Parallel women ok, the male one ... less: still controversy over the "half second rule"

The two races in Lech / Zuers, the only specialty races this season, re-propose the criticality of a discipline that is still not convincing. And in 2022/23 there would be four parallels on the calendar ...

Monday 15 November 2021 6 minutes reading time

Parallel yes, parallel no. The theme is always divisive, even if the majority of athletes, professionals and enthusiasts agree in the definition of a race linked too much to the factor of chance, even if a team is trying to find it. The problem is always the same, i.e. the gap that can be created in terms of track quality on one of the two tracks in the final stages: in Lech / Zuers, for last Saturday's women's race, everything went quite well, with the differences that they seemed minimal, but yesterday the challenge of the boys changed the cards on the table. Do you want for the snowfall of the previous afternoon and a surface that has become "sticky", or for the many passages on the same track also in the qualifications (in which 57 athletes took part, always on a double run), the fact is that the red track turned out to be much faster than blue at the decisive moment. Christian Hirschbuehl, fifteenth time trial in the morning, found himself in the situation of competing on the red track in all the decisive runs (paradoxically, thanks to his high time in the qualifying phase), always recovering his opponents, up to the semifinal with Kristoffersen and the final with Raschner, despite having accumulated more than half a second late in the first. And the point, as happened in the two world races in Cortina 2021, is always the same: the rule of the maximum delay of 0 "50, which was only meant to" guarantee "the challenge even in the event of an athlete leaving in the first run, is totally affecting these tests since the track advantage is likely to be often higher than that half second in the run which is then decisive. Solutions? Remove the "half second rule" or allow the athlete with the best time in qualifying to be able to choose, before each knockout round, the first track on which to run but it is clear that the challenge would still be distorted to the detriment of the rival . Switzerland was one of the few nations to expose itself in a really important way, so much so that its big names (Odermatt, Meillard and Murisier) quietly left to train in Colorado thinking about the Lake Louise races, as did many other athletes. , perhaps even more so in the women's sector. Curiously, none of the six rossocrociati in Sunday's race made it past the morning stage. The future? It is difficult to understand what the FIS will do, the certainty for now is that in 12 months we will no longer see individual competitions, with only the team events at the Olympics and the Cup finals, but the investment on the parallel will continue and, a having returned to a "normal" post Covid calendar, the project for 2022/23 is already black and white, albeit clearly subject to changes as we have seen in these two years; we are talking about eight races in the next World Cup, four for the men's sector and four for the women's one. Lech / Zuers and the New Year's Eve parallel in Davos will be "common", with men also involved in Alta Badia (canceled this year to make room for a second giant on the Gran Risa, a choice that we hope will be repeated ...) and then in Chamonix, while the women would return to compete in the test already seen in Sankt Moritz and then in Sestriere, where Clara Direz won in 2020. Even in that case, with a sensational advantage in the second run ...

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