Kitzbühel is impossibly posh and somehow full of drunken roughness at the same time on race weekend.
You can still find the genuine sport on the hill, but not in the city. The town turns into a catwalk for people who have never touched a ski edge in their lives, all fur trim and champagne flutes, pretending they’re here for the racing and not the photos. They thread their way through crowds wrapped in flags, one spilled beer away from ruining their designer shoes. It’s chaos.
When I was a kid, I loved it.
Our national holiday. You walk through the streets at sunrise, and the fans are already out, wrapped in flags and stupid wigs and cow costumes, faces painted red-white-red, carrying plastic horns and crates of beer. Someone is always blasting Andreas Gabalier too loud from a balcony. It smells like stale alcohol, cold metal, and deep fryer fat.
When I was finally old enough to drink, I got drunk before lunch in the finish area. Twice.
Just a pity that was all I got. From twenty on, I’ve been one of the idiots standing sober on top of the hill instead.
This morning, I’m one of the sober idiots again. The only difference is that this time, Kitz feels like it's watching me.
***
Up top, the town disappears. No fur, no champagne. Just techs stomping their feet, coaches talking into radios, and boards showing start numbers and times. The start house sits like a wooden mouth at the top of the Super-G, ready to spit us down into the mess.
Roland waits by the fence, hands in his jacket pockets, eyes on the course. When I stop next to him, he doesn’t bother with a pep talk. Just tips his chin toward the hill.
“You’ve got all that it takes this year,” he says. “Make it yours.”
My thighs hum from warm-up runs. I slap them through the suit, feel the muscle answer. Binding check, boot buckles, and chin strap.
The beeps from the starter for the guy before me cut through the thin air. I slide into the little start corral, plant my poles over the wand. The world narrows to the first roll, the blind breakover, the line I traced in inspection.
Kitz feels different from Birds of Prey. Beaver Creek was wide and surgically clean. Here, the hill is narrower, meaner, closer. The houses, the nets, the fans — it all feels one mistake away from crashing straight into someone’s breakfast table.
Even up here, you can hear them. A low animal roar waiting to decide if you’re a hero or an idiot.
The beeps start.
Four. Hands ready.
Three. Hips forward.
Two. Weight on the front of the boots.
One.
Green.
I dive out of the gate like I’m attacking a person, not a slope. Edges bite, then chatter as the skis pick up speed, drop over the first pitch. My stomach goes light, the air punches past my helmet, the course comes at me in a white tunnel.
It’s just me, the line, and the hill that raised me through a TV screen.
The first gate spits me straight into the Seidlalm jump.
Seidlalmsprung, small by downhill standards, but even the Super-G is enough to lift you off the snow and drop your stomach. I tuck over my tips, let the skis run, and the landing comes fast. My knees eat the compression, quads flexing hard, and I'm already carving into the first technical turn before the shock leaves my legs.
The course drops me onto the lower section of the Streif—Lärchenschuss, the larch trees blurring past the nets, speed building with every gate. The snow is perfect, surgical ice, and my edges bite clean. I let the skis drift wide just a hair on the turn, then snap them back onto the fall line, hips driving forward, shoulders squared.
The noise from the crowd is everywhere now. Cowbells, screams, someone yelling my name in a voice that cracks halfway through. It doesn't matter. The only sound that matters is the scream of my edges and the wind drilling past my ears.
I hammer into the Oberhausberg section, another steep pitch that tries to fold my knees into my chest. My quads are already burning, that good kind of fire that means I'm pushing the edge of control. The course carves left, then right, gates flashing past so fast I'm reading them on instinct, not thought.
Then the hill opens up ahead.
Hausbergkante.
