Alpine Skiing FIS World Championships 2025

[Faramir 453]

15 minutes ago, Grassmarket said:

All Olympic Sports are unfortunately under pressure from the IOC to produce mixed-sex events, no matter how much they detract from history & tradition. 

this is not a mixed sex event though, the only mixed one was axed from the program. It's FIS being stupid.

[copravolley 551]

2 hours ago, justony said:

The only interesting story today was Shiffrin dissing Vonn and later won with Johnson, while Vonn finished well behind, mostly due to her downhill.

This doesn`t surprise me, because these are completely different generations of skiers and Schiffrin preferred to start with her friend, who is currently better sports level than Vonn. She might have chosen Vonn only because of pressure from sponsors and the media.

[NearPup 3,600]

4 hours ago, justony said:

They took away long lasting legacy of combined races to replace it with Team Combined. 

Unfortunately the combined was dying for years at this point. It’s basically not on the World Cup anymore, and since there are so few true overall skiers anymore (esp on the men’s side). This is actually a case where I think it would have stayed the same if it was just the women, but the last few top level men’s combined were just really bad.

 

This is basically just a way for the FIS to save the event, because they were seemingly at a loss to

maie the event work after trying a bunch of different formats.

[justony 475]

Personally I loved combined, because it represents true diversity of skier knowledge. But sadly almost no one wanted to compete more serious, so they kind of enforce these changes. 

 

I am not against changes, just they should try them at first in low tier, then World cup and later on big stage.

 

Also, I would like to point out, for Team Event, it is really dumb, there are already known pairings based on Nations Cup.

 

It would be better to start with qualification runs, and according to those times set bracket. 

[Grassmarket 4,097]

22 minutes ago, NearPup said:

Unfortunately the combined was dying for years at this point. It’s basically not on the World Cup anymore, and since there are so few true overall skiers anymore (esp on the men’s side). This is actually a case where I think it would have stayed the same if it was just the women, but the last few top level men’s combined were just really bad.

 

This is basically just a way for the FIS to save the event, because they were seemingly at a loss to

maie the event work after trying a bunch of different formats.

Think that's right. It had become low prestige event which the big names ducked because of either time wasted or increased injury risk.

[NearPup 3,600]

6 minutes ago, justony said:

Also, I would like to point out, for Team Event, it is really dumb, there are already known pairings based on Nations Cup.

 

It would be better to start with qualification runs, and according to those times set bracket. 

Oh ya, the team parallel event could really use a qualifying run. Unfortunately it’s an even lower prestige event than the combined was so I doubt the FIS wants to make it more demanding on skiers than it absolutely needs to be - they struggled to get big names to compete *at the Olympics*

[hckošice 15,754]

Women's Team Combined
Final Results

 

United States

Breezy Johnson

Mikaela Shiffrin

2:40.89(1:42.11+58.78)

 

Switzerland

Lara Gut-Behrami

Wendy Holdener

2:41.28(1:42.89+58.39)

 

Austria

Stephanie Venier

Katharina Truppe

2:41.42(1:42.46+58.96)

Full Final Result HERE

[Swewi 461]

1 hour ago, NearPup said:

Oh ya, the team parallel event could really use a qualifying run. Unfortunately it’s an even lower prestige event than the combined was so I doubt the FIS wants to make it more demanding on skiers than it absolutely needs to be - they struggled to get big names to compete *at the Olympics*

The team event also have one other big problem in my opinion. As long as you had the best male and femaler skiier, it doesn´t matter at all who the two other skiiers are and how poor they would perform because you would always win on the tiebreaker.

[Federer91 3,077]

Shiffrin comes, Shiffrin wins, a tale old as time  

 

Don't know what to take from today's event. I'm pretty neutral on the gimmick, it wasn't horrible, but it's not the Combined i remember from 20 years ago. Though it is known for everyone of us, that the classic Combined is dead for many reasons, if it's between this and no Combined at all, i would take this doubles format. The added pressure that you a performing not only for yourself is an interesting aspect.

[Monzanator 4,810]

The problem with the old combined was it was skewed heavily into slalom speciallists for a while and the speed guys just threw in the towel. The whole alping skiing has turned into event speciallism except for guys at the very top (and the current #1 Odermatt doesn't do slaloms which makes him vastly different to Pinturault & Hirscher who came from tech to add speed events). Likewise Svindal didn't bother with combined since he didn't do slaloms. The days of KAA and Kjus were over and done with some time ago and FIS realized something had to be done. The parallel team events are not good enough, everyone knows one course is very likely to be better and the event can be manipulated by choice so having two athletes doing their preferred event in Team Combined makes most sense on paper IMO. I'm willing to give it a try going forward.