World Cup racers get a run for their money in Taos World Pro Ski Tour

TAOS, New Mexico – A collection of the world’s fastest skiers discovered that the World Pro Ski Tour presented by Rocket Mortgage is a whole different animal than the World Cup during qualification day at the Taos 2022 WPST World Championships, which was presented by New Mexico True at Taos Ski Valley on Friday.

“The regulars like Rob Cone, Michael Ankeny and Nolan Kasper, they’ve been doing these events and there’s little tricks that you learn doing them all. They’re always going to be hard to beat. And obviously Linus Strasser, he’s crazy fast on the World Cup, River (Radamus), too. Now the Canadians are here. There’s a really good field. It’s definitely not going to be easy to take it to the finals,” said the U.S. Ski Team’s Luke Winters, who arrived in Taos following a breakout season on the World Cup, in which he nailed three top-10 finishes in slalom.

Winters got a taste for the Pro Tour last season at the final stop at Echo Mountain, Colo., and ended up ninth in qualifying on Friday. World Pro Ski Tour regular Simon Breitfuss Kammerlander of Bolivia landed the No. 1 qualifying spot as Ankeny was second and Slovenian Miha Kuerner third of 40 athletes taking to the gates in Friday’s men’s qualifier. Four World Cup athletes opted to auto qualify, including Strasser, Radamus, Canadians Erik Read and Trevor Philp. They still took qualifying runs on Friday, but as the snow softened on the long course, a few races succumbed to the elements. Radamus crashed near the bottom of his second run and U.S. National Slalom champion Jett Seymour missed a gate, resulting in a failure to qualify.

One of the key differences newcomers noted in the World Pro Ski Tour format compared to parallel races on the World Cup is the start gate.

“The start is obviously a new thing,” Winters said. “You can make a lot of speed or lose a lot of speed out of the start. That’s a little bit of a learning curve.”

Canadian World Cup veteran Erin Mielzynksi qualified third Friday among the 23 athletes in the women’s field and although she loves parallel racing, admitted the horse gates on the Pro Tour require a completely different approach than the start gates for dual events on the World Cup.

“On the World Cup, it’s up front and it’s a singular gate, so it just drops all at once. You pull out with your hands. Here, there’s actually a piece of wood behind your skis, so you kind of do a wheelie. Everyone rocks back. You’re using the momentum of the ski to propel you forward and the gates open like a horse corral,” Mielzynski said. “Then the timing is different. On the World Cup we have three beeps. Here you have five. I have to look at the lights instead of listening. I’m not nailing the start, but it’s cool to be so far out of my comfort zone and still racing. It’s cool to learn something new.”

On the women’s side, WPST newcomer Tricia Mangan landed the No. 1 qualifying spot, firing into the Taos World Championships two days after sweeping two giant slalom and super G FIS races at Aspen Highlands, Colo. Poland’s Magdalena Luczak was the second qualifier while Norwegian Tuva Norbye, who’s won each of the WPST races in Steamboat Springs and Aspen this season after the women’s tour was re-introduced after a two-decade hiatus, was 13th to qualify.

World Cup ace and Olympian Paula Moltzan had a hairy first run on qualifying day, nearly going down just before the finish line, but managed to qualify 11th, while retired U.S. racer Resi Stiegler, who gave birth to her first child eight weeks ago, was among a handful of top female athletes who did not qualify for the weekend’s races.

“In general, it’s a different course than I’m used to,” Stiegler said after her qualifying rounds on Friday. “The speed was too much for me. It was a straight course and I was going too round.”

The Taos 2022 WPST World Championships unfold with men’s and women’s parallel slalom on Saturday, April 9, and giant slalom on April 10. Watch the action live at worldproskitour.com.