This time, L'Avet looked different.
It had cooled down on Saturday night, the thermometer was around -4ºC and the humidity had dissipated, and the snow fell solid, very hard, and as it fell it compacted and L'Avet, the route that hosts the Soldeu World Cup , he beamed proudly.
As the day before, two hundred workers had stayed up late: armed with quads and shovels, they had spent three hours digging in the depths of the night.
There was urgency and some uncertainty.
Andorra did not want to look like the resorts of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Chamonix or Zermatt-Cervinia: weeks ago, overcome by inclement weather (the strong winds, the inconsistency of the snow), all of them had had to close the shutters and cancel their World Cup tests.
Climate change hits us all.
(At mid-morning this Sunday it was known that the second leg of the men's slalom in Bansko, in Bulgaria, was also cancelled, a victim of bad weather).
(...)
In Soldeu, at dawn, David Hidalgo, general director of the competition, went out to test the route: he put on his skis and descended like a professional.
–You had to be cautious, I assure you. The track was very fast, the snow barely lifted in the turns, when hitting the edges. Good legs were needed to overcome the route – he told me in the press room of the Sport Village hotel, overlooking the route.
(Andorra is putting all its effort into action. On June 4, in Reykjavik, the bid for the 2029 World Cup will be played against Italy's Val Gardena and Norway's Narvik, a remote station close to the Arctic Circle.)
(...)
In Team Hospitality, the slalomists' waiting room, the chefs offered scrambled eggs with truffle. It was a pleasant consolation for the skiers, a sweet aperitif before the storm, since the route had become great, very demanding.
As soon as the first heat started, the specialists were ready to have a hard time. You had to use your quads to overcome the bad feeling.
Carla Mijares (22), hope of Andorran skiing, like Joan Verdú, skipped a gate.
Disqualified.
That first run claimed another 16 skiers. They would finish the 43rd round of the sixty specialists.
–The other day, I saw Paula Moltzan (29) in shorts –David Hidalgo told me–. Each of her thighs was the size of my hip. Awesome.
The powerful thighs of the American, already a World Cup classic, with a title at the Courchevel World Cups last year, had projected her to eventual second place, waiting for the second round, but she did not go beyond that: At the end of the day she was surpassed by the Swede Anna Swenn-Larsson (32), who claimed her second victory in a World Cup slalom, and the Croatian Zrinka Ljutic.
(Estaban absent Mikaela Shiffrin and Petra Vlhová, both lesionadas).
That second round had been a trompe l'oeil.
The track softened as the specialists descended. Each one of them persisted in worse conditions. It was snowing and not cold, and piles formed on the route.
Chiara Pogneaux, the Frenchwoman who had set the 30th time in the first descent, started first and scored a wonderful slalom to be the eventual leader.
Sitting on the throne, she watched with great eyes as the rest of the rivals writhed on the court. One after another they went down, up to 20 skiers in a row, and AJ Hurt (who had won bronze on Saturday, in the giant) and the excellent Sara Hector (five World Cup victories) failed.
They are good specialists, but nothing: none of them superseded the French.
And the spell was not broken until Katharina Liensberger (26), an Austrian who has four podiums in the slalom and who surpassed Pogneaux by two hundredths, finally descended. From there, the favorites were passed: the podium went to Swenn-Larsson, Ljutic and Moltzan, in that order.
–In the worst winter I remember, we have saved the World Cup –David Hidalgo told me, the day already over.
