Pierramenta final day (Skiing)

Sunday 20 March 2011 09:17PM

This year’s Pierramenta ended in suitably spectacular, and rapid fashion! The final day is always much shorter than the others, and today’s was about half the ascent of the day before. Instead of this meaning an easy day it just meant the tempo was cranked up! Thankfully our performance on the third day had moved us off the last line at the start (where we’d been due to our poor ranking after our disasterous first day). This meant we didn’t have to sprint past so many teams to put ourselves in a good position before the course narrowed down.

Thomas and I had another good battle with Ben and Jon, they got ahead on the big first climb, but by a small enough margin that after a short descent we were just behind them again by half way up the second. The next descent was a joy; big sweeping turns in snow that made you feel you’d suddenly got much better at skiing. Being able to see where you were going was a bonus too! On the final climb we gave it everything we had, but so did Jon and Ben-employing the elastic and just staying ahead. A final descent on monster moguls and rock hard icy slopes bought us to a final run across the line, where I promptly tripped over my poles and sliced my hand open. Four days of racing had obviously taken its toll!

Driving back to the UK in Ben’s van the three of us were musing over whether the start line of the Pierramenta is the most elite of any we’ve ever stood on. It could just be…

Today we were 74th, moving us up to 86th overall, and Ben and Jon were 69th today and overall. Good effort all round. That’s the end of the ski season for me, bring on next year!