Friday night thickens in Soldeu.
It is not intensely cold, but it is snowing and raining, and the flakes fall heavily and form piles on L’Avet, the track that must host both sessions of the Grandvalira World Cup: the giant on Saturday, the slalom on Sunday.
Shortly before five in the morning, Marc Mitjana, general secretary of the test, calls for rebuttal. You have to roll up your sleeves, arrange the route: 150 people appear on the scene. They bring shovels and snowplows, and in the depths of the night they start digging.
At seven in the morning it is still snowing, and the snow becomes wet and thick, and Andorra recruits fifty more workers. And everyone works overtime, because three hours later, the stage must accommodate the 57 participants in the giant.
-Everyone knows what to do: we divide the work, we have a team trained since 2014 – Mitjana tells me -: those with the shovels remove the snow; the turbo team installs the exterior doors; the drifters, to drift; The Picassos paint the slopes…
The team gives their all and the organizers breathe a sigh of relief. The track is in order, somewhat soft, somewhat thick, but you can descend.
“And it’s already a lot,” a spokesperson for the test tells me. This same season, bad weather has caused cancellations in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Chamonix and Zermatt-Cervinia. We, on the other hand, move forward.
(…)
In the press room of the Sport Village hotel, from a bird’s eye view of the track, I propose to Diego Picó, Marca’s teammate:
-Come on, shall we go down to the ring?
And Picó nods and we descend to the mixed area, to pursue conversations with skiers, and to move forward we splash through the thick, wet snow, and Picó’s feet get soaked, because this time he has put on magnificent slippers, a gift from his wife, but in this pond they are not worth it.
-The track is super bumpy (with piles) -says Marta Bassino (27), the Italian who scored the best partial of the first race-. And on the second descent (from 1:30 p.m.) it will be even bumpier. But you can go down well. You just have to adapt.
In reality, Marta Bassino does not adapt.
He fails in the second race, stumbles in the last four gates and loses the victory. She doesn’t even get on the podium: she finishes sixth.
The one who grows is Lara Gut (32), the Swiss who is now the head of the women’s circuit: Gut recovers from a weak first round (9th time) to score the victory, the 43rd of her professional career, the success which allows her to rise to the overall lead in the World Cup, with a five-point margin over the injured Mikaela Shiffrin.
(Shiffrin, absent in Grandvalira, had suffered a spectacular accident at the end of January in the descent of Cortina d’Ampezzo; since then, she has been moving between doctors and physiotherapists, with a damaged knee, rushing to return to the competition; they are also out games Petra Vlhová and Sofia Goggia).
-It hasn’t been an easy day. In the first round she did not find the feeling she was looking for. Then I was more aggressive despite the serious mistake I made at the end – says Lara Gut, whose Spanish is impeccable.
(She is trained by Alejo Hervás, a legendary Spanish coach who in his time coached María José Rienda and Carolina Ruiz, and who later passed through Canada and now, for five years, has been training the new leader of the World Cup: “I met Lara at the Airolo station, when she was eleven years old; we went there with Rienda and the girl would stand behind her and do the same things,” Hervás tells me).
-And how have you reset after that weak first round? -I asked Lara Gut.
-When you are aware of what you were missing, you try to solve it. In the first sleeve it was too round and in the second I tried to cut every millimeter. And it has worked.
And then he remembers that 16 years ago, in the 2008 European Cup, he had won on this same stage.
-How am I going to forget it? -she says.
After Gut, Alice Robinson, a New Zealand skiing prodigy, and the American AJ Hurt finish.
