Events

U.S. Speed Team Trains for Olympics at Park City
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Published on Monday, February 08, 2010 - 01:30 PM






Park City, UT - The U.S. Olympic Alpine Speed Ski Team spent last week slaying the gates on the 2002 Olympic GS hill at Utah's Park City Mountain Resort for its final training camp on snow before heading to Vancouver on Sunday.

With the dream of gold now just days away, the team came together one last time to fine tune their skills with the goal of perfect execution during the Games. The star studded camp included 2002 double silver medalist Bode Miller (Franconia, N.H.), 2006 gold medalist Ted Ligety (Park City, Utah), Olympic veterans Steven Nyman (Provo, Utah) and Marco Sullivan (Squaw Valley, Calif.), plus Olympic first-timers Andrew Weibrecht (Lake Placid, N.Y.), Erik Fisher (Middleton, Idaho) and Will Brandenburg (Spokane, Wash.).

"The camp is going fantastic. We've trained on really great conditions at Park City," Men's Alpine Head Coach Sasha Rearick said on Friday. "The snow is as similar as we could make it to Whistler at 7,000 feet."

The camp was structured like a two-day football camp. In the morning, the team trained one event, for example on Thursday they ran super G first followed by GS with a short break in between for the coaches to reset the course. Each session consisted of four to seven runs, depending on how the athletes felt.

For several of the athletes, such as Ligety, Nyman, and Weibrecht, they returned to a hill they are quite comfortable with. All three athletes raced and trained as a junior at Park City Mountain Resort taking countless runs down CB's.

"It's nice to be here in Park City, training in my hometown, it's not often I can do that. It's cool to be here on CB's. It's an awesome hill, a hill I grew up on," said Ligety. "It's sweet how they prepared it and it's nice to have the hill to ourselves."

Rearick and the coaching staff are confident moving towards Vancouver after seeing such positives in Park City.

"The guys have had an awesome attitude and they have been pushing and challenging each other," said Rearick. "The coaching staff is really excited on how the guys have been pushing the limits on what they've been able to do."
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