Shiffrin

[jbotti]

There is an excellent WSJ article on Shiffrin today. It's a worthy read. The article talks about how she strives for a quiet upper body and how her idol Janica Kostelic absorbed everything with her legs. In PMTS terms we are talking about massive flexing which keeps the upper body level and stable. The link to the article is below but I have pasted one of the better quotes:

"She is the most stable skier in the world by far," said Steve Porino, the NBC commentator and former U.S. ski team member who also trained with Dwyer at Burke Mountain. "Sometimes she looks like she is going slower than everyone else because there is so little extra movement. You have to just look at her feet and ignore everything above that to see how fast she really is."

Shiffrin has worked to perfect that "quiet" style for nearly a decade. She studies video, exhaustively, especially tapes of former Croatian champion Janica Kostelic, who won six Olympic medals, four of them gold, with a dance-down-the-mountain style that still wins praise from skiing aesthetes.

"No matter what came up she just absorbed it with her legs," Shiffrin said of Kostelic. "She was always charging but in control. I admire that because so many skiers now look like they are going to die at any moment."

For most skiers, the 60-turn slalom race is a fight against the gates. For them, the gates stand in the way of the straightest possible line down the mountain. Because Shiffrin is so rarely off-balance, she experiences the gates as an opportunity to gain more energy and speed out of the turn as she throws her weight over her toes, keeps her skis close together and tilts them frighteningly high on their edges. "I'm trying to take the line that helps me use my skis best," she says.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1 ... S=shiffrin

[h.harb]

Pure PMTS!