SnowsportGB news from Turin

Snowsport GB
Olympic Update No 7
San Sicario, Wednesday, 15 February 2006

Chemmy Alcott kept up the positive momentum started yesterday when Noel Baxter skied to 14th, a best ever British Men's Olympic Combined result, as she skied to 11th place in the Women's Olympic Downhill on the Fraiteve Olympique course.

Alcott's result is the best British women's result since Bunny Field skied to 6th place in Grenoble in 1968, when women's downhill racing was a very different sport.

The dream for Michi Dorfmeister was completed when she lifted the gold medal for Austria, eight years after she missed Super G gold by just one hundredth of a second in Nagano, but Alcott proved the value of her summer training and the work she has been doing recently with a top sports psychologist, as she put to rest the disappointment of her Salt Lake 2002 downhill, with a visibly determined, aggressive run on a long, bumpy, gnarly course.

She finished just 1.36 seconds behind Dorfmeister. Her top split times brought a hush over the crowd and for a long period she sat comfortably in the top 5. "I am surprised. I haven't really pulled a run out all year in downhill so the odds against pulling out one at the Olympics in bad weather are kind of minimal." Smiled a delighted Alcott, "Since I haven't had confidence in downhill the bad weather is not so much my thing. I was looking at the start list yesterday and I was quite pleased with my run yesterday, and I thought 'If I come down and cross the finish line and I'm fourth then I'm going to be quite happy, but now I'm pissed because I saw the splits and I'm, like, oh? but that's me. I'm on my limit and I'm going to make a mistake."

"Geri (Greber, her coach) got all Warrior with me and said to me 'Chemmy today you have a choice, you can choose to be fast or you can choose to be scared, and I'm like, thanks buddy, he was saying 'which do you choose'. Now I'm going to tell him I chose to be fast. I just skied normal. But the be all and end all of my story today is the jumps. They have just got so much better. If I think back to four years ago and the photo of me all over the place on the front of the British Team Guide. It's the worst position I can remember. I was so embarrassed. I did 296 jumps in the summer. I jumped 54 football pitches. I had to put all the stats on it to make me feel confident. That's how low I was."

Chemmy's next event is Super G on Sunday. "The great thing now is that I have a result and it takes all the pressure off, which means I can just go to the limit."