U.S. alpine: five is plenty fine

KRASNAYA POLYANA, Russia — There were a couple hours Saturday evening when it seemed possible the U.S. alpine ski team — already with a performance here at the Sochi 2014 Olympics that history will judge as fine, indeed— might, just might, sneak away with what would amount to a bonus medal. After Run 1 of the men’s slalom, Ted Ligety, winner three days ago of the giant slalom, had put himself in position for a medal. He was only 11-hundredths back of third.

The U.S. alpine team went into Saturday night with five medals, tied for its second-best performance ever at a Winter Games, with the Sarajevo 1984 team. Only the Vancouver 2010 team, which racked up eight, had done better.

Tantalizingly, six suddenly seemed within reach. Because he already had the GS gold, Ligety was skiing the slalom with no expectation, no pressure. The buzz started building — remember those two killer slalom runs Ligety put down to win his first Olympic gold, the combined, in Torino in 2006?

And then came the buzzkill.

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Shiffrin's 'sure as heck' gold

KRASNAYA POLYANA, Russia — The first Olympics he went to, in his very first race, 15-year-old Michael Phelps took fifth place. He got right back in the pool and, soon enough, he set his first world record. In his next Olympic race — which, because of the calendar, had to wait four years — he won gold. In her first Olympic race, the women’s giant slalom here Tuesday, 18-year-old Mikaela Shiffrin took fifth. She said, “I think this is supposed to happen,” adding, “The next Olympics I go to, I sure as heck am not getting fifth.”

There are moments, even at the Olympics, that are genuinely special. These moments make memories that last through the years. They also make cross-over stars, the ones who can make it big outside the confines of a niche like alpine skiing.

Mikaela Shiffrin didn’t have to wait four full years. She sure as heck gave it the full Friday Night Lights treatment here at Rosa Khutor, throwing down two incredible — and very different — runs to win gold in the women’s slalom.

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Ted Ligety's 'awesome' GS gold

KRASNAYA POLYANA, Russia — A couple years ago, they made a rules change in the giant slalom. Citing the interest of athlete safety, they made the skiers change to longer, straighter skis. Those skis are way harder to turn. Ted Ligety, the American who had ruled the giant slalom, complained bitterly.

And then he figured out a way to ski on those new skis, lower and longer in the turns, that further separated himself from everyone else in the world. He could now win races by astonishing margins.

At Wednesday’s men’s super-G at Rosa Khutor, Ted Ligety put on a clinic to win the first American alpine skiing gold of these Olympics. Indeed, he won big. It was one of the great moments of the 2014 Games. Here, for the entire world to bear witness, was sheer excellence — the excellence the sport demands as well as the excellence the man demands of himself.

It was, in a word, awesome.

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Bill Marolt pivots to Tiger Shaw

When Bill Marolt took over 17 years ago as president and chief executive officer of what is now called the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Assn., he proclaimed its goal was to be the "best in the world." For sure, the United States had produced great skiers: Andrea Mead-Lawrence, Billy Kidd, the Mahre brothers, generations of the Cochran family, Bill Johnson, Tommy Moe, Picabo Street, the cross-country racer Billy Koch. Absolutely, unequivocally, the American union was blessed with mountains east and west, even north in Alaska.

When Marolt took over, however, his goal was audacious. The U.S. Ski Team had enjoyed limited international success for about a decade. Its cash situation was, to be gentle, precarious. "Best in the world"? Little wonder the Europeans -- who dominated the winter scene -- might have laughed. Heartily.

With Wednesday's announcement that Tiger Shaw is due to take over for Marolt after next February's Sochi Games, the time is now to give credit where credit is due.

The United States is now a Winter Games powerhouse. Why? Because of the U.S. Ski Team.

At the Vancouver 2010 Games, the U.S. team won the medals count, with 37. Again -- why? Because the U.S. Ski team won 21.

A little comparison, for those who might yet be stuck in the past, or can't -- or don't want to -- get past their feather boas:

It is absolutely true that in Vancouver Evan Lysacek won gold in men's figure skating. But in the ladies' individual skating competition, no American won a medal of any color. That marked the first time there was no medal in women's singles since 1964, underscoring -- despite the massive hype and drama television loves to play up -- the weakness in the U.S. skating program.

That has not changed. At the 2013 worlds, U.S. women managed to finish fifth and sixth.

Reality, geography, politics and power check:

The 2014 Games are, of course, in Russia, where Vladimir Putin is president. The costs for those Games are already north of $50 billion. Mr. Putin did not oversee the spending of that much money not to win important medals. In Russia, figure skating is important (recall the judging controversy at the 2002 Games). Outside of South Korea's Yuna Kim, who is ethereal, who thinks the Russians aren't going to run away with the figure-skating medals?

The corollary? That leaves the real action in Sochi in the mountains.

Which leads back to the U.S. Ski Team, which has been planning for Sochi since even before Vancouver.

For instance, in 2014 because of new events added in 2011 by the International Olympic Committee, there will be 48 medal opportunities in snowboarding and freeskiing, up from 24 in 2010.

In these so-called "action sport" events, U.S. athletes have been at or near the top of the world rankings over the past seasons.

Meanwhile, in alpine skiing, Ted Ligety won three golds at last year's world championships. And Bode Miller is only the greatest all-around male skier the United States has ever produced.

The U.S. women, to echo the slogan, are the world's best:  Mikaela Shiffrin, just 18, is the No. 1 slalom skier anywhere, Julia Mancuso one of the top big-event racers ever. Lindsey Vonn, the most successful female ski racer in American history, a four-time World Cup overall champion and the 2010 Vancouver downhill gold medalist, now has something to prove; she is making an ahead-of-schedule recovery from last February's knee injury, cleared for on-snow training and heading Friday for Chile, the ski team's other big announcement Wednesday. Vonn's original target to be back on skis: November.

In cross-country, Kikkan Randall and Jesse Diggins and, for that matter, the entire women's relay team are for-real contenders to win the first Olympic medals for the U.S. in the discipline since Koch in the 1970s. On the men's side, Andy Newell is in the hunt, too.

The Nordic combined team proved the breakout stars of the Vancouver Games. Billy Demong and Todd Lodwick figure to be back. And the Fletcher brothers, Taylor and Bryan, are killer fast on skis. Any sort of jumping and the skiing will take care of itself -- which the rest of the world knows full well.

Sarah Hendrickson won last year's women's ski jumping world championships -- though she suffered an injury to her right knee in a training jump last week in Europe.

Back to snowboarding: the U.S. roster is so good and so deep that Shaun White, the two-time halfpipe gold medalist, is going to have to compete, and hard, to defend his title.

These are just some of the faces and names that will be on TV come February.

As complicated as Bill Marolt's job is, it's also thoroughly elemental. It's USSA's job to put these athletes in position come next February to deliver peak performance.

The record shows that few, if any, sports organizations have been run as well as the U.S. Ski Team since 1996.

Indeed, few organizations anywhere are now run with the vision -- and the winning culture -- of the ski team.

Since 2009, USSA has been headquartered at the Center of Excellence in Park City, Utah, where staff, trainers, coaches and athletes across all the disciplines mingle in a building that is part office and part state-of-the-art training center -- the better to exchange stories, ideas, laughs, whatever. This is how a common culture is not only built but nurtured.

This fall will mark the third season of the Copper Mountain Speed Center in Colorado -- where racers can, early-season, train full-on downhill, with speeds of 80 mph and jumps of 50 to 70 meters.

For 16 of the last 17 years, USSA has recorded a balanced budget.

It has an endowment that now measures $60 million.

All of this is, in large measure, thanks to the leadership of Bill Marolt.

"I think if I've done one thing," Marolt said, "I brought focus and a sense of direction that ultimately everybody bought into. And out of that focus and direction, you can create that culture of excellence. Then -- you can create a lot.

"More than anything, I brought the sense of focus."

That is what Shaw inherits. This is his challenge and his opportunity.

An alpine skier himself who raced in the 1984 Sarajevo -- under then-men's coach Bill Marolt -- and 1988 Calgary Games, where he finished 12th in the giant slalom and 18th in the super-G, Shaw has since gone on to make himself into a successful businessman.

Shaw recently served as a senior director at Global Rescue LLC, responsible for business development and new markets. Before that he was director of inventory strategy at Dealertrack, overseeing a wide range of automotive retail sales issues.

Marolt will turn 70 in September. Shaw turned 52 last Saturday.

It's one more mark of Marolt's professionalism that there was a process to recruit, identity and put in place his successor. Shaw will become chief operating officer Oct. 1, then move into the top job next spring.

"I'm going to be involved right away in whatever Bill wants as he tutors me," Shaw said in a telephone interview, adding about Sochi and referring again to Marolt, "It's his show. The Olympics are his show. He built the institution to get the athletes to the podium, all that infrastructure.

"What I hope I learn in the time I spend under him is what has made him so successful. The primary goal of mine is to keep us No. 1 in the world, whatever it takes. What he is doing works. We want to emulate that, replicate that and -- improve on it."

U.S. Ski Team: on its game

There once was a time when the Europeans scoffed at the U.S. Ski Team. The Americans have the icy low hills back east and the amazing Rocky Mountains, Sierras and Cascades out west, and yet every winter the Americans would roll into the World Cup tour and maybe there would be the occasional breakthrough -- Phil and Steve Mahre in the 1980s, for instance -- but not the sort of consistent, across-the-board dimension that would make the Euros, the Austrians in particular, snap to and say, whoa, the Americans are so for real.

Ladies and gentlemen, that time is now.

Know, too, that the 2014 Sochi Olympics could well be the U.S. Ski Team's moment in the sun, testament to the culture behind its claim to be "best in the world."

Once, that notion seemed so audacious as to be absurd.

Now -- well, at the 2013 alpine world championships, which wrapped up Sunday in Schladming, Austria, the U.S. won more gold medals -- four -- than any other nation.

Ted Ligety won three gold medals, the super-G, super-combined and then his specialty, the giant slalom. Teen Mikaela Shiffrin won the slalom. Julia Mancuso, as ever a big-game racer, took bronze in the super-G.

The U.S. team's performance came even though Lindsey Vonn -- the Vancouver 2010 downhill winner and indisputably the best female skier the United States has ever produced, with four World Cup season titles and 59 World Cup wins -- tore a knee apart in the very first event, the super-G. She has vowed to be back for Sochi.

Further, Bode Miller -- before Ligety, no question the best American male skier of all time -- is taking the year off to give a knee time to heal. Nolan Kasper, who probably would have been a medal contender in the slalom, crashed in December and is out, too.

There are many, many reasons the U.S. team has risen to the top.

Among them: sponsor support; cutting-edge scientific and training methods; the opening of an early-season speed-racing training base in Copper Mountain, Colo.; a winter-time training base in Sölden, Austria, to reduce back-and-forth travel across the Atlantic; summer training in Portillo, Chile, and down under in New Zealand.

It all goes back, however, to culture -- the idea that the Americans not only can but should win and, moreover, that they're all in it together.

This is the notion behind the 85,000-square foot Center for Excellence, the ski team's headquarters in Park City, Utah, that doubles as world-class training center. It's not just the alpine team that works out there. The cross-country team, the freestylers, the Nordic combiners, the guys, the women, the teenagers, the athletes in their 20s and 30s -- everyone.

That was the idea when the place opened in 2009 -- it was where the U.S. Ski Team, all together and altogether, would work out. It's how culture happens.

Skiing is an individual sport. And yet the U.S. Ski Team has bridged the gap. It is, indeed, a team.

You see it now in small but utterly revealing ways.

After her divorce, Vonn found a welcoming home with the women on the U.S. team. There were hugs all around in a conference room in Lake Louise, Canada, when she said, simply, "I want to be your teammate," and from then on -- that's the way it has been.

Last month, the U.S. women were talking -- with admiration -- about Chip White, for 17 years a U.S. team coach, now in charge of the speed team (events such as the downhill).

"If we miss a day of skiing, he is so bummed," Leanne Smith said. "He is just sad and inconsolable and feels like it's his fault. He cares so much. He knows all of us at a personal level and wants to see us to what we are all capable of."

Vonn -- this was before her injury, obviously -- said, "He cut his finger off," with a table saw last fall, "and he was still out on the mountain. He had one hand all taped up and he was still carrying gates around and wrenching in gates and working just as hard as he always does, even though he was in excruciating pain."

Shiffrin and Vonn are now known to paint their fingernails together. Shiffrin is 17, Vonn 28. Vonn was one of Shiffrin's childhood heroes.

Ligety is also 28. It would be so easy for there to be a do-not-cross sign between the men's and women's teams, which travel all winter on different circuits. Instead, here was Shiffrin after her victory Saturday, underscoring the connection:

"Ted was so inspiring these world championships. It's really hard to have a good race every few days and that's what he's done. You get tired and you're trying to extend your mental capacity for an entire two weeks. He seems to have done it flawlessly."

The U.S. Ski Team is, of course, more -- way more -- than just the alpine team.

Even as the posters came down and the bags got packed in Schladming, consider what else was going on that was relegated to the back pages, if that, of America's newspapers -- the stuff that come next February will become front-page news at the Olympics:

At a test event in Sochi, American halfpipe freeskiers Torin Yater-Wallace and Gus Kenworthy went one-two. Seven of the 12 finalists: American.

Also in Sochi, Hannah Kearney -- the 2010 Vancouver champion -- won in moguls with Eliza Outtrim second; Heather McPhie took fourth on a tiebreaker. Six U.S. women made the round-of-16 semifinals. On the men's side, Patrick Deneen took second.

In Davos, Switzerland, at a cross-country World Cup sprint, the final tune-up before the Nordic world championships this week in Val di Fiemme, Italy, five Americans -- three women and two men -- qualified into the heats, with Andy Newell taking his best finish in three seasons, fourth in a classic sprint. He now stands second in the World Cup sprint standings. Kikkan Randall leads the women's sprint standings.

At another World Cup tune-up Sunday before the Nordic worlds, this one at Ljubno, Slovenia, American women ski jumpers finished third, fifth and seventh. Japan's Sara Takanashi won the event and clinched the World Cup title.

Does all this guarantee anything next February in Sochi? No.

Does it, however, mean things are headed in the right direction? For sure.

The U.S. Ski Team won 21 of 37 American medals in Vancouver. In 2010 there were 24 medal opportunities in snowboard and freeskiing; in Sochi, that number will be 48. It's easy to see: the action in Sochi figures to be up in the mountains.

"We had great success in Vancouver and we worked really hard to position ourselves to use that success and that platform to continue to push for another really successful Olympics," Bill Marolt, the president and chief executive officer since 1996 of the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Assn., said in a telephone call from Sochi.

"The momentum we are seeing this year is going to be really motivating. The success will focus the athletes and the coaches and I think we'll get a really good effort next summer, with a lot of really good hard work. I think it will go up a notch from what we've done. We'll go in fully prepared, with no stones unturned, and see where we are where it's over."

U.S. Ski Team's depth -- wow

The stars of the U.S. Ski Team delivered this weekend. So, too, did some up-and-comers, and that's why the U.S. Ski Team is now, truly, one of the best in the world. It's not some advertising slogan anymore or some pumped-up corporate motto or even some "let's get the troops fired up so everyone who works here might one day believe it" kind of deal.

It's fact.

It's one thing to see Lindsey Vonn, Julia Mancuso and Ted Ligety on the podium. Each is a proven talent, a star at the top of the game.

But Nolan Kasper in second place? And -- in the slalom? Only one word will do to describe that: wow.

The good news didn't stop there: Laurenne Ross came in fourth in the super-G, behind Vonn, Mancuso and Germany's Maria Riesch.

Over the course of the past three Olympic Games, Vonn, Mancuso, Ligety and, of course, Bode Miller have firmly established the U.S. team as a genuine force in alpine skiing.

Here, then, is the top line from this weekend, the men racing in Kranjska Gora, Slovenia, the women in Tarvisio, Italy:

Vonn secured three World Cup season titles -- downhill, super-G and super-combined. She also cut the lead that Riesch holds in the overall to 96 points; six races remain.

And this:

Ligety took third in Friday's giant slalom, his speciality. He is now the clear favorite to win the season GS championship.

Mancuso's second in the super-G,  meanwhile, continued her first-rate season.

Of course, the challenge for any program is to move beyond individual excellence -- to develop a pipeline of ongoing talent. The emergence of Andrew Weibrecht, who earned a bronze medal at the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, suggested the U.S. team was indeed on the way.

Weibrecht, injured, has missed this season. Now come, among others, Kasper and Ross.

"My god, how cool -- we were all, all the girls were in the hotel lobby watching his run and we were so fired up," Vonn said, referring to Kasper's slalom silver. "I mean -- the whole restaurant was staring at us; we were screaming pretty loud."

Mancuso, referring to Ross, said, "It was awesome .. special … so super-cool."

Ross is 22. She writes a super-interesting and -thoughtful blog.

She said of being fourth: "I'm not disappointed. it would have been nice to have been third but …  this is my first top five, this is my first top 10, this is my first top 15 in a World Cup,."

Noting her 10th-place finish in the downhill at last month's world championships in Germany, she went on to say, "This is my first time being in there, really, at a World Cup. I'm psyched with fourth. At least now I know I can be in there. I'm OK with Lindsey and Julia and Maria beating me. They're really good skiers. I'm psyched to be in there with them."

As for the 21-year-old Kasper -- if you have been following the season closely, you could see this coming.

He has, as he said afterward, been going fast in training. He notched a couple top-15 slalom finishes, then came in 10th last week. A close dissection of the stats shows that the 13th he earned on Jan. 25 in Schladming, Austria, included the second-fastest time on the second run.

Nearly 40 other racers went out Sunday. Kasper, though, turned it on, U.S. men's head coach Sasha Rearick afterward calling Kasper's performance "some of the most impressive skiing of the season by any athlete of the World Cup -- he took some chances, put pressure on the right spots and went really fast."

Austria's Mario Matt won the race, Kasper nine-hundredths back.

Miller was the last American male to finish in the top three in a World Cup slalom race, in 2008.

The last time before that, per the authority, Ski Racing magazine's online edition:

Felix McGrath, in 1988.

Again, from Ski Racing: "Kasper's name now joins those of American legends from the early days of the World Cup, when slalom podiums where more routine:  From '67 to '72 Tyler Palmer, Bob Cochran, Rich Chaffee, Bill Kidd, Spider Sabich and Jimmy Huega all picked up podiums. And, of course, Phil and Steve Mahre got a full share in the late '70s and early '80s, retiring in 1984."

Wow.