Kitzbühel (Austria) (AFP) – All eyes will be on Switzerland's runaway World Cup leader Marco Odermatt when racing on the hallowed snow of Kitzbuehel gets under way this weekend.
The 26-year-old, a surprise winner of last year's downhill gold at the World Ski Championships in Courchevel where he also won the giant slalom, revealed he has upped his weight training and it has paid off in spades on the piste.
Odermatt has this season won seven races in three disciplines and is also atop the standings in the downhill, super-G and giant slalom.
In Wengen, where Aleksander Aamodt Kilde and France's Alexis Pinturault both sustained season-ending crashes and FIS came under fire for staging an additional downhill in an already-packed schedule, Odermatt really showed his increasing prowess in the ultimate speed event.
He bagged a maiden World Cup downhill victory and followed that up with victory in the second downhill race to set himself up perfectly for the challenges of Kitzbuehel. "After the success in Wengen, a victory in Kitzbuehel is my biggest dream," Odermatt said.
"I also know how good I am at the moment and how close I am to this victory. In Kitzbuehel I have only been short by hundredths of a second."
Odermatt and the rest of the 60-plus field will have their work cut out with back-to-back downhill races on Friday and Saturday, with a slalom scheduled for Sunday.
The 84th running of the downhill, which made its debut in 1931, will see racers reaching motorway-coasting speeds of 140km/h while negotiating sections that have an 85-percent gradient.
While not the longest course on the circuit, racers are guaranteed a thigh-trembling descent of the 3.3km-long Streif course on the Hahnenkamm mountain where the vertiginous start sees them reach 100km/h in the first five seconds.
'A good action movie'
"The Streif is like a good action movie - exciting until the end," says Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Austrian bodybuilder/actor-cum-former California governor who is an ever-present during racing in the upmarket Tyrolian town.
The reigning Olympic downhill champion is Beat Feuz, three times a winner in Kitzbuehel, where he symbolically called time on his glittering career after last year's race. "It's the most famous and spectacular race of them all," the former Swiss racer said. "You have to be 100% committed to taking risks.
"It's exhausting, but fantastic." Feuz added: "There are certainly more strenuous courses, in purely physical terms. "But in Kitzbuehel, there's a lot more to it: the mystique, the race hierarchy... "There are so many outstanding athletes who reach their limits here."
The course record of 1min 51.58sec was set by Austria's Fritz Strobl back in 1997.
But it is safe to say that racers are more concerned about safely negotiating the piste with the right amount of so-called "risk management": how much a racer is able to push himself, much like a Formula One driver, in the knowledge that one slight error might mean hurtling into some of the 15km of nets and fencing down the course.
Last year's downhill winners were Vincent Kriechmayr and Kilde, with Switzerland's Daniel Yule claiming the slalom title.
Racers are again vying for prize money of 100,000 euros ($108,000), part of a 1m-euro pot on offer for three days of racing, something fully deserved in the eyes of former Norwegian racer Aksel Lund Svindal.
"At the Olympics, there can sometimes be an accidental winner. On the Streif, it's always the best who win," said Svindal, a three-time super-G winner at the Hahnenkamm.
Programme (all times GMT, subject to change)
Friday: downhill (1130)
Saturday: downhill (1130)
Sunday: slalom (1030+1330)