The opium of skiers?

A good friend of mine who has instructed skiing for more than 40 year in France was telling me the other day that on smooth runs, today's skiers can carve stunningly as if they were perfect robots, but when they land on rough terrain, they're often back to square one, are “all over the places” and carving doesn't do much for them. You know what I think about skiing and terrain. Easy terrain means easier skiing than bumps, crud and other obstacles and the latter is often “what separates the men from the boys...”

Last weekend, the newly minted Swiss olympic downhill gold medalist Didier Défago took on the Bec des Rosses in Verbier for the first time ever and demonstrated how impressive and technically difficult this extreme skiing course is even for a top alpine skier and how out of his element he was (in all fairness, it should be said that he was using a pair of GS skis)... The same could be observed with Julia Mancuso who competed in Verbier and took third, a great achievement, but please don't look too closely at her style! Out of their element, even top racers don't look nearly as good as they do on super-prepared race courses and this is something that has definitely degraded from the seventies or even eighties when even a GS course was not a paragon of smoothness! The snowcat and it modern grooming equipment may have become the opium of the skiers...