Editor’s note: This is part of The Know’s series, Staff Favorites. Each week, we offer our opinions on the best Colorado has to offer for dining, shopping, entertainment, outdoor activities and more. (We’ll also let you in on some hidden gems).
My favorite place to be on the first weekend of December is at the foot of a mountain at Beaver Creek, watching the world’s best downhillers plummet down an icy race course with steeps and jumps at speeds approaching 80 miles per hour.
And this year, the annual Beaver Creek World Cup races offer previews of the marquee men’s ski races at the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics, now only 75 days away in Northern Italy.
Much of the world-renowned Birds of Prey downhill course follows terrain that is rated double-black diamond for the rest of us — yes, you can ski it after the racers head to Europe and Beaver Creek grooms it — but elite racers make a lot fewer turns.
It takes them a little over a minute and 40 seconds to descend 2,470 feet, which is about twice the height of Lookout Mountain in Golden from base to summit. The race course measures more than a mile and a half, over which racers average nearly 60 mph with peak speeds of more than 75 mph. Yet the top racers always finish within fractions of seconds of each other.
This year, there will be four days of racing with two downhills, Dec. 4-5, a super-G on Dec. 6 and a giant slalom on Dec. 7. Admission for the races is free, although VIP tickets are available. Bleachers will be set up in the finish area, and race action will be shown on a large video screen, even as it is being transmitted to Europe for a prime-time TV audience.
If you’re not a skier, giant slalom may not be very exciting. Downhill, though, is thrilling even if you know nothing about the sport because of the high speeds and risk involved. That’s also true of super-G, which is similar to downhill except there are more turns and speeds aren’t quite as fast.
The Birds of Prey course has been regarded internationally as one of the world’s best since it debuted in 1997. Since then, it has hosted scores of World Cup races, plus world championship races in 1999 and 2015. The world championship downhill races in 1999 attracted more than 20,000 spectators, including Arnold Schwarzenegger, a native of Austria who was there to root on Hermann Maier and his Austrian teammates.
Maier had won two Olympic gold medals a year earlier and was known around the world as the Herminator. (The moniker played off the starring role Schwarzenegger played in “The Terminator,” a 1984 sci-fi film.)
I covered the annual Beaver Creek races for two decades, as well as seven Winter Olympics and five world championships in Colorado, Austria and Italy. The most remarkable race of them all was the super-G at the 1999 Beaver Creek world championships. The top two finishers tied for the gold medal — the first-ever world championships gold medal tie — and the third-place finisher finished 0.01 of a second behind. And yet, the two who tied for gold were the heavy favorites going into the race, Maier and Norwegian Lasse Kjus.
I worked out the math that day: In a race that lasted just over a minute and 14 seconds, the gold medalists finished the equivalent of 10 inches ahead of the bronze medalist while traveling at an average of 85 feet per second.
There was a hometown hero that day, too. Vail’s Chad Fleischer finished sixth, only 0.27 of a second behind the bronze medalist. He was so very close to winning a world championship medal in his hometown.
“When you know you skied so well, there’s that one turn or two turns on the course you maybe could have done just a little better, and then you get bumped out of third place. It just eats you up inside,” Fleischer said.
Keep in mind that the races last a little over 90 minutes and the best racers go first, so you can leave before it ends without missing the top finishers if you want. Then, you can spend the rest of the day skiing Beaver Creek. Hopefully there will be a decent amount of open terrain there by then.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention this week’s World Cup races at Copper Mountain, that resort’s first World Cup races in 24 years, where February’s Olympics will be much on the minds of the racers. Men will race super-G on Thursday and giant slalom on Friday. The women will race GS on Saturday and slalom next Sunday. Mikaela Shiffrin, the Coloradan who holds the record for World Cup wins (102), is expected to compete.