A luxury ski racing school for rookies

As the world’s top skiers gather in Val d’Isère, a luxury chalet company is offering guests the chance to follow in their tracks.

At the giant slalom start gate, high above the French resort of Val d’Isère, former champion racer Géraldine Petit was revealing her secrets. “You must be in your bubble, ignoring everything around you, just taking long slow breaths,” she said. “Then just before you start, you make short fast breaths – hup, hup, hup – to really get the adrenalin, then you stamp your feet and blast forward.”

On a weekend in early December 2015, the world’s best skiers will be doing just that, on precisely this same spot, for the Critérium de la Première Neige, the event which for 60 years has kicked off the main Alpine ski racing season. This is hallowed ground: the Face de Bellevarde course hosted the Olympic downhill in 1992 and the World Championships in 2009, events which helped propel Val d’Isère into the premier league of world resorts. Normally it is off limits to the public from the start of the season until after the Critérium races are done, but I was there a week ago – dressed in Lycra catsuit, staring down the ice-injected piste – on a new race-training course launched by one of the resort’s upmarket chalet operators.

The Lycra is an eccentric look, particularly for a skier like me, somewhat past his competitive peak. In the 1980s, it was normal for recreational skiers to ape their heroes by wearing tight “race pants” and using long, thin skis, but skiing has changed. Today’s lift lines are filled with people wearing loose-fitting Gore-Tex and carrying fat skis, backpacks, shovels and probes – looking ready for a Himalayan ski mountaineering expedition even if they are really just on their way to lunch.

Driving this transformation have been the industry’s marketeers, who, over the past decade, have shifted their focus from racing to off-piste, even coining a new term for the pursuit: “free-ride”. Advertising posters and television commercials that once exclusively showed speeding racers in catsuits instead captured freeriders drowning in powder or leaping from cliffs. New fat skis made off-piste accessible to all, while videos of the best freeride stunts went viral on social media. Suddenly racing, obsessing over split-seconds lost or won on courses few ordinary skiers would ever get to try, seemed an increasingly esoteric, old-fashioned, pursuit.

In launching race-training trips now, Le Chardon Mountain Lodges is swimming against the tide, or perhaps responding to the first glimmers of a racing resurgence. The company runs five chalets whose usual selling points are five-course dinners, fine wine, massages and spa treatments and, thanks to an exclusive location at the edge of the village, balconies and terraces that look out over the empty, snow-covered Manchet valley. But Le Chardon has a racing pedigree, too. The boss is Jamie Rennie, 31, a Scot who formerly raced slalom and giant slalom for Scottish and British teams. His cousin, and the man who will lead the race courses, is Alain Baxter, Britain’s most successful Olympic skier, having won bronze at Salt Lake City in 2002 (the medal was taken away after a failed drugs test caused by a Vicks inhaler, though he was later exonerated). Snowboarder Lesley McKenna, a three-time Olympian and winner of two World Cup events, is another relative.

Baxter was due to lead last weekend’s short taster course but broke his ribs the previous week and had to pull out. Instead Petit, 24, was drafted in, a Val d’Isère native who was skiing before she was two, raced on the professional circuit for six years and is known to all as Gégé. When we meet over tea and cake at the chalet on the first night, her easy smile and blonde pigtails belie a steely commitment to a brutal sport.

After breezily mentioning breaking ankle and knees, she tells us about a race in Austria on January 2012. “I have no idea what happened but when I crossed the finish line I was on the ground,” she says. “I just remember reaching up to touch my face, then brought my hand down and it was covered in blood. The next thing I knew I was in hospital with tubes coming out of my arms.” She was in a coma for several hours and had broken bones in her face, but came back to win more races before retiring in 2013.

Trying to put such thoughts to the back of our minds, we begin our training in earnest the following morning on the Grande Stade slope, where a course of giant slalom gates has been set out. Petit explains how to take the racing line – starting to turn far ahead of the gate so you cut directly beneath it, while always looking several gates ahead – then, one by one, we push off.

My first run feels unbelievably fast, the blue and red gates rushing past. The skis seem to take control, flipping me from one side to the other; all I can do is hang on. At the bottom I’m met by Benjamin Dubois, technical director of the Ecole du Ski Francais, who is assisting Petit. I expect him to be impressed by my speed, to slap me on the back and tell me I could have been a contender. Instead, there are problems, lots of them, including but not limited to “parasitic upper body”, wrong arm position, a lagging outside ski, too much weight on the inside ski. It’s clear there’s a level of scrutiny way beyond what you’d expect in a normal ski lesson.

We head up to do it again, and again, and again. This is the key, says Petit. “With normal skiing you never make the same turn twice, but training in gates, you do the same turn 20 times and you start to learn a lot about the speed, the feeling from your feet, the position of your hands.”

At lunch there is video feedback, and more puncturing of hubris. In my head I am tucked forward, composed, cornering on rails but the man in the video flails and skids. In the afternoon, though, as I chase Petit down empty pistes, trying to follow her exact line and movements, struggling to keep up though I must be 30kg heavier, it finally feels like I’m making progress. With skiing, or any sport, this is the real thrill, a joy that slips quietly away the longer you remain stuck on what coaches call the “plateau”.

But why bother training to ski faster through gates, when you will only ever do so in training? In fact, there are a small but growing number of races which welcome amateurs, some of them now so oversubscribed the organisers must award places by lottery. The real point, though, is that race training is a short-cut to better general ski technique, a sort of supercharged ski school. “It makes you much more accurate, more aggressive, and when you put that into your free- skiing it makes a considerable difference,” says Baxter.

His courses at Le Chardon will last a week, covering the full range of slalom and giant slalom techniques, and with video analysis (alongside champagne and canapés) back at the chalet each night. I only spend a day with Petit, but by the end I feel my technique has been nudged forward more than in years of complacent, unthinking, skiing. On the next trip my fat skis might have to stay at home.

THE BEST KNOWN AMATEUR SKI RACES
The Inferno, Murren, Switzerland
Organisers claim the Inferno is the biggest amateur ski race in the world, with 1,850 participants each year. Places are awarded by lottery and the racers set off at 12-second intervals from the summit of the Schilthorn (the site of Blofeld’s lair in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service). January 20-23 2016
The Inferno

The White Ring, Lech, Austria
The White Ring is a circuit of pistes and lifts around the village of Lech. Usually it is a popular half-day objective for holiday skiers, but on one day each year it is turned into a 22km-long racecourse. February 4-7 2016
The White Ring

Parsenn Derby, Davos, Switzerland
First held in 1924 – a decade before the resort got its first lift – the Parsenn Derby is one of Switzerland’s most historic races. At one stage it was a prestigious stop on the professional circuit, but now is an amateur event, attracting about 500 racers each year. March 18-20 2016
Parsenn Derby

Derby de la Meije, La Grave, France
La Grave is a wild resort, entirely off-piste apart from one short run, and its annual end-of-season race is similarly unconventional. The start is on the glacier at 3,600m; the finish is in the village at 1,450m. In between there are no gates, rules or prepared course – the winner is simply the first one down. A big party awaits in a marquee at the bottom. April 2 2016
Derby de la Meije