Olympic effort a confidence booster
Will Brandenburg didn’t have time to bask in the afterglow of his top 10 Olympic finish in the super combined on Feb. 21. About an hour after the event he packed his bags and flew to Aspen, Colo., to ski more races.
“I’m trying to win the overall NorAm title,” he said. “If I do that I get a World Cup spot at every event next year. We flew straight out from the Olympics, took a few training runs and raced. By the time the last race was done I was ready to go to bed for awhile.”
The NorAm Cup is to alpine ski racing what the Triple-A is to baseball. The next step up is the show. Brandenburg, a Mead High graduate and Schweitzer Alpine Racing School alumnus, is currently 39 points behind the leader, Canadian Dustin Cook. With five races remaining, 500 points are up for grabs.
Brandenburg’s Olympic performance may have erased any remaining doubt – for his coaches and himself – that he can race at the World Cup level. The key will be consistency and a little bit of luck in a high-risk sport. He crashed hard on a downhill training run the day before the event.
“I caught an edge and went flying into the netting,” he said. “I got MRIs and X-rays on my neck because I was pretty sore. But since it wasn’t broken, I was OK to race.”
Brandenburg said the super combined downhill was tight, turny and bumpy. It was injected with water to create boilerplate. Visibility was flat in the early morning.
“In the starting hut I was pretty nervous because of the crash the day before,” he said. “But when you kick out of the gate all you think about is where you can push the limits to go fast and where you just try to survive.
“I didn’t have a chance to run it all the way to the bottom in training, so the last 20 seconds my legs got pretty tired. I went out of my line right before the two jumps at the finish and threw all my speed away.”
Brandenburg was 27th after the downhill. His slalom run later that day was skiing as good as it gets. It was a breakthrough performance defined, as so often happens in ski racing, by a mistake.
“At the start of the slalom you can see the finish and hear the crowd,” he said. “I heard the crowd erupt about five seconds before I kicked out and it gave me a lot of energy.”
About halfway down, his smooth, powerful descent was interrupted as an overaggressive turn popped him out of his line. It was a mistake he figures cost him about .40 – less time than he spent fretting about it.
“What I’ve been battling in slalom is fighting through mistakes,” he said. “For me it’s a run I can really build on because I skied about 25 of the best turns I’ve skied, had a mistake and then regrouped and skied 25 great turns to finish the race. I could have went the other way and blown out, but not this time.”
Brandenburg finished 10th overall with the second-fastest slalom in the Olympic field, .02 behind teammate Ted Ligety, who finished fifth overall. He was .23 faster than Bode Miller, who won the gold medal on the strength of his downhill.
“I’ve been skiing that well in slalom since January in NorAm and Europa Cup,” he said. “I hadn’t really put it together yet at the highest level, so it’s pretty cool to be able to do that.”