Planica Comps

Well this is a bit late but better late than never.

A brief summary of the comps in Planica:

First, the complex:  Planica is best known for its ski flying hill.  This fall, however, they finished rebuilding and renovating their normal and large hill.  They literally had too much money in the budget and couldn’t spend enough of it on the complex.  Hard to believe, but true.  One example of the extravagance is indoor escalator that runs beneath the K125 inrun and down to the K95. 

The big hill – which we competed on – was so much fun!  Unfortunately results weren’t great this weekend.  None of us were off by too much technically, but on a hill like that small miscues can turn into big issues.   Saturday we did all race really well and Nick led the way in 25th with the 7th fastest race, Michael was 26th with the 5th fastest time, and I was 29th with the 4th fastest time.   Sunday, I led the way but was 33rd – no points for us.

Craig Ward (Michael's dad) took some great photos in Planica.  All of the ones of us racing are from him.

We didn’t have any competitions this weekend, so we stayed and trained in Seefeld, Austria.  Our “rest week” ended up being pretty busy and flew by – mostly because of our trip to Predazzo.  On Friday morning we drove the short 2 hour trip down to watch Nordic World Championships in Predazzo, Italy.  First we watched the normal hill individual combined – where Bryan led the way with a solid 14th place.  

The real highlight of the week was watching Sarah Hendrickson win a World Championship gold!  It really was incredible to be a part of the team cheering her on to the top spot in the world.  

Another highlight from Seefeld was skinning up one of the nearby alpine mountains with one of our Austrian friends who lives nearby.  Trying to carve the steep icy hill coming down was not easy, but it was a whole lot of fun and a pretty great way to get in some training. 

Sunday we started the journey up to Norway.  From Seefeld it’s close to ten hours of driving to Kiel, Germany, on the North Sea.  And then we hop on a ferry for 24 hours and arrive in Oslo.  We did manage to find a Autohof to grab lunch and turn on Eurosport exactly as the Nordic Combined team race started.  Team USA brought in their third medal with a very stellar bronze.  Earlier on Sunday, Kikkan Randall and Jessie Diggens won gold in the team sprint.  What a weekend for the US!