COPPER MOUNTAIN — Maybe it was because the Winter Olympics are only nine weeks away. Having Mikaela Shiffrin’s name on the marquee certainly was a factor, given that the winningest ski racer of all time was performing on a hill only 30 minutes from her home in Edwards.
But the overflow throng of thousands that assembled in Copper Mountain’s East Village base area for a women’s World Cup giant slalom on Saturday was far bigger than what Beaver Creek attracts for men’s World Cup every December. Crowds were big for the men’s races held here on Thursday and Friday — marking the return of World Cup racing to Copper for the first time in 24 years — but Saturday’s turnout was enormous.
“I’m psyched,” Shiffrin said of the crowd after finishing 14th on a technically challenging course. “To come out the weekend after Thanksgiving — people could be doing a lot of other things right now — it’s really exciting to see so many people. And there’s so much enthusiasm. It’s just amazing to be home and to have this kind of turnout.”
Copper hadn’t hosted World Cup racing since 2001 when early season races scheduled for Aspen were moved here because of insufficient snow there. There was a similar situation two years earlier when races scheduled for Park City, Utah, were moved here.
“It’s been a long, long time since we’ve had this level of racing,” said Copper Mountain general manager Dustin Lyman, “so I’m not surprised people wanted to come out and see the racers.”
Shiffrin found the first run tricky because of variations in snow conditions, finishing 18th, 1.74 seconds behind eventual winner Alice Robinson of New Zealand. She took a different approach in the second run.
“I had to do a pretty big readjustment of my technical cues,” Shiffrin said. “This surface is so specific. It’s just really difficult to be really fast consistently for the whole run.”
Her second run was better and she moved up four spots in the final standings.
“I was able to execute 90% of the run really well, so I’m psyched,” Shiffrin said. “It’s hard to change your mentality between the first and second run of race, to really put that into play and execute it. I feel like I was able to do that, for the most part.”
While she’s still working on her early season GS form, she dominated the first two slalom races of the season, in Finland and Austria with huge winning margins, and will be the favorite in Sunday’s slalom, her best event. She goes into the race with 103 World Cup wins, 17 more than the second-winningest racer, Ingemar Stenmark of Sweden.
She doesn’t expect it to be easy. Sunday will mark the first time this season that the women have competed on consecutive days, and it will be at an elevation of more than 10,000 feet.
“All the women who did this race, we’re all going to be really feeling our legs. I’m already feeling my legs,” said Shiffrin, 30. “It’s been long travel days in consecutive weeks. Then we come to the highest race that we’re going to see all year to do the first double-race weekend. It’s a tough schedule at the beginning of the season.”
Shiffrin’s fiance, Norwegian Aleksander Aamodt Kilde, returned to racing on Thursday nearly two years after a horrifying downhill crash at Wengen, Switzerland, that left him with severe leg and shoulder injuries. Shiffrin said watching him push out of the starting gate was “so incredible and inspiring and emotional.” He was in the finish area to watch her race on Saturday and will race at Beaver Creek next weekend.
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