud of anything that I will ever do,” she said late Sunday afternoon. “The most proud I’ve ever been is to win a race in front of my nanna.”
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