A few of my friends are doing a spot of summer skiing in Tignes and putting up annoying pictures of them enjoying themselves on Facebook. However I am not one for summer skiing – it just doesn’t seem right! And the nearest winter slopes are a long way away.
However that isn’t to say I am not thinking of where I will be skiing this Winter. My wife has already booked somewhere near Pizol, and I am getting a dribble of press releases ahead of the new season.
One of the more interesting press releases was from Seilbahnen Schweiz aka Remontées Mécaniques Suisses aka Funivie Svizzere aka Funiculars Svizras aka Swiss Cable Cars Association. They have put together an interactive site here where you can zoom in on the cable cars in Switzerland and click a link to take you to the home page of the respective operator.
Watching Vanessa Mae, clearly an outstanding skier, navigating the Giant Slalom circuit in the Sochi Olympics just reminds me what a gulf exists between professional ski racers and the likes of us weekend skiers. Mae’s diminutive size is obviously one factor in her being something over 30 seconds off the pace, but I am always astonished at how hard some of the circuits are. The steepness of the descent is not so obvious on TV, nor how often the surface is so icy an average skier wouldn’t be able to get any edge on it at all. Visiting runs like the Lauberhorn also fails to alert you to the fact that these runs are deliberately made harder for the big races.