World Championships in Saalbach with Premiere
At the Alpine World Ski Championships in Saalbach from 4th to 16th February, a new and auspicious competition will celebrate its premiere: the Team Combined. The best slalom and downhill skiers will compete against each other in teams of two. The women will race on 11th February and the men on 12th February.
The history of the Alpine Combined began almost 100 years ago. The very first international competition consisted of a downhill and a slalom and took place in 1928 at the Arlberg-Kandahar Races. For decades, winning a combined event garnered more kudos than success in individual races. And that applied in Kitzbühel too. The Hahnenkamm champion was always the winner of the combined, who also may have been female, as women were regular guests in Kitzbühel between 1932 and 1962. Record winners include Anderl Molterer, Kjetil-Andre Aamodt and Ivica Kostelic, each with four combined victories on the Hahnenkamm, while Traudl Hecher and Gratia Schimmelpenninck both took the women's title twice.
Over the years, however, it has been more common to focus on an individual discipline, meaning that the number of all-rounders has gradually decreased. Today, this elite guild includes Mikaela Shiffrin, Marco Schwarz and Michelle Gisin, although the Swiss skier ended her slalom career in Flachau and the Carinthian has not yet tackled a speed race this year after his injury.
The combined title was contested for the last time at the Hahnenkamm Races in 2016. The event has not been part of the World Cup since the 2020/2021 season. Athletes and fans can now look forward to a new attempt to combine speed and technique in a spectacular and exciting way as part of the World Ski Championships in Saalbach: the Team Combined. A slalom specialist and a speed specialist form a team. One competes in the slalom, the other in the downhill. Unsurprisingly, the team with the fastest time wins gold. The women's teams will start at 10.00 hrs on 11th February, followed by the men at 10.00 hrs the next day. The downhill will take place first, succeeded by the slalom in the afternoon (13.15 hrs).
Each nation can nominate up to four duos and the competition could bring about completely new dream teams: Shiffrin/Vonn, Odermatt/Meillard, Liensberger/Hütter or even Feller/Kriechmayr. There is no way, that Michael Huber, Organising Director of the Hahnenkamm Races, is going to miss the Team Combined in Saalbach: ‘When do you get the chance to see so many technical and speed stars on the same day? Not only that, when do you have the opportunity to attend a world premiere?’
Tickets for the Team Combined are available here. You can be part of the action in Saalbach for as little as 25 Euros.
Photo © Ski Austria/Andreas Putz, Erich Spiess
