The championships are scheduled from January 19 through February 3, and the Saalbachers and Hinterglemmers are putting a lot of faith in a break in the chain of three consecutive snow-poor years to keep the positive publicity going and ultimately enhance their image as a top ski destination.
“This valley has the biggest interconnected ski circus in the region with 180 pistes and lifts that carry more than 60,000 skiers an hour,” said Klaus Schrötter, director of the Saalbach/Hinterglemm Tourist Office. “We have 17,000 guest beds and 2 million overnights a year, 1-1/2 million in winter. With the Championships on television all over the world, it is an opportunity to show 500 million people the good things we have.”
If next winter isn’t kinder to the Alps than this past one was, those half-billion television viewers might be looking at the kind of conditions ski resorts prefer to keep to themselves. “If we make a mistake, the world will see that too,” Schrötter acknowledged and if this past winter and its toll on the World Cup are indicators, Saalbach’s unwillingness to commit to state-of-the-art snowmaking will prove to be just such a mistake.
In case you’ve forgotten, the World Cup schedule of the just-passed season was a fiasco in Europe, especially for the high-profile speed events. The Val d’Isère downhill was cancelled twice. The Saalbach downhill was first moved to Schladming, Austria, site of the 1982 World Championships, and then cancelled. Even a slalom in Madonna di Campiglio was scratched. And that was before the Christmas break.
In late January, the highly publicized 50th anniversary running of the prestigious Hahnenkamm in Kitzbühel deteriorated into the first-ever two-run World Cup men’s downhill on a shortened course and a cancelled women’s super-G. Even a race budget of 1.3 million Austrian schillings (over $1.1 million), the use of helicopters to fly snow in from glacial peaks and the assistance of 150 Austrian army personnel conscripted for course preparation duty couldn’t reduce the event beyond the most basic face-saving. From the top of Hinterglemm’s Zwölferkogel, it is possible to see the Kitzbüheler Horn, a short crow-flight away, but the Saalbach organizers remain optimistic that next year will be better.
That optimism might be misplaced. The region got one early-season snowfall on Christmas Eve 1989, when the pre-holiday World Cups were history. Not a flake fell from the sky during an unseasonably warm winter until mid-February 1990, when up to two meters accumulated. That was the good news. The bad news was that the dump was quickly followed first by heavy rains and then by bright sun in cloudless skies and temperatures that soared well above freezing, rendering any ungroomed snow unskiable and rapidly melting off the rest.
There is snowmaking in place at Saalbach/Hinterglemm, but it is a measure of the unimportance organizers place on the installation that this SAM reporter could not get technical data from anyone on the system’s capacity, nor is more than passing reference made to snowmaking in any of the organizing committee’s publications. Of the 137 million schilling (over $12 million) budget, the organizing committee allocated just 5 million schillings as its share of the snowmaking equipment put in by the valley’s two lift companies. (The total snowmaking investment, if it is higher, was not disclosed.)
Since the summer of 1986, 20 cat-mounted, fan type SUFAG “snow cannons,” which look like small, cylindrical Hedcos have been purchased, and water and electric lines have been strung up on six runs. These include all the courses on the two World Championship mountains — Saalbach’s Kohlmais and Hinterglemm’s Zwölferkogel, with snowmaking only from the mid-stations of both mountains to the valley — and a total of four other high-traffic areas and beginner slopes on two mountains not used for the races at all. The water for this scattered system is pumped out of the Saalach, a swift little creek along the valley floor, and stringent environmental regulations prohibit the use of any snowmaking additives.
Harald Schonhaar, a former U.S. Ski Team coach and the technical director at the 1990 Hahnenkamm, said, “They’d better buy another 70 guns. If next winter is like this one was, they won’t have a championship.”
Yet organizing committee and touristic spokesmen insist that no more snowmaking will be added, no matter what. “It is too expensive, and we don’t need it for normal skiing,” said a committee spokesman. The official talk was of 30-centimeter (one foot) machine-made cover for the Championships, but if the weather pattern doesn’t change, even the ability to put that modest amount of snow on the courses might be wishful thinking. When this writer visited Saalbach in mid-February, there were “5 to 20 centimeters” of machine-made snow, according to local authorities, plus whatever remained of the previous week’s natural snow. Exposed slopes that had only natural snow were showing brown less than a week after the season’s biggest snowfall, and the snowmaking-equipped runs were thin with spring conditions already prevailing. The following week, gale-force winds raked across Europe. A year from that same time on the calendar is past the close of the 1991 World Alpine Ski Championships.
A look at North America’s last two elite multi-event international ski competitions shows the contrast in thinking, even if you just count the number of guns. Like Saalbach, Vail, the 1989 World Championship host, ran the events on two separate mountains. Yet Vail had two compressed air/water systems, each with 40 to 50 guns (with a capacity of 23,000 cubic feet of air per minute), one each at Vail and Beaver Creek. When the opening ceremonies took place on January 29, the settled snow, comprised of natural and machine-made cover, on Vail Mountain measured 44 inches. By the close of the Championships two weeks later, another two feet of snow fell increasing the snowpack to 54 inches. “They’re crazy to try to run those races if they have a year like this,” said Sarge Brown, former mountain manager at Vail. “Vail Associates spared no expense (in preparing for the World Championships). They spent upwards of $2 million that year just to prepare for the Championships. For Vail to run a World Cup now is like running a NASTAR race — everything is wired in.”
According to Vail Associates’ spokeswoman Betsy Famy, the company would have devoted 100 percent of its snowmaking capacity to the race courses if that had been necessary. As it was, all of the courses were covered top to bottom with firm shot-from-guns snow, including 50 feet on Pepi’s Face to alter the grade of the slopes to under 50 percent, as required by the FIS for men’s slalom. A year earlier, the 1988 Winter Olympic alpine events were run at one mountain. Nakiska near Calgary shot four feet of snow onto the race courses from a 66-gun air/water system, plus a handful of supplementary fan type guns.
For a resort, putting on a major-league ski competition is as risky as sliding into the starting gate is for a ski racer. Each one is a very visible gamble. The racer may have luck and/or that extra measure of skill on his side and ski brilliantly to victory and renown. If he crashes, fans will see that too. Likewise, when a resort pulls off a high-level competition no matter how poor a deck of cards nature has dealt, as Lake Placid did in 1980 and Calgary did eight years later, it’s a noteworthy achievement which all the world also sees. Miscalculations are equally public — and can be costly to the resort’s image for years to come.
