The ski racing season is about to pick up speed (literally) | CBC Sports

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There’s a lot going on right now in alpine skiing.

Yesterday, American great Lindsey Vonn confirmed that her comeback at age 40 will begin this weekend with some warmup races in Colorado. This came a few days after Mikaela Shiffrin, the U.S. star who broke Vonn’s all-time women’s World Cup wins record, fell painfully short of her 100th victory when an ugly crash in Vermont left her with a badly punctured abdomen. Shiffrin said Monday she’ll be out for “for a few weeks, minimum.”

Also on Monday, 35-year-old Austrian great Marcel Hirscher’s return from a five-year hiatus came to a crashing halt when he blew out a knee during a training run. Meanwhile, Norwegian star Aleksander Aamodt Kilde, who supplanted Hirscher as the men’s overall champion in 2020 and is now engaged to Shiffrin, is sitting out the season due to complications from a bad spill last January.

All this news, and we haven’t even hit the juiciest part of the season yet. That will happen Friday when Colorado’s Beaver Creek resort hosts the first World Cup downhill race of the season, followed by the first super-G on Saturday (they’re both men’s events, and Beaver Creek will also host a men’s giant slalom on Sunday).

For those who don’t follow alpine skiing, the downhill and the super-G are the two most popular disciplines. These so-called “speed” events are faster, more dangerous and generally more exciting for fans than the slalom and giant slalom — known as the “technical” events because they reward precision more than raw courage (though your average weekend skier probably wouldn’t have the guts to attempt a pro slalom or GS course either).

In the downhill, athletes can reach speeds of more than 150 km/h as they navigate twists, turns and treacherously uneven terrain. Last season, a rash of major injuries from high-speed crashes in the downhill and super-G became such a concern that skiing’s world governing body now requires athletes to wear airbags for those races.

WATCH | Canadian star Jack Crawford details his love for downhill skiing:

An ability to thrive in the face of such dangers has defined Canadian ski racers for decades — dating back to the legendary Crazy Canucks, who made their bones (and broke a few too) by winning the terrifying Kitzbuehel downhill four straight years in the 1980s.

The current keepers of that tradition are Jack Crawford and Cameron Alexander, a pair of 27-year-olds who are the two best active Canadians in the men’s speed events.

Crawford won super-G gold at the 2023 world championships in France, becoming just the third Canadian man to capture an alpine world title (John Kucera and Erik Guay also won theirs in speed events between 2009 and 2017). In 2022, Crawford took Olympic bronze in the combined, which blends a downhill and a slalom.

All four of Crawford’s World Cup medals (three silvers and a bronze) have come in the speed events. He finished fifth in the season-long downhill standings in 2022-23, when he reached the podium three times in addition to his victory at the world championships.

Alexander took bronze in the downhill at the 2023 worlds and won a World Cup downhill in Norway in 2022. Last season, he earned a pair of downhill bronze en route to a ninth-place finish in the World Cup standings.

Barring catastrophe (always lurking in this sport) or inclement weather (same), Crawford and Alexander will compete in Friday’s downhill (1 p.m. ET) and Saturday’s super-G (12:30 p.m. ET) at Beaver Creek. You can watch both races live on CBCSports.ca and CBC Gem. Read more about Crawford’s link to the Crazy Canucks in this story by CBC Sports’ Devin Heroux.