Make skiing great (again)

New Alpine skiing seasson started end of October. What is new? Is there something exciting going on? Were there some changes introduced? New rules? New fans? New viewers? New sponsors?

Let me leave to you readers to answer these ?sort of? (retorical) questions.

But for me, an observer of World Cup skiing and the whole shabang around competitive Alpine skiing the season started great. It gave me a lot of stuff to thought about.

I would like to dive into the Alpine skiing as sport industry first. Every industry is there to be disrubted. Some of them easier, as example financial services industry by Fintechs, car industry by Tesla and Chinese electric vehicle producers, and some of the industries are a bit more difficult to be distrupted and such be changed.

?“We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas”, Steve Jobs

Let me get back to Val Gardena in December. Two downhill races, a sprint and a ?regular? one. At the finish the first 30 racers were devided by less than 1 second in the sprint race. Wow. Wasn’t that excited? The racer with the bib 34 won. An hour and a half of excitement, the TV viewers were sticked to the sofas all the time, not just 15 minutes as in some other disciplines of Alpine skiing.

Where have I seen these already? Sprint and regular race? Two of the most watched individual sports that rule weekends, Saturday and Sundays from 2nd half of March till end of November: Formula 1 and MotoGP.

And who gets viewers to sofas between November and end of March, mid April? Not a single dominant sport is out there, so there are viewers to stick, sponsors to promote, competitors to expose, TV time to fill up with excittment.

Let me put some facts on the table. Some years ago, three or four years, FIS disclosed the information that the avarage Alpine skiing fan is 56 year old. No new numbers were published since. The MotoGP has a much lower avarege age of the fan, 36 years and 4 months, where most of the new fans are coming from Europe and Asia, Formula 1 fans are even younger, 32 years of age, 4 years down from the 2017 survey.

And these three sports could be very similar. All of them have Grand Slam races. Formula 1 has Monaco, Monza, Silverstone and Singapore, MotoGP has Misano, Barcelona, Sachsenring, while Alpine Skiing has Kitzbuhel, Wengen, Beaver Creek.

And where is the difference between two world leading individual sports and Alpine skiing then? Alpine skiing is complicated for the average viewer. One day they are racing downhill, there is speed, accuracy, big jumps, the next day do zig-zag turns. By the way, Slalom races can be exited as well. Third day there is something in between, longer turns, left right and first 30 racers are 4 or 5 seconds apart. And SuperG? What is this about? Not a Giant Slalom, not a downhill. Yes, Alpine skiing World Cup is extremly complicated for an avarage fan and TV viewer. And in the last 20 years nothing new came up, no changes except so TV colorful graphics were added. But nothing new for the on-site spectators.

In Formula 1 there is the same kind of racing every racing weekend. A teams come to the venue on Wednesday, There arte practice runs on Thursdays and Fridays, qualifing on Friday or Saturday morning, sprint race on Saturday afternoon and the big race on Saturday. Same with MotoGP. And there are 200.000 plus spectators every weekend on MotoGP and Formula 1 races on-site. There are VIPs in the pit lanes, the spectators can talk to racers, there is big money flowing on these two circuits.

To dive deeper, the Formula 1 and MotoGP are not about selling bikes and cars. How many of you would buy a McLaren car? A Williams car? In Moto 2 races there are all bikes coming from the same producer? Nevertheless if Formula 1 and MotoGP would be about selling cars and bikes, they are not sold only between March and November. They lease cars the whole year round, similar as there is more and more bikes leased, why I would not buy (or lease) new skies in April as most of the ski manufacturers are coming out with new models in March already.

The Alpine Skiing should not be about selling skies. Google is sponsoring McLaren team in Formula 1. What do they have with cars? They are promoting their logo, their brand to millions of spectators and TV viewers. The Teams and their sponsors invite different customers to different venues. It is a global sport. The same team has VIP guests from China in China, The Middle East in Qatar and UAE, movie starts in Monaco and Las Vegas, …

I can add another comparison between car sports and Alpine skiing. Drag racing has the same? connection to Formula 1 as parallel slalom has to downhill race. Basicaly non. You can not put everything in the same bowl, you get a mess in there.

We can even look into golf being also a great example of how to change once the old fashioned competitive sport in last 15 years. And golf is constantly changing, although The Open was held 151st time already in 2023.

Change happens one step at the time

People hate change. It is the most difficult step one can take. You need to be bold enough or you can do it step by step. And hopefully we can all agree Alpine Skiing World Cup must change.

Let us start at the good examples. Let us use Downhill already named Formula 1 of Alpine Skiing and try to make it similar to F1.

Downhills are held in places that can catter for big numbers of fans. 50.000 spectators in Kitzbuhel are there daily every single year. Wengen has plenty of spectators as well same as Chamonix, Beaver Creek, Garmisch, Bormio, Val Gardena. Ok, there is some room for improvement in Kvitfjell, but there might be new venues willing to invest in new downhill slopes in US, Asia, there might be races held in Chile and New Zeland through out of the year.

FIS can change the format of the Downhill weeks. Let us forget the Slalom and Giant Slalom for now. Let them stay as they are. Let us focus on Formula 1 of Alpine Skiing for a start.

• Wednesday there is ProAm skiing day. Sponsors, lotery tickets for spectators that can ski with the racers.
• Thursday and Friday, there are traning runs,?
• Saturday is the day for a Sprint race,
• Sunday for the big ?regular? downhill.

Friday and Saturday's evenings are reserved for big parties night. The sponsors might get interested, there might be 10 to 12 ?Kitzbuhels? per year and if it flies, there might be more. The destinations are looking for a whole week events, they want to be promoted, they want to upgrade their visibility. Formula 1 is growing the number of weekends because of big sponsors inflow and countries and cities being more and more interested to use the events to promote the destinations. More and more racing tracks are built, more and more sponsors and invetsment money is flowing in.

There was no real change in Alpine skiing for the last 30 years. The paralel events are not the way to go. It can be a separate circuit. The four seconds time gaps in Giant Slalom and Slalom are not the eye catchers for larger audience. The win by bib number 34 after an hour and a half of excitment in The race is the way to go.

I know it is not politicaly correct to applaude for private teams and leave the National ski organisations to cater for sport development as well as orginising teams for Olympics and World Championships (as in soccer, basketball, athletics, road cycling,...) but in succesful sports there is no national organisations on regular circuits. There are factory or differntly sponsored teams, using world wide events to promote sports to global sponsors, not just to local ones as national organisations do.

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So FIS, there are so many extremly good examples out there. Be shamless and steal. Be bold, be creative. I understand it is difficult to change people being decison makers already for 20 years or more, having to manuver the politics of ?big? ski nations, but we, the fans, the average Joes of Alpine skiing at 56 would like to see changes in Alpine skiing.

It was Gardena and Beaver Creek that triggered this blog. It might pass as a 3 minutes read in the evening. It is just a view of an Alpine Skiing fan, just came back from a World Cup venue with the sore throat after cheering two days in the rain on-site on the Women's Slalom (zig-zag) and Giant Slalom races.

I am 56 (exactly an average alpine ski fan) and father of World Cup downhill skier. Involved in Alpine skiing for the last 20 years, working in a local ski club, organising international races and supporting young skiers. In business life I am disturbing different industries and bringing value to larger numbers of consumers through developing new approaches to ?regular? services.