Today was a good day. We woke up to falling snow, and temperatures warmer than what had been forecast, so it would have been reasonable to expect things to go in a very different direction than yesterday’s testing had indicated. But, for the most part, things held steady for us and we were able to make decisions with really high confidence.
Kris Freeman, our one athlete, had a sufficiently good race in third place to ensure that he will be in a very strong position on the FIS points list at the end of the Olympic selection period, and will almost certainly get a shot at his fourth Olympic games. He was very happy with his skis today. It was hard to tell from the side of the trail exactly who had great skis because so much depended on how hard people pushed on the tops of the downhills. Kris was just skiing over the top, letting some gaps develop, and then riding up on people at the bottom with full confidence that the skis would keep him in position. So that was good!
We also made a pair of skis for Paddy Caldwell. Paddy is on the Dartmouth team, and Ruff and Cami nailed the wax today as far as I could see from the side of the trail. But I exercised family privilege and took a pair of Paddy’s skis to prepare for him. Of course, we pick all Paddy’s skis, so I chose the best pair (like I said, family privilege), which is what he used to dominate the junior men’s race. Like Amy has pointed out – the various racing Caldwell cousins are the best advertising we could hope for!
Grinds rise to the surface
All week it has felt as though the snow here was extremely grind-tolerant. People have been succeeding on a LOT of different structures. Today it was interesting to note how many people chose our new TG grinds. Sylvan Ellefsson won the 30K on a TG1-1 which had not been selected frequently so far this season – it’s on a new pair of skis that just hasn’t been quite as good as his standby ski from week 12, 2010 (yeah, that series). Kris was on a TG1-2 on a ski I grabbed at World Championships last year. The top two junior girls were on TG1-1, and Paddy was on TG1-2. Those grinds have had good success in a lot of different snow conditions so far this season, but it was notable today that various people were selecting different skis than they had been liking earlier in the week. The most notable difference was clearly the new snow. But beyond that I don’t really have a ton of insight into why those TG grinds might have been particularly good today.
Paraffin
I mentioned yesterday that we had played with Vauhti HF Blue with some Zero Fox powder mixed into it. I’ve never tried to mix fluoro powders with bulk waxes before this week, but the combo tested best again today, and so we went with it on race skis, We had back-ups, but they didn’t test as well.
Powder
Overnight temps stayed pretty warm, which was good news for us since we really liked the Vauhti C139 race service powder yesterday. In our early testing we had a lot of powders running really tight, including Star FM, Zero Fox, Start SFR30 and C139. But as the day warmed, the C139 ran away with it. That same C139 was excellent for us at the Craftsbury Eastern Cup sprint a couple of weeks ago, in pouring rain. Vauhti is releasing a new line of hfC Powders in advance of the Sochi Olympics, and this C139 is getting released as the new hfC9.1. We’re really excited about this – the old hfC9 has had some good days in fine-grained new snow, but the C139 has been one of the best and most versatile wet powders we’ve ever worked with. It was the ticket today in our testing.
Topcoats
We tested a lot of topcoats today. We have continued to have hfC15 liquid win tests all week here, in all conditions. To be perfectly frank, it doesn’t sit well with me. We know the stuff is good, but no wax can win in every condition. So we cast a very wide net today. As we saw earlier in the week, some of the fluoro blocks were good in the stadium on the manmade snow, but the hfC15 liquid was still winning on the sections of the course with a natural snow base. In the end we really liked the Ski*Go CM10 fluoroblock. In places it was better than the hfC15, and in others it wasn’t as good. So we tested them layered – CM10 with hfC15 on top. Bingo. Race wax.
Hand Structure
As the week has gone on, hand structure has been progressively more important. Until today, the Red Creek 0/-10 was a clear favorite. Today, in the new snow, we liked the 0/-6 a lot, and for the afternoon junior race we added the 1mm and 2mm linear for some extra zip on the high speed descents. I believe those hand-structures made a big difference today. We’ve been passing around those tools a bit, and have sold a handful here, and I believe they were getting used with good success. I’ve had really high confidence in the Red Creek hand structure tools from my experience in Europe, and I’m excited that they’re doing so well here.