Injuries, Bad Luck Hit U.S. Skiers Medal Count At Worlds May Be Bleak
Picabo Street is out for the season. Tommy Moe is home nursing a cut hand. Other Americans have barely made a ripple on the World Cup circuit.
The U.S. ski team heads into the World Alpine Championships without its two biggest stars and without much hope of even winning a single medal.
With the Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, just a year away, American ski prospects are looking bleak.
Hopes for a great season for American skiers collapsed in early December when Street, the defending world downhill champion and the sport’s most marketable female competitor, tore ligaments in her knee.
Street, the 1994 Olympic silver medalist, won’t be back on the World Cup tour until next season.
“That’s the problem with a team built on one athlete,” said the women’s head coach, Herwig Demschar. “When you lose it, you’re gone.”
Since Street was sidelined, other injuries have decimated the team, leaving few healthy skiers to even challenge for a medal at the two-week world championships opening today.
Moe, the 1994 Olympic downhill champion, severed a tendon in his hand last weekend and will miss the worlds. Moe called his injury a “fluke thing” that happened in a Kitzbuehel, Austria, pub, where he and several other World Cup racers were tending bar.
A week before Moe’s injury, Kyle Rasmussen tore knee ligaments in a downhill in Wengen, Switzerland.
“We are hurting,” men’s head coach Tomas Karlsson said.
AJ Kitt, bronze medalist in the downhill at the 1993 worlds in Morioka, Japan, declared himself “mentally burned out,” according to Karlsson, and skipped the Kitzbuehel races last week to go home and recharge for Sestriere. His best showing this season has been an eighth-place finish.
Perhaps the best U.S. chance at a medal is slalom specialist Matt Grosjean, who has been consistently among the top 15 racers in slalom this season and posted a career best fourth-place finish in Kranjska Gora, Slovenia, on Jan. 6 “I feel that I am skiing better than I have going into any race,” Grosjean said. “I know it will take my absolute best day to get a medal, but my goal is to have that day.”
On the women’s side, the 1992 Olympic silver medalist Hilary Lindh has had a mediocre season, although she showed signs of recent improvement with a ninth-place finish in Cortina, Italy. Before that, she hadn’t placed higher than 17th.
Megan Gerety had a fifth-place finish early in the season at a downhill in Vail, but since then has finished mostly around the 20th spot.
Gerety, 25, hit by the same bad luck as her teammates, took a dangerous spill during the Cortina downhill. Although not seriously hurt, Gerety may have trouble attacking the course in Sestriere.
At Laax, Switzerland, Russia’s Warwara Zelenskaja was the surprise winner of a women’s World Cup downhill Saturday, while Olympic champion Katja Seizinger of Germany fell.
Zelenskaja blazed down the sun-soaked Fatschas course in 1 minute, 24.98 seconds, for her first World Cup victory of the season and the second of her career.
Switzerland’s Heidi Zurbriggen, who tied for first with Italy’s Isolde Kostner last week in a downhill at Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, tied for second Saturday with Renate Goetschl of Austria at 1:25.07.
Kostner, the favorite, was a disappointing fifth, .34 seconds behind Zelenskaja.