I’m going to tell you how to take a ski break for a day. You can literally check out the snow reports one day, be skiing or snowboarding the next, and be back in the office the following day. In other words, you can take one day off work and ski the Swiss Alps for a full day in the mountains. How’s that for a day out the office!
Why Switzerland? Well it has fabulous resorts within easy reach of Geneva Airport; you can use public transport to get to the slopes; and accommodation at short notice is widely available if you stay in the valleys rather than the mountains. And it is no more expensive than France for a quick break and much more convenient than Italy or Austria. Although Innsbruck in Austria is quite convenient for a number of resorts, there are fewer flights.
I’m not going to push Easyjet, but it is a good choice for getting to Geneva from the UK, with several flights a year from Gatwick and regional airports. BA is also a good choice if you have lots of Avios points. And if you want to take your skis with you, Swiss will carry them for free. Typically Easyjet flights start from about £26, but get pricey at weekends. At a day’s notice it can cost less than £100 pounds return for an evening flight out, and either an evening flight back the next day or an early morning flight the following day – both of which will get you back in the office the next day with a full day’s skiing.
Geneva Airport has a station in the airport itself with direct trains running to hub towns from where you can get to the slopes, either by a single train journey or a very reliable bus service.
You can stay in a resort, but with a late flight and an hour time difference it is a push if you leave the office to take an evening flight. I would recommend you stay in one of those “hub” towns, somewhere like Lausanne, Vevey, Montreux, Aigle, Martigny, Sion, Sierre or Visp. It all depends on how much travel time you are prepared to put in to and from respectively the airport and your preferred ski resort. Some towns on the main line service to Brig from Geneva Airport are particularly convenient for specific resorts, e.g. Aigle for Portes du Soleil (Champéry), Villars, Les Diablerets and Leysin; Martigny for Verbier and Les Marécottes; Sion for the central section of the 4 Valleys (Nendaz, Veysonnaz or Siviez) and Anzère; Sierre for Crans-Montana; and Visp for Saas-Fee or Zermatt. I could mention other resorts, but on the whole they require longer transfers or are much smaller.
Most towns have convenient and reasonably priced accommodation near the main railway station that can be booked at short notice, typically via Bookings.com.
You are spoilt for choice about which resort to go to. Saas-Fee and Zermatt are open for longer seasons than the rest, and mid-week skiing is usually only available at the others from the start of December. During peak season Leysin, Villars, Les Diablerets and the Portes du Soleil are the nearest significant resorts to Geneva.
Let’s look at a couple of examples.
Flying out of Gatwick on a Wednesday at 6.20pm, arriving at Geneva at 8.55pm, book into the Lausanne Youth Hostel or Hotel AlaGare both walking district from Lausanne station. Get up early and get a full day skiing in Verbier, leaving your stuff in a locker at the base station for Verbier. Return to Lausanne in the evening and take the 7.00am Easy jet flight getting you into Gatwick at 7.35am.
Another example: Take the same evening flight and book into a hotel in Aigle. Ski Leysin the next day, then take the 9.35pm flight back getting you into Gatwick at 10.05pm.
The costs depend on a number of factors. Costing out the first option, you might spend £100 on flights, plus transit costs to a UK airport. You can bring your skis on Easyjet for £39 or hire in resort for about the same if you book in advance. With Avios points I’ve done a return BA flight for £60. The return train fare on Swiss Railways from Geneva Airport to Lausanne is about £40 and the cost of a combined ski and travel pass (the Snow’n’rail scheme) for Verbier will be about £100. Lausanne is about 50 minutes from Geneva Airport and just over 2 hours from the gondola station serving Verbier. Accommodation near the station will cost you about £80 for a night. Food and drink are best bought from supermarkets and it is totally acceptable to drink alcohol on the trains.
On my trip to Saas-Fee last week I took advantage of an all-season ski pass I bought for under £200. I also have a half-fare card which halves the cost of rail transfer in Switzerland and I have Easyjet+ which gives some perks flying Easyjet. I am over 60 so travel in the UK is free or heavily discounted. And I have a pad in Switzerland about 1 hour 30 minutes from Geneva Airport and half an hour from the nearest ski resort.
I also have a pass for 25 other leading Swiss resorts that cost me around £200 for the whole season. The benefit of also having the Saas-Fee pass is it gives me good skiing early and late in the season.
Winter holidays for non-skiers
For a lot of people winter is something to be endured, a long season of cold, short days and stark skylines. The only escape seems to be a long haul flight to somewhere sunny and warm.
But nothing could be further from the truth.
In 1864 four English visitors to the Swiss Alps were due to return home for the winter. Their hotelier, Johannes Badrutt, said that they should come back at Christmas and stay until Easter, and if they didn’t find St Moritz as sunny in winter as it was in summer, he would pay their fares and hotel bills.
Badrutt won the bet, and winter tourism was born.
But what was there to do? Alpine skiing was yet to take off – Conan Doyle in nearby Davos was to have a large part to play in that story. With a well-developed summer tourist industry, St Moritz, Davos and many other resorts quickly developed a significant infrastructure to enable winter visitors to while away their days, and nights, and the longest established resorts still have a huge variety of non-Downhill activities on offer.
A recent article I read in the BA Leisure magazine, recommended a handful of resorts that suited both skiers and non-skiers. Megève, St Christoph, Cortina d’Ampezzo, Zermatt and Lake Tahoe make their shortlist, and it’s a good list. For the Americas, however, there are a number of resorts I would add to the list (see my ski USA page), and I think there are at least a couple of dozen other Alpine resorts as good for skiers as for non-skiers, particularly in Switzerland.
But what to actually do? Innsbruck, Montreux and Basel have wonderful winter markets, although they close before Christmas. Many resorts and Alpine towns have wonderful outdoor and indoor ice rinks, and professional ice hockey teams play throughout the Alpine nations, with a major hockey festival in Davos known as the Spengler Cup. Bob sleigh also features at a few resorts, and at Celerina adrenalin junkies can actually take part in a four man bob team!
More sedate winter sports available in the Alpine resorts include snowshoe trekking, cross-country skiing, curling and tobogganing. A town called Bergün is a mecca for tobogganing, with people visiting from all over Europe to take advantage of the runs there (and enjoy the breathtaking UNESCO listed railway you need to take to get to the start of the runs). My Swiss Winter Sports web site covers other winter sports you can participate in Switzerland in addition to skiing and snowboarding.
There is a network of well maintained winter walks throughout the Alps, the reward mid-way along the walk often being a charming mountain restaurant. There are even Michelin listed resorts in the Alps! Zermatt is particularly renowned for its mountain restaurants.
We love visiting resorts with spas, the best of which is probably Leukerbad, but there is plenty of choice. Villars opened a new spa this year.
Switzerland and Austria have a highly reliable and extensive transport network which makes it very easy to choose a destination suited primarily to non-skiers, but which skiers can also use as a base for day trips to a variety of different destinations. Lucerne and Innsbruck are particularly good choices.
Often the best time to go is March. The days are getting longer and the days warmer, but the snow base is usually still good. If you are prepared to leave it late to see how the snow conditions are developing, a lot of resorts provide particularly good deals before Christmas.
Winter Vacations in Vaud and Francophone Valais
Although I am technically a resident of Switzerland, my family is living in the Netherlands, so I spend a lot of time to-ing and fro-ing. We plan to move to the French-speaking Romande area of Switzerland, so my ski trips this winter have largely had an ulterior motive, i.e. where best to live. This has resulted in a number of my trips being based in the valley to get a feel for places, and then going up the mountains to ski. And additionally I did one trip staying in a ski resort to get a feel for the pros and cons. So, given a choice of anywhere in Switzerland we could choose to live, where would it be?
And the answer is… Aigle. Ten minutes from Montreux, thirty from Lausanne, an hour from Geneva airport and a whole bunch of world class ski resorts. From a family point of view the schooling seems better than Valais and the people less provincial – and Valais is walking distance away! The weather is about the best in all of Switzerland with around 300 sunny days a year. The apartment we are hoping to secure won’t be built for at least a year, but it promises to have wonderful views of Les Dents du Midi, perhaps one of the half dozen most memorable mountains in the whole of Switzerland.
Anyway, over the next few days I will share my insights about skiing on my winter trips to Vaud and Valais, and let you into some of the adventures along the way, like inadvertently ending up in Geneva (but getting to visit the wonderful Galerie 123), watching Brigitte rock the pistes, partying with a bunch of Belgians, picking up some useful ski tips and much more. But now time to pick up the kids!
Martin Peikert
Should marijuana still be banned from sport?
USA Track and Field (USATF) confirmed Tuesday that Olympic hopeful Sha’Carri Richardson will not compete in Tokyo after she tested positive for THC, the active ingredient in marijuana. Since the breakout sprinter’s 30-day suspension was announced Friday, celebrities and lawmakers, including U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have come to her defense, calling for the World Anti-doping Agency (WADA) to re-evaluate its stance designating marijuana as a banned substance and for USATF to let Richardson compete.
WADA, which sets anti-doping guidelines for sports organizations around the world, prohibits substances which have the potential to enhance performance, pose a risk to the athlete, and/or “violate the spirit of sport.”
CU Boulder Today asked Psychology and Neuroscience Professor Angela Bryan, who studies the risks and benefits of cannabis, what the science says about the relationship between weed and sport.
Is THC performance-enhancing?
There is very little research on this topic and a lot of it dates back to the ‘70s, but the available data suggests that cannabis is not performance-enhancing from the perspective of speed, power or strength. In one study, researchers had cyclists use cannabis, or not, and then assessed their performance on the bike. They looked at both speed and power, and both were decreased in the cannabis condition. Others have shown little or no difference in performance.
One caveat: These studies were done with a lower-potency product provided by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) for research and may not reflect what athletes are actually using these days, so more studies are needed. There is no evidence that using it a few nights before competition would influence performance days later. Take a look to Halo CBD sold on vaprzon.
A fair number of people use cannabis before or after they exercise. Why?
In one study, we were surprised to learn about 8 out of 10 marijuana users in states where cannabis is legal use it shortly before or after exercise. What we do know is that it can help with recovery in the same way that an Advil or Tylenol might. People report using it to help with post-workout pain and muscle soreness and inflammation. We also hear from some endurance athletes, including ultrarunners, who use cannabis immediately before physical activity to make their three hour run or four hour bike ride more pleasant and less dull.
To learn more about this, we will be launching a study next month in which we bring people into the lab to run on the treadmill—one time under the influence of cannabis, another time not under the influence. We will assess their experience of pain, their perception of the passage of time, and their affect––or how good they feel––while exercising.
WADA also bans substances that are ‘a health risk to the athlete.’ Is THC a health risk?
What we can say with some degree of certainty at this point is that high potency THC products are not great for the developing brains of young adolescents, or for people with a family or personal history of psychosis––it is probably risky for them to engage in cannabis use. There are also some acute effects on verbal recall, but they are not lasting.
Other than that, there is little convincing evidence of acute or long term health risks of cannabis use, and there is certainly nowhere near the risks of using alcohol, which is not on the banned substance list. Many people die due to alcohol poisoning each year, and that simply does not happen with cannabis.
Richardson says she was using it to cope with her mother’s death? Does THC help with mental health problems?
Depression, anxiety, sleep and pain are the four big reasons adults self-report using cannabis medicinally. A lot of people report that cannabis is helpful for them in dealing with a mental health crisis. We are still learning about this and our lab has several studies underway. What I do know this this: If she had had a couple of beers or a glass of wine to cope with the death of her mother we would not be having this conversation.
In your opinion, based on the science, should THC remain banned for elite athletes?
Given there is no convincing evidence THC boosts performance, and it is legal in the vast majority of U.S. states and in entire countries, including Canada, I do not think it should be included as a banned substance for elite athletes or for any other kind of athlete for that manner. That said, I would in no way endorse Olympic athletes taking cannabis immediately before competing. My perspective is more that athletes using cannabis in their down time either recreationally or as an aid to recovery should not be held against them in terms of competition.