Skier Kerr blasts Austrian ski cross-course after failing to advance
WINTER Olympic hopeful Errol Kerr is blasting the World Cup Ski Cross course in St Johann, Austria, as he failed to make the top 32 list of qualifiers for yesterday’s finals.
Despite his best effort in challenging circumstances, Kerr was two-tenth of a second from making the finals as he finished Monday’s qualifier in 43rd place from a field of 86 skiers.
The Jamaican completed the 750m hard-packed course in 47.40 seconds, as Simon Stickl of Germany topped the field with a time of 45.24 seconds.
In a blog posted on his website errolkerr.com, Kerr said the icy course which has been injected twice, is steeper than before while landing feels like a parking lot.
“They decided to move the course about 200 yards further up the hill which made it steeper than last year. The hill is too steep to run big, wide open turns that you would need for a good ski cross race, so, instead, we are running approximately 15-metre radius GS turns down a hill that has man-made fall-aways with micro-terrain in them, and it has been injected twice.
“They have decided to take the sport of ski cross and make it a ‘non-passable’, very boring race and make the hill as icy as possible so you are going off of six-foot step downs, and landing on snow that feels like a parking lot,” Kerr wrote.
Kerr, who is working towards becoming the first Jamaican to represent the country in skiing at upcoming Winter Olympics, finished 30th in St Johann last year and was looking towards a better showing this time around.
A year later, however, the organisers have increased the degree of difficulty of the course, which hasn’t found favour with the world’s top skiers expected to thrill an anticipated crowd of over 10,000 spectators.
“They just have the wrong idea and wrong direction of where to take the course. You can hear it from every athlete. I don’t think there is one person who skied off the course today that liked it or enjoyed themselves, and usually, after a day of training, you can ski off the ski cross course and everybody is high-fiving each other and they want to take more runs, because it is one of the more fun things you can do on a pair of skis,” Kerr said. “You and a buddy go out, not necessarily free skiing, but you’re racing down a course with banked turns and jumps and you get to pass each other. It’s usually a really exciting time, whereas, today we trained one at a time because it would have been unsafe to go two or three or even four at a time down.”
Nevertheless, Kerr is expecting an exciting competition as the entire town will be coming to watch the event and the organisers have done a good job at creating an electric atmosphere in its build-up.
He said: “They already sold 5,000 tickets in advance for the race, and the race will be live on television. There’s a giant 60 ft x 100 ft TV in the finish line. There are speakers everywhere, DJ’s, tents, warming tents, beer gardens… people are just excited to come out and watch this racing.”
“Now we just need to get a good venue and a good hill, and this could be the best World Cup stop on our World Cup Circuit, but it turns it into the worst one for us athletes because it is the worst course that we’ll see all year,” he added.
Kerr’s will now turn his attention to Saturday’s World Cup Ski Cross race in Les Contamines, France.