“Mr. GS” Talks Slalom, Injury, Team as Racing Approaches

September 21, 2018

By Sean Higgins – Senior Editor

Ted Ligety is a man who really needs no introduction in the skiing world. Bursting onto the world stage with a miraculous gold medal in combined at the Torino 2006 Winter Olympics, Ligety kept the pressure on, capturing five World Cup giant slalom crystal globes, another Olympic gold at Sochi 2014, five World Championship golds, and 25 World Cup wins in the years since.

Now 34 and a father to his one-year-old son, Jax, “Mr. GS” has had to battle through his fair share of injuries over the last few seasons. A torn ACL followed by back surgery in consecutive years made the road back to the World Cup long and frustrating for the Park City, Utah native. Heading into his first truly healthy season in nearly three years, Ligety hopes to reclaim his spot at the top of the Word Cup.

“Coming into this season, I’m definitely in far better shape and stronger and the physical side of things are going a lot better than last year,” he says. “Not having to worry about my back as much and not having to augment my whole training around that has been nice. I can start to go a lot harder on the workout side of things, which has been good. Being one season removed from surgery is always nice.”

Although he managed to get through the 2018 season injury-free, his lone podium appearance came just before PyeongChang 2018, when he captured a third-place finish in the Garmisch GS just before the trip to Korea. Ligety could only muster a fifth place in combined at the Games and finished a disappointing 15th in GS, where he was the defending Olympic Champion.

Currently, Ligety is in Chile for his second training camp of the prep period. Ligety spent the majority of August in New Zealand with the rest of the tech team, working on fine tuning his GS technique and setup before the 2018-19 season-opening World Cup in Soelden, Austria, coming up in October.

“We had an awesome camp down in New Zealand,” Ligety says. “We were super lucky with the weather and snow conditions so we probably had one of the better camps we’ve ever had down there. Working on my setups with Head was good and I feel like we made a good step forward there and my body and my skiing was moving in the right direction.”

With the recent reorganization of the technical side of the U.S. men’s team into one training group, Ligety is relishing the opportunity to train with his usual core group of GS skiers. He’s also excited to see how some of the young, fresh talent is developing as well.

“We have a really cool, good core group on the tech side right now with Tommy [Ford], Ryan [Cochran-Siegle], and I who have been together for a bunch of years now and we’re all pretty close; that’s a fun group to be around,” he adds. “Having River [Radamus] and Luke [Winters] with us has been cool and having Brian [McLauglin] come in as well has been fun. It was fun to have that new blood around.”

Although most of his success has come in GS, Ligety first made his mark in slalom as a junior cutting his teeth on the World Cup. Ligety has ramped up his slalom training this summer and said he might hop back in a Word Cup slalom or two if the early races go well and he is able to secure special seeding for racers with over 500 World Cup points. Ligety has not finished a World Cup slalom in nearly three years.

“It’s something I really want to do,” he says. “I have a lot of fun when I race slalom and I feel like it’s going really well and it’s one of the more fun events when it’s going well. So, I definitely would like to battle back somewhere close to where I have been, but it’s going to be a little bit of a process trying to not start DFL.”

As with any racer Ligety’s age, the prospect of retirement is always one that looms on the horizon. It’s no different for Ligety who understands that his years left on the World Cup are likely numbered. Armed with a healthy body and a smarter approach to training, Ligety plans to be around the top of the sport for at least a few more years.

“I’m definitely closer to the end than I am to the beginning, that’s for sure, without a doubt,” he admits. “We’ll see. I think, right now, I want to ski a couple more years. I feel healthy and I feel like I can actually have a chance to get back to where I was a few years ago. That’s definitely a goal of mine. You only have one shot at this and it’s a pretty fun and awesome job. I don’t know if that means two or four more years but I don’t see it going beyond that, especially with the family.”

Check out the rest of our exclusive interview with Ligety in the video below:

Posted from Skiracing.com via SIA First Tracks