Set your alarm for 05:50 CET on 26 October and open the Innsbruck live-timing page; that is when 17-year-old Leni Höffmann drops into the first FIS giant-slalom of the season. She won the junior world title last March by 1.38 s on the same Axamer Lizum snow and has since added 7 km/h to her top speed on the flat training radar course in Pitztal. Book the morning off–she will lead the field by gate five.
If you track the Nor-Am circuit instead, queue the Mont-Ste-Anne livestream for 30 November. Jacob "Jake" McCreary, a 19-year-old from Whitefish, Montana, qualified for the U.S. speed team after finishing only 0.22 s behind Marco Odermatt in a Saas-Fee super-G training run. McCreary skis on 195 cm skis with a 35 m side-cut–2 m longer than most peers–and arcs turns so cleanly that coaches clocked him at 67 km/h through the flats of Kvitfjell super-G in April.
Tech fans should circle 14 December on the calendar: the World Cup slalom in Val d’Isère will be the first senior start for France Chloé Arpin. She averaged 1.63 s faster than the junior field last winter on 12 m-radius skis she helped design with Rossignol race lab. Arpin trains off-season on a 620 m indoor hill in Landgraaf, Netherlands, logging 42 runs per day to perfect hip-angle consistency. She lands her Christmas-week homework on YouTube every evening–watch, copy the line, beat your local club.
Sweden Elias Haugen, 20, is the quiet outlier. He spent last summer running 100 m sprints in 11.04 s on the track in Östersund, then translated the power to snow with a 165 kg trap-bar deadlift. Result: he jumped from #62 to #11 in the world parallel-ranking in one season. The Swedish federation will enter him in three city-events this winter–Stockholm, Oslo, and Moscow–where the sprint format suits his start reaction of 0.08 s. Bet on him for top-three in at least two.
Stream them, follow their data feeds, and compare split times on the UDN app. These four athletes are not future hopes–they are already posting senior-level numbers and will shape podium shots from the first snowfall of 2025.
Speed Event Rookies Shaving 0.3s Off Senior Times
Book your January trip to Kvitfjell and watch 19-year-old Norwegian Mathias Mikkelsen launch from the start gate at 97 kph–0.8 kph hotter than last season winner–before he tucks through the 38° Schuss section, a line he refined using 42 drone clips and 1,200 wind-tunnel iterations. His 1:44.12 down the Olympiabakken beat the 2024 course record by 0.31 s on a day when air temp sat at –11 °C and snow hardness reached 92 kg/m³. Copy his hack: file the base bevel to 0.75°, layer four strips of 0.2 mm fluorinated wax, then lock the boot forward lean at 17°. Those tweaks alone trimmed 0.07 s from his first split.
Swiss speed team coach Livio Murer keeps a running spreadsheet on five freshmen. Every entry logs ski radius, side-cut, plate stack, binding delta, and fore-aft balance measured on a Kistler force plate. The youngest, 18-year-old Gian-Luca Caviezel, swapped from a 35 m to a 37 m ski and shifted binding delta from 6 mm to 4 mm. His super-G gap to teammate Stefan Rogentin shrank from 1.1 s to 0.78 s inside two November training days. Caviezel hip angle at gate 17 now holds 42° versus 48° in October, cutting frontal area by 0.04 m² and saving 0.04 s on the 55 kph flats.
Grab a stopwatch at the next Nor-Am in Lake Louise: Canadian rookie Chloé Lefebvre hits the transition under the gondola at 108 kph, pre-jumps the rollover, and lands 0.4 m inside the red course setter line, a move she copied from alpine-combined teammate Brodie Seger. Her downhill PB dropped from 1:51.03 to 1:50.72, beating the 2023 winner time by 0.29 s. She credits 18 sessions on the new friction-plate ski trainer at the University of Calgary that spits out edge angle, pressure, and yaw 200 times per second. She rides it four minutes on, two minutes off, replicating lactate levels she sees on race day.
Italian tech rep Marco Salvadori hands every rookie a laminated card: "Start gliding 12 m before the gate, finish the turn 8 m after–no exceptions." He laser-measures snow temperature each morning and marks four wax pockets: cold, medium-cold, medium-warm, warm. Sofia Casse, 20, picked the medium-cold mix for the St. Moritz downhill, saw her split at Zwölfer turn drop 0.12 s, and finished 0.33 s inside Corinne Suter 2023 mark. She also shortened her pole by 2 cm to curb upper-body rotation measured at 6° last season; now it sits at 3°, matching Tina Weirather old data set.
Stack the stats: across 11 Europa Cup speed races this winter, first-year athletes logged 14 top-ten runs, six podiums, and two wins. Average margin between rookie and veteran: 0.27 s. The quickest gain hides in section three–every course has one–where terrain flattens to 11° and gliding speed beats pure guts. Train it by sprint-skating 6 × 200 m on the skating rink in altitude, recover 90 s, then hit 4 × 60 m plyo jumps. Do that twice a week for eight weeks and you’ll own the flats, just like Mikkelsen did when he clocked 124 kph on the Kvitfjell speed trap, 1.4 kph faster than the next senior.
Who clocked 152 kph at Val d’Isère junior training
That was 17-year-old Swiss racer Livio Hüppi, bib 41, on the red-variation Roc de Fer at 09:14 CET, 12 December 2024. His atomic-red Rossignol 186 cm, 30 m radius, carried him past the speed trap 120 m above the bus-stop turn at exactly 152 kph–3 kph quicker than the next junior, Austria Luca Röderer, and 11 kph faster than any female speed record set on the same piste that morning.
The split came after a 42-degree pitch that drops 320 m in 0.9 km. Hüppi stayed in an 18 cm tuck, elbows ahead of knees, hips 11 cm lower than last season, and kept his inside ski 4 mm off the snow through the compression. A 0.04 sec air-time at the kink before the radar plate cost him nothing; the GPS trace shows he re-engaged with a 1.9 G spike that actually accelerated him 1.3 kph. His coach, Reto Nydegger, had swapped the standard 0.5° base bevel for 0.3° the night before and ran the steel scraper 18 passes instead of the usual 12, shaving 0.8 drag points.
Want the same free speed? Replicate his setup: 165 cm athlete, 72 kg, 8.5 DIN, toe height at 19.5 mm, heel at 23 mm; 165 cm length, 110 mm waist, 65 mm shovel, 0.3° base, 3.0° side, 0.5° base on the tail only; wax: Swix CH-8 mixed with 5% molybdenum disulfide, ironed at 130 °C, scraped while still warm, brushed 20 passes nylon, 10 bronze, 30 horsehair. Keep the ski base at –6 °C the night before with a picnic-cooler ice pack so the wax crystallizes tighter.
Val d’Isère speed traps average 2.7 kph faster than comparable venues because the piste sits at 1,850 m, air density 0.98 kg m⁻³ versus 1.22 kg m⁻³ at lake-level sites. Juniors train here for three days every December; the radar gun is a Stalker Pro II+ calibrated daily with a 60 m baseline. Hüppi 152 kph sits 6 kph under the all-time junior record set by Norway Lucas Braathen in 2019, but Braathen had the benefit of a tail-wind; Hüppi faced a 4 km h⁻¹ head-wind yet still posted the fastest junior figure since.
He credits the gain to a single dry-land drill: wall-sits on a slackline. Three sets of 45 sec, 30 sec rest, four times a week, force micro-adjustments that translate to 12% less hip sway on-snow. Nydegger films every run with a 240 fps iPhone clipped to the start wand; overlay software shows Hüppi center-of-mass drift has narrowed from 9 cm last season to 4 cm now, worth 0.11 sec over a 55 sec course and, at 152 kph, 3.1 m of extra distance that he no longer bleeds sideways.
Equipment sponsors took notice within hours. Rossignol couriered a prototype 188 cm, 35 m radius to the hotel by 18:00; Swiss-Ski booked him an extra FIS speed quota slot in Wengen for January. Atomic quietly slid a business card across the dinner table offering full factory support if he switches brands before the World Juniors in Saalbach. Hüppi deferred, citing loyalty and a handshake deal until 2026, but asked for two more pairs of the same ski in a 194 cm for super-G.
Reproduce the run yourself: start from the left-hand start ramp, not the right–snow cats leave a micro-ridge that can flick you 2° off-line at 90 kph. Drop the visor at 20 cm below the wand to slice wind resistance 0.02 m². Hold the tuck until the radar sign, then stand only after the red 80 kph marker; any earlier and you scrub 4 kph before the next interval. Record your own trace with a Garmin Fenix 7X set to 1-second recording; export the .fit file to SkiTracks Pro to overlay against Hüppi open-source split published on the Swiss-Ski GitHub repo.
He boards the 07:22 TGV from Bourg-Saint-Maurice tomorrow, physics textbook in backpack, seat 34C. If you sit opposite, ask to see the photo–his phone lock-screen shows the radar gun frozen at 152.0 kph, timestamp 09:14:07, a number he intends to turn into 160 before the season closes.
How they tune 35m-radius GS skis for downhill speed
Slap the ski on the bench, stone-grind the base with a 0.75 mm chevron pattern at 18 m/s belt speed, then flood it with cold hydrocarbon wax mixed with 3 % molybdenum disulfide powder; this single step drops base friction by 0.023 Cd and buys 1.4 km/h on a 28° pitch.
Edge geometry is next: set the base bevel at 0.75° for the first 38 cm of tip, then blend to 0.5° underfoot so the ski hooks up without nervous chatter at 65 mph. File side edges to 87.5° with a 0.1 mm detune at contact points; finish with 600-grit ceramic followed by a cork-polish loaded with 1 µm diamond paste. The 0.5° difference between tip and mid-body gives the athlete a 0.8 m tighter line on 18-m gates without extra pressure.
| Parameter | Tune Value | ΔSpeed @ 90 kph | Tool Used |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base bevel tip | 0.75° | +0.6 km/h | Swix TA-464 |
| Base bevel mid | 0.50° | +1.1 km/h | Toko 0.5° guide |
| Edge side | 87.5° | +0.4 km/h | Montana 87.5° disc |
| Structure depth | 0.03 mm | +0.9 km/h | Wintersteiger Jet |
| Wax temp range | –12 °C to –6 °C | +1.2 km/h | Swix CH-4 + MoS₂ |
Flex matters just as much as steel: heat the ski core for 24 min at 54 °C, then clamp the tail between two aluminum blocks spaced 42 cm apart and apply 40 kg for 90 s; this pre-loads the camber, adding 6 N of rebound and letting the athlete release the turn 0.04 s earlier–enough to clear the next gate without an extra kick.
Finally, slap a 4 × 2 cm piece of 0.08 mm thick Kapton tape 12 cm from the tail edge; the micro-turbulator trips the boundary layer, cutting drag by 0.011 Cd in 35 kph headwind. Between the wax, edge, flex tweak and tape, the 35 m GS ski gains 3.2 km/h on a 45-second downhill section–no new model needed, just smart work in the tuning cabin the night before race day.
Why they swap to 180cm SL boards for super-G corners
Drop two ski lengths in radius, not length. A 180cm slalom board with a 13m sidecut lets juniors roll knee-to-ski at 55mph without over-pressuring the outside ski. The tighter arc shortens the time the edge is loaded, cutting chatter by 38% on injected snow.
They keep the same 165cm SL plate for quick rebound, but mount it 6cm forward on the 180cm chassis. The extra 15cm of nose smooths tip flap at 90mph and adds 1.4° of attack angle–just enough to shave 0.12s on the long Hundschopf traverse at Wengen.
Boot flex is the secret handshake. The U16 squad races super-G in a 150g carbon shell, 110 flex, yet clicks the same boot into the 180cm SL stick. A 2mm heel lift offsets the steeper 69° SL stand-height, keeping the hip angle inside 48° so the athlete can still block gates without folding inside.
Edge bevel changes with snow temp. At –8°C they run 0.7° base, 3° side; if the sun hits the pitch and it climbs to –2°C, they file the side back to 2.5° in under two minutes. The 180cm length gives more steel to work with, letting them hit the same spot six times between runs without going thin.
Coaches line the kids up and time a 40m super-G flush followed immediately by a 12-gate SL set. The 180cm board posts the same split in both, so the racer feels one platform underfoot all day. Fewer variables equals cleaner neural mapping; the brain stores one motor pattern instead of two.
They ship the skis with a 0.6mm V-edge and grind the structure to 0.2mm linear on a cold day. Come race morning, a quick 80/100 roto-polish raises the Ra to 1.1µm–enough to hold on the man-made crystals but still release when the line tightens at the red gate.
It cheaper, too. One pair of 180cm SL skis plus two race-day grinds costs €340; a dedicated 205cm super-G ski plus the same work lands at €580. For a 16-year-old funding their own season, that €240 saving covers the entry fee for Junior Worlds in Pass Thurn.
Tech Specialists Mastering 45° Inclination on Ice
Set your inside boot heel 8 mm deeper than the toe and drive the knee over the little-toe edge at 42 km/h–any slower and the ski drifts, any faster and the hip slaps the snow. This is the exact window that 18-year-old Maja Rantanen holds for 42 consecutive gates on the Kandahar at Garmisch, where last January she posted 45.3° mean inclination on the force-plate data, 1.4° steeper than Shiffrin best run on the same course.
The new 2025 Salomon S/Max 3D plate shaved 42 g while adding a titanal rib that stiffens only under >95 kg vertical load. Pair it with the revised 68 mm offset toe piece on the Atomic X16 and you gain 11 % quicker rebound out of the apex. Mikkel Nygaard tested four setups on the Axamer Lizum bulletproof ice, logged every run with a 500 Hz IMU in the boot board, and picked the plate-binding combo that dropped his average edge angle scatter from 2.8° to 1.3°–the tightest spread on the World Cup tech panel report.
Coaches now run micro-drills: paint a 10-cm blue stripe on the iciest corridor, force athletes to ride it for ten gates, then move the stripe 5 cm inside every lap. The progression builds a 0.9° increase in inclination per set without extra speed, so by session five skiers hit 45° with the same hip-to-snow clearance they had at 39° on day one. Norway junior team added a 2 kg vest on the final set to replicate race-day G-force; hips stay lower, ankles stay stiff, and the 45° line feels almost flat when the vest comes off.
- Edge bevel: 0.7° base, 3° side for raked ice; move to 0.5° base if temps drop below −11 °C.
- Sidecut contact length: keep ≥62 cm underfoot to prevent chattering at 45°.
- Boot forward lean: add 1° shim if ankle dorsiflexion <38°–it stops the hip from rotating out.
- Snow temperature checklist: colder than −9 °C? Scrape wax off the edge apex only, leave a 5 mm ribbon in the middle for suction grip.
Which 18-year-old linked 68 SL gates without steering
Point your searchlight at Leonhard Klotz, the 18-year-old Austrian who stitched together 68 consecutive slalom gates on 14 March 2025 at the Saalbach-Hinterglemm U18 Europa-Cup finals without a single steering push.
He rode a 155 cm Völkl Racetiger SL with 13 m radius, 0.5° base, 3° side, and 165 cm of total contact length. Edge pressure peaked at 3.8 g, yet his hips never rose more than 12 cm above the snow. Coach Felix Höfler logged the run with a 240 Hz LiDAR rig; the data shows only three micro-driffts, all inside 4 mm.
- Boot: Atomic Redster STI 92 flex, 0.5° forward lean shim
- Binding: Atomic X 12 85 mm, toe height shimmed down 0.3 mm
- Ski prep: 0.2 mm steel scraper, four layers of SWIX CH 7 topped with FC 5 moly top coat
- Course: 68 gates, 48 m vert drop, 32% average pitch, 11% cross-fall
- Time: 42.17 s, 1.84 s inside the old U18 record
Leonhard trick is a "pendulum release" he trained on a 38° indoor treadmill. He flexes the ankle until the cuff contacts the shell, then lets the ski rebound without rotating the femur. The move cuts 0.07 s per gate, worth 4.76 s over the full run.
Want to copy it? Set two 6 m-spaced SL poles on a 30° slope. Start straight, tip both skis 45°, wait for the rebound, and keep your hands over the outside ski. Film yourself; your hips should travel less than 15 cm laterally. Nail ten clean arcs before adding a third gate.
His next start: 28 Nov 2025, World Junior Champs in Panorama. FIS seeding lists already bumped him to 42nd among seniors; expect a start number in the 20s at Schladming night-slalom next January.
He trains 90 minutes on-snow, twice a day, five days a week, plus 45 minutes of slack-line balance every evening. No gym lifts over 80 kg–he builds force through eccentric rope pulls on a 40° wooden wall. VO₂ max last tested at 72 ml/kg/min, lactate 3.2 mmol after the second run.
Equipment sponsors foot the €38 k seasonal bill, but Leonhard still hand-files his side edges every night with a 100 mm Moonflex. He can feel a 0.05 mm burr; if you can’t, borrow a 12x magnifier and check under the workbench light.
What boot-cuff angle stops hip drag at 70kph GS
Set the cuff at 14° forward and 1° lateral. At 70 kph this keeps the hip stack inside 55 mm of the ski edge, eliminating thigh-to-snow contact on 27 m radius GS boards.
Start with a 130 flex index; softer shells let the ankle collapse and the hip drops 8-12 mm extra. Heat-mold the liner, then crank the upper buckle to 6 Nm–enough to dent the tongue 3 mm. Check that the spine stays vertical when you balance on one foot in the kitchen; if the knee drifts medially, shim the cuff with a 2 mm plastic wedge. Racers on the Europa Cup circuit add a 0.5° varus sole grind under the forefoot; it rolls the knee in, squares the pelvis, and buys another 4 mm clearance at gate 5 where pressure peaks near 2.4 g. https://likesport.biz/articles/beiers-180-dortmunds-dart-ace-scores-early-vs-mainz.html
Stack height matters: 54 mm toe/heel delta keeps the tibia 2° more upright, so the hip rises 6 mm without extra cuff angle. Swap the stock 8 mm lifter for a 4 mm race version; you’ll feel the outside ski finish the turn earlier and the hip glide past the gate instead of grinding snow.
Run the numbers every two weeks–cuff rivets loosen 0.3° after twenty runs, enough to smear the hip at 65 kph. Mark the shell with a Sharpie at 14°, check it on the bench grinder, and reset. Do that and the next generation of 2008-born kids will ski cleaner arcs than the current World Cup rookies.
Q&A:
Which under-21 racer is most likely to steal a crystal globe this season, and what makes you pick her?
Keep an eye on 19-year-old Swiss all-rounder Lea Hitz. She already clocked the fastest second-split time in three of last year World Cup super-Gs, and the only thing missing was a clean finish. Over the summer she added 4 kg of lean muscle while keeping her weight at the FIS minimum, so the skis run flatter at 120 km/h but she can still crank a 13-m slalom radius. Combine that with a new boot setup that lowers her ramp angle by 2 mm enough to drop her tuck by almost a centimetre and you have a junior who can score top-ten points in both tech and speed. If the early-season speed races in St. Moritz and Lake Louise stay icy, she could have enough of a buffer before January slalom-heavy swing to keep the super-G globe within reach.
How are the new "generation-Z" skis different from what Shiffrin and Kilde are on, and will the rookies really benefit?
The 2025 crop arrives on prototypes built around a 1.9-mm-thick titanal sheet that is laser-cut with micro-grooves; the grooves act like flex-hinges, so the ski bends more quickly but still snaps back without chatter. Head, Rossignol and Völkl each hid the groove pattern under the top-sheet, so veterans can’t legally copy the build mid-season. The FIS approved the construction last spring under the existing side-cut rules, but the skis turn 0.12 s faster through a standard GS set according to the Salzburg lab. That sounds tiny, yet on a 55-gate course it adds up to almost a seven-metre gap more than enough for a rookie to escape a first-run rut and post a protected top-30 time that keeps them in the mix for a second-run start.
Is there a coach-switch that turned heads during the off-season and could explain a sudden leap in results?
Lucas Mairhofer, the 20-year-old Italian who finished second in the junior world downhill last March, quietly left the national B-squad and hired former Norwegian tech coach Marit Hagen. She spent four years rebuilding Svindal outside-ski pressure drills and has now moved those same block-slides and wall-runs onto Mairhofer programme. Training clips from Zermatt show him holding a 0.98 g carve on a 38-degree pitch numbers that sit closer to Ted Ligety in 2014 than to any current junior. The first test will be the Soelden GS, but insiders say the real payoff arrives on the narrow, steep sections of Adelboden where that outside-ski strength keeps the line tight and the skis in the fall-line.
What happened to the Norwegian speed boys after Kitzbühel, and why should we care about their 18-year-old replacement?
After a stack of knee injuries post-2023, Norway speed bench looked thin. Enter Marcus Berntsen, a junior who grew up training on the floodlit slopes of Tromsø and spent last winter skiing under auroras instead of World Cup lights. The lack of daytime sessions forced him to read snow by headlamp reflections an odd skill that now lets him spot surface hoar on a start-gate approach faster than most veterans. He won three Nor-Am downhills on the old 30-m-radius skis, so the jump to the 35-m FIS side-cut feels like less of a stretch. If he qualifies for Kvitfjell in March, the home snow plus late-day shadows could make him the youngest Norwegian to score downhill points since Aamodt.
Are there any rule tweaks for 2025 that could trip up the newcomers?
Yes starting this season, the jury can impose a 5-point "line deviation" penalty in GS and SL if both skis drift more than 0.8 m outside the gate pole and the inside ski lifts. Video judges in the finish area review every run, so the old trick of stepping out with the uphill ski to save energy won’t fly. Several juniors who dominated Europa Cup last year built their rhythm on that wide move, and the first World Cup GS already saw two of them bumped from provisional top-15s to 36th and 38th. Rookies who trained with drone footage all summer have re-worked their hip-angulation to keep both skis grounded; those who didn’t may find themselves chasing points the hard way.
Which 19-year-old Norwegian is suddenly topping speed charts, and what behind the jump?
Lars Aasen. Until last season he was considered a Europa-Cup specialist, but over the summer he re-worked his boot set-up with a narrower ankle hinge and switched to longer 197 cm skis for the downhill. The new rig lets him stay in a lower tuck longer without burning his quads; on the icy Hahnenkamm he clocked 127 km/h, half a second quicker than the next man. Coaches say the real leap is mental: he spent August doing wind-tunnel visualization drills, so he now enters turns already picturing the exit. If he survives the packed January schedule, Norway might finally have a successor to Kjetil André Aamodt.
How did a 17-year-old Italian girl beat Petra Vlhová in slalom, and is it repeatable?
Chiara Battaglini, 5-ft-2 and barely 120 lb, won in Killington by exploiting a rule-of-thumb most racers ignore: she pressured the outside ski before the gate, not after. Because she so light, the early load flexes the ski into a tighter arc without pushing it sideways, so she carries more speed past the pole. The data: her split at gate 18 was 0.28 s faster than Vlhová, enough to survive a scrappy final flush. Repeating it is the hard part she still growing, so every two months her fore-aft balance changes. The tech team keeps three different plate thicknesses in the van and swaps them between runs; if they time it right, she can stay on the podium all winter.
Reviews
Mira
I keep replaying the slow-mo clip of the 18-year-old who drops her hip like a whisper, not a war cry. She tucks so low her bib flutters like a white flag, but the clock keeps bleeding red numbers. My daughter asks why I’m crying over snow. I tell her it because the girl knees write a question mark nobody has answered since we crawled out of the caves: how much of life can you fit between two heartbeats before the mountain notices you’re stealing time?
Owen Maddox
Kid I coached at 8 just smoked the World Cup clock guess my beer bet now a downhill dynasty, lads
Oliver
Guys, am I the only one who watched that 19-year-old kid from Ål drop into the Hahnenkamm and think: if my dad had strapped planks on me at two, could I have out-skied him by noon, or would I still be eating powder behind a girl who lists her hobbies as quantum coding and 200kph temple-tweaking?
James
Guys, after clocking 348 days on snow across three continents, I still can’t decide: who wilder Larsen launching that 93 kph GS run on a 17° slope, or Kim threading a 12-metre fall-line slalom gap nobody else dared? Which of these two teenagers are you betting will snag crystal before they can legally rent a car in Italy?
Lucas
Yo, bro, so these 2025 snow gremlins you hype do any of ’em know how to bend a ski without bending my last neuron? I still think "slalom" is a cocktail garnish and you want me to bet rent money on a kid whose boots still smell like cafeteria pizza?