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The O. Zone: Sports, like snowfall and extreme weather, are really hard to predict
Game Creek Bowl is now open at Vail (Vail Resorts photo).
Editor’s note: On Thursday, Dec. 5, Vail opened parts of the Back Bowls.
Sports, much like the weather in these heat-trapping, CO2-spewing times, are hard to predict.
Time to revisit a few such predictions I made just under two weeks ago, starting with the most shocking, and the one I thought would be the easiest lock: Mikaela Shiffrin of Edwards won’t come home to Beaver Creek later this month with 100 career World Cup wins to her name.
Shiffrin was on her way to No. 100 on Saturday at her home-away-from-home hill of Killington, Vermont, leading the giant slalom after the first run with just about five gates to go in the second run, when she lost her edge, crashed through a gate and flipped into the netting. Shaken but thankfully not too badly injured, Shiffrin won’t be racing in today’s slalom at Killington and could be out of action for the foreseeable future.
“Stuck” on her own incredible record of 99 World Cup wins, Shiffrin won’t have a chance at No. 100 in Mont-Tremblant, Quebec, next weekend, because those races were scrubbed due to a lack of snow. And that’s where that weather predictability, or lack thereof, comes into play.
If the International Ski Federation (FIS) had the flexibility of, say, the National Football League, which recently flexed our Denver Broncos into a second Thursday night game this season on Dec. 19, maybe they could have flexed the Dec. 7-8 Tremblant races to Aspen, which used to be a regular tech (slalom, GS) stop on the women’s World Cup tour and has plenty of snow.
Of course, there’s no guarantee Shiffrin will be back on snow by then anyway, or, for that matter, in time for the Sunday, Dec. 15, women’s super-G race at the Stifel Birds of Prey World Cup races at Beaver Creek. Which is why it would have been nice for FIS to have tacked on a tech race for the women the way they did for the men the weekend before at Beaver Creek.
I hate to appear ungrateful so soon after Thanksgiving, but, as I argued last season, when heavy snow wiped out all of the men’s speed events, a getaway day GS would have been nice. And, in the case of Shiffrin, it would have given her a hometown tech race to strut her stuff, as opposed to her shakier speed event (she is not racing downhill at all this season) of super-G.
So we will see if Shiffrin even races at the Beav’ on Dec. 15, but if she does, it’s highly unlikely the greatest women’s tech-event ski racer of all time will chalk up career victory No. 100 here.
Now let’s deal with the prediction I was least certain of a couple weeks ago: Coach Prime and his radically revamped Colorado Buffaloes will not win the Big 12 title and head to the College Football Playoff. Because they lost to KU last weekend, CU will land in either the Alamo or the Holiday Bowl and call it a great bounce-back (9-3) season, and Travis Hunter will win the Heisman Trophy. Flatlanders (losses to K State and Nebraska too) cost CU the ultimate heights.
My predictions about the Avs and Nuggets can still hold up, and the Broncos will likely win the next couple of games. I also nailed the prediction that it would snow again – maybe getting that one a little too right. It not only snowed a foot right after my prediction, it snowed another three feet the following week.
That’s more pre-Thanksgiving snow than I have ever seen in my 31 years here, underscoring that the most predictable thing about climate change is just how unpredictable extreme weather events are becoming around the globe.
Mitigating against the worst impacts of climate change, pivoting to renewable energy, and investing in extreme weather forecasting would seem like the wisest courses of action in these increasingly unpredictable times, but, unfortunately, the reverse will be true the next four years.
Another thing I could not have predicted is how little skiable terrain has resulted from our unpredictable, early-season bounty of snow. True, Vail opened Game Creek Bowl on Saturday, bringing the total skiable terrain there up over 1,000, but that’s still just under 19% of Vail’s total skiable acreage of 5,317.
As John LaConte of the Vail Daily pointed out on Friday, Vail has had an incredible 84 inches of cumulative snowfall so far this season. Compare that to November of 2018, when Vail received 71 inches of early-season snow and opened the Back Bowls by Nov. 25 and Blue Sky Basin by the end of the month. That was just seven years ago. Have things changed that much in our industry since the COVID-19 pandemic?
Again, I don’t want to seem ungrateful so soon after Thanksgiving, but if something can be opened (thanks to those increasingly unpredictable Snow Gods), it should be opened. Also insert my perennial gripe here about Beaver Creek spending more time on the World Cup courses than recreational terrain for the rest of us paying schmucks – something I attribute in part to FIS forever penciling us in for the inconvenient, early-season North American leg of the tour.
These are, of course, extremely first-world problems. More and more, I prefer skinning or Nordic skiing with my dogs somewhere far from the crowded, lift-served slopes, but as our population grows (and we aren’t adding more resorts), it seems to me that spreading snow riders around on as much skiable terrain as possible is the most satisfying (and safest) solution.
Editor’s note: The O. Zone is a recurring opinion column by RealVail.com publisher David O. Williams. Please read how you can help support this site by considering a donation or signing up for news alerts … or both.
David O. Williams
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