Scott Kneller

The Start of the World Cup season has finally arrived in San Candido Italy, after almost eight months of preparation. I was a little anxious to say the least.

I performed well on the first day of qualifying and finished 22nd, my best qualifying result to date and to do it in the opening world cup was a big weight off my shoulders. The course was exceptionally short, 42 seconds, which meant qualifying was very tight just over a second separating 1st and 32nd.

Finals on the second day didn’t go great. I was in a slightly disadvantaged start gate due to my qualifying time and I was quickly shuffled into third after the first turn. I tried to pass Andreas Matt on two of the jumps but had no success. Casey Puckett and Andreas Matt progressed through to the next round and Casey finished in 3rd. It was a little disappointing to have such an early exit from the finals, but I felt I skied well and it was great to have some finals exposure in the opening World Cup.

Qualifying on the second day was even tighter and I was devastated to finish in 36th place just 7 hundredths off qualifying for finals.  I made several small mistakes on the way down and on a course as short as this you needed to be perfect, or at least I did. On the girls side though we had some great success with Jenny finishing in 13th and Katya in 32nd. Michael Schmid won both days of competition and he never once looked in doubt, after taking a commanding points lead he will be very hard to beat this year.

In London at the moment, visiting my relatives for Christmas and enjoying some downtime before I head back to Austria on the 28th for the World Cup in St Johan on the 5th January.  I will post some footage of the race in the next week or so.

Here are a couple of pics from the Moelltaler Glacier, Austria. We trained here for a week in preparation for San Candido.             Photos cutesy of Katya Crema

Merry Christmas and a happy new year…