The December Birthday's Downfall... or Upswing

 I can still vividly remember my first speed race. I was a first year J4. The race was at Snowbasin, Utah. I think I was racing on a pair of 155 GS skis, which for me was big. It was the first full divisional race of the season. This meant that it was a qualifier for J4 Festival, a race I desperately wanted to attend even though as a first year the odds were stacked against me. I don’t remember much about the skiing but I do remember the devastation. We pulled off two Super G races and I placed in the late teens in both races.

Now I can almost hear your brain going ‘come on you were devastated about placing in the late teens!’ But I was devastated. Now to put this in perspective in those days I felt pretty confident about getting a podium any time I made it down the hill. But that day at Snowbasin I remember looking at the scoreboard and giving up trying to figure exactly how I finished because there were too many names with times better than mine.

Now looking back on this loss I can pinpoint two reasons that I wasn’t good at speed then. For one those 155 GS skis probably weren’t the best and I had probably skied on them once. The other reason that I will mention is that I was small. Now looking at me now you probably wouldn’t have guessed but back then I was short and skinny. My birthday is in January but in a two year age bracket that still meant I was at least a year younger than most of the kids on the course. This brings up one of the interesting points of ski racing. Does relative age matter?

By relative age, I mean where your birthday falls within the age group in which you compete.  If age groups are by calendar year, as in ski racing, then kids born in January will be eleven months older than the kids born in December of the same birth year.  But statistical analysis shows that for ski racing, the short answer is no, relative age doesn't matter. If you were simply looking for the answer to that question then you can stop reading here. If we were talking about hockey then the answer would be yes -- being born early in an age group, being a little bigger (on average) than your competitors makes a difference -- and below I will talk about why ski racers have managed to avoid this relative age problem that cuts many out of sports like hockey and soccer.

Successful ski racers at young ages are often born in the first half of the year. But this differential disappears by the world cup level with slightly more athletes born in the second half of the year. So why are ski racers able to overcome this disparity while it persists in hockey all the way through to the NHL level? I think that part of the answer has to do with the difference between team and individual sports. In team sports a team is chosen and only those who are on that team get to play. So if coaches select the bigger, better coordinated kids who were born a little earlier, then they get better training opportunities and become stronger hockey players.  In ski racing youth qualifier races are scarce and training is open to anyone with the financial means to participate. While there may be some favoritism by coaches the good kids will become good at their own pace, working on their skills until they grow physically and mentally.

But losing also makes you fight. After my first Super G series the fear of inferiority pushed me to train harder than I had ever done before. I honed in my focus and went for the win more in the next race. If you truly want to be good at something and you are not, then you need to work that much harder to try to overcome your inabilities. Luckily the younger kids will get bigger and older and when they do they will be that much better than the other kids because they will have been working harder and getting better out of fear that they aren’t good enough.  Whereas the kids who are fast just because they were older and bigger will not keep working on their skills and improving their skiing.

So if you are one of those kids or a parent of a kid born in the second half of the year don't cry or give up. If you work hard you will catch up and the work you put in fighting will pay off in the results. You may actually be at an advantage if only you can keep working long enough to see it.

What's the Goldilocks Height?

Here we see Askel Svindal one of the tallest current World Cup Racers next to Marcel Hirsher one of the smallest and Ted Ligety who is average. They are all talented racers even with varying heights.

Growing up I always wanted to believe that with hard work anything is possible.  I believe that much less as I get older. Unfortunately as much as we want to believe anything is possible, especially in the world of sports, the fact remains that some people are limited. But the question I have is what genetic factors make you good at ski racing?

I recently read The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Performance by David Epstein. While many books look to disprove the role of genetics in elite performance Epstein sought to prove it. It is an excellent read and I highly recommend it.  While Epstein never spoke about ski racers he did find some startling evidence of the influence of genetics in sports. This idea intrigued me. I had never heard about any studies in ski racing, although a fellow athlete once told me that femur length is critical to ski racing success. I don’t know about that but I wanted to know more about what genetic traits affected ski racing success.

One genetic trait has been studied in length with regard to athletic success: height. In Ericsson’s study he mentions height and cites a study of Olympic athletes at the Montreal games and says that while different heights are an obvious advantage in certain sports (ie basketball and gymnastics) the average height of athletes at the Montreal games was the same as that of a control group of students. This implies that while people may not be cut out for particular sports there should always be a sport that will favor their height.

Unfortunately I don’t know that this is really the case any more. Over time the height of athletes in most sports has trended toward the extremes. In the first modern Olympics it was believed that the average sized man was the right size for all athletic endeavors, not too tall, not too short, not too muscle bound or lean. Since that first Olympics much has changed. Gymnasts have gotten smaller, basketball players taller. But what about ski racers? Ted Ligety is 5’11’’ and Anna Fenninger 5’5’’ -- fairly average heights. So does being tall give racers an advantage?

This led me to make an extensive search of the internet. I compiled the height of as many Olympic medalists in ski racing as possible. Some, especially those of early ski racers, were unavailable but I did find enough that I could compile some usable data. The results led to some interesting answers and even more questions.

The average height for a male Olympic medalist in ski racing is (can I get a drum roll please?) about 181cm equivalent to about 5’ 11’’. While this is slightly higher than the U.S. national average (176), it is closer to Central Europe’s average male height. The shorter countries in Europe run around 176 and the taller 180 or 181.  The shortest male medalist is Heini Hemmi who won gold in the ’76 games in GS. There aren’t many close to him with American Andrew Weibrecht coming in as the shortest current medalist (and one of the shortest all time) at 168cm (5’6’’). The tallest medalist is Michael Walchofer at a towering 192cm or 6’4’’. Almost half of male medalists lie between 178 and 183cm.

Now for the ladies. Interestingly it seems that while male heights have stayed fairly steady throughout the sport’s history female height has increased somewhat over time with an average of about 168cm or 5’6’’. Again this is slightly higher than average but still well within the range of a normal person. The shortest ever was Barbara Cochran at 155cm and the tallest was the well-known Maria Höfl-Riesch at 180cm. More than half of female medalists lie within 165 and 172cm. Women’s ski racing also has a broader range of heights than men with racers from Tessa Worley to Lindsey Vonn doing well.

Does this mean that anyone can be a great ski racer? Well maybe, maybe not. Ski racing definitely discriminates against the lower third of the height spectrum with fewer and fewer racers at those heights. I think that one critical piece of being a good ski racer is having weight to carry you down the hill. The shorter athletes on the circuit now (like Weibrecht and Gut) have fit as much muscle weight onto their smaller frames as possible.  Unfortunately accurate weight information on ski racers is not available (since the weight information that exists is self-reported and in many cases not credible).

Another interesting finding was the comparison between events. Interestingly on both the men and the women’s side GS was the shortest event but all events stayed roughly around the same number. I don’t think the difference was significant. There isn’t really a different ideal height for speed vs. tech, even though figures like Svindal and Miller might lead you to believe otherwise.

There are certainly issues with being too tall or short in ski racing. Unlike most sports that have trended toward the extremes ski racing trends just above average height with fewer and fewer outliers as time progresses. So most people can be ski racers assuming they can add muscle weight to their frame, but we are not without our own form of genetic discrimination even in the realms of height.

10,000 What?

As we move into the fall many of us ski racers are beginning to think about summer camps. Did we do enough? Did we put in enough hours? Some of us may have thought of this as a way toward achieving the 10,000 hour rule. Now you may have thought ‘is she going to talk about the ten thousand hour rule with regard to ski racing?’ The answer is yes, yes I am.

A few years ago I attended a Western Region camp and listened to a lecture by Dr. Lester Keller. He spoke of the ten thousand hour rule and asked how long it would take to achieve such a number. After some mental math that I will admit to being incredibly suspect I came up with how long it would take ski racers to achieve the 10,000 hour mark: 100 years.

In February I read a few articles that reminded me of the 10,000 hour rule. Most argued that the 10,000 hour rule had made parents crazy and was detrimental to athlete development. I thought back to the camp I had and the issue fascinated me so much that I felt I needed more research on the subject to do a proper blog. What I found couldn’t fit in one blog so I have decided to do a series of them, one blog per week on attaining excellence in ski racing. Check back every Friday. Outliers popularized the 10,000 hour rule, his book was based on Ericsson’s research.  I am a busy girl so reading those plus a number of books also on the subject of expert performance took  some months.
Now part of why all of this took so long was that I felt I had to actually go back and read where all of this came from, namely all 37 pages of Anders Ericsson’s study: The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance. Although Malcolm Gladwell’s best selling book

Before we begin I think we should define deliberate practice. In his study Ericsson describes it in these terms: “The most cited condition concerns the subjects' motivation to attend to the task and exert effort to improve their performance” (Ericsson, 1993) My interpretation: deliberate practice is difficult. “In addition, the design of the task should take into account the preexisting knowledge of the learners so that the task can be correctly understood after a brief period of instruction” (Ericsson, 1993) The task should neither be too hard nor too easy and should make sense to the learner. “The subjects should receive immediate informative feedback and knowledge of results of their performance. The subjects should repeatedly perform the same or similar tasks”(Ericsson, 1993) You should get coaching and you should do it repeatedly.

So in my mind this narrows deliberate practice in ski racing down to training, in gates or freeskiing (not for fun but actually as a method of improving oneself doing drills or focusing on technique). It does not include slipping, powder skiing (although we can discuss the merits of this, we must agree that it is not deliberate practice), riding chairlifts, sitting at the top of the course, working out, etc. If I add up my own numbers from last year I took approximately 600 runs either in a course or freeskiing/doing drills. This means that for perhaps the first time in my life my mental math while listening to Dr. Keller was correct. Assuming that every year was like my last it would take 100 years to reach the 10,000 hour mark.

So even if you committed to more training time than I did there is no conceivable way you could reach Gladwell/ Ericsson’s number. Part of the reason that no one ever reaches 10,000 hours in ski racing is that we spend a lot of time on chair lifts and slipping etc. There are basic limitations to how many runs we can get in a day. I think that any coach strives to make the most of training time available but the reality is that you can only do so much skiing at high intensity, especially at many of the elevations we train at (like Colorado and Chile). Ski racing is inherently a demanding sport. We push the limit of our anaerobic capacity and fight extreme forces. This combined with the already present issues of chairlift time and hill preparation make a day with 8-10 runs productive, even if we only added 10 minutes of deliberate practice to our running total.

In the past I have seen some athletes who trained considerably more than others. Most of these athletes either lived or moved to Mt. Hood for the summer and trained frequently all summer. I never saw this approach work out. Athletes who did this either hurt themselves or simply dropped off the next year. I attribute this to a lack of physical fitness, although some of it may also have been mental fatigue. The fact is that as ski racers we need a higher level of strength, power, and cardio fitness than can be achieved while skiing full-time. We must take time off of skis and we must use this time to increase our fitness (most skiers’ cardio drops off somewhat during the season) and prepare for the skiing ahead.

In conclusion ski racers cannot get 10,000 hours of skiing. That is not to say that deliberate practice or training isn’t important -- it just means that ski racing doesn’t fit into Gladwell’s numbers. In the original study Ericsson only mentions 10,000 hrs of practice once (so technically no Gladwell didn’t make the number up as Ericsson has said to the public, but Ericsson did not emphasize the number). Ericsson seems to be more of a fan of the 10 year rule and repeatedly says that it takes ten or more years to become proficient at a given subject. This is a rule we can live by if we discount our early years. It seems that once we fully commit to skiing and spend 12-20 hours (not of deliberate practice but just hill time) it takes ten years until we are proficient (in the top 30) on the World Cup. This is not to say that by doing ten years of this practice we will become World Cup skiers but rather World Cup skiers have spent that much time doing full time training.

In conclusion Malcolm Gladwell never thought of ski racing when coming up with his chapter on deliberate practice. We are an unusual sport in this regard although I can think of other sports that would face similar problems. I can certainly assure you though that you have not nor will you reach 10,000 hours any time in the near future.

Lessons from a One-Sport Athlete

(A picture from Whistler Cup in 2008 half of the J4 team, yours truly on top and below from right to left: Julia Mueller Ristine, Mikaela Shiffrin, Colin Martens, Hana Saydek, and Linnea Basinger. One of these athletes has quit, two are on the U.S. Ski Team, and four race in college.) 

 

A lot of people talk about specialization these days. There is a debate about whether athletes should focus on one sport or diversify and do multiple sports (especially in high school). I decided to write a blog on the subject because I was and am a one-sport woman. I want to say that what is going below is not going to be an argument for the one-sport track but rather a discussion about multi or single sport life and the pros and cons of both and why I chose one but why you or your children might choose otherwise.

I began skiing at age 3. My father has always been into skiing and my mom got into it as we went along but my parents really always wanted me to be a ski racer. I was always pushed toward ski racing and so it is unsurprising that I became a ski racer. But I tried other sports.  I played soccer when I was little, a little summer rec league. My dad coached our team and I never liked it. I wasn’t good at it (I might have stuck with it longer if our team had won more but my team always sucked). I didn’t like the team sport concept (it frustrated me) and soccer simply didn’t excite me. I think I did three or four summers of it until my parents let me quit. I played hockey for a year or two but in addition to the problems of soccer there were only one or two girls on the team. Because my family liked skiing we didn’t have a lot of extra cash for things like horse back riding (I still have never ridden a horse) and tennis so I didn’t have a chance to do those.

When I was about ten or eleven I told my mom that I would like to try swimming. I was pretty good at it and soon began doing it competitively. The sport was cheap, individual (except for relays but our relay team rocked!), and I was pretty good at it. I was swimming five days a week for an hour and half a day and I enjoyed it. Then I got good at ski racing. I went to Whistler Cup my first year J4 and after that swimming was never the same. I was barely medaling in states in swimming and I was winning Junior Olympics in skiing. The choice seemed simple at the time.

So by the time I entered high school I only ski raced. I never picked up another high school sport and personally I don’t regret that decision. I wouldn’t have wanted to force myself through another sport I hated. But I did some sport hobbies. I got into running my freshman year and did that – and continue to do it -- on and off. Sophomore year I got into gymnastics and took some classes (even though I had never done it at a younger age and was about eight inches taller than anyone else in the building). I got into slacklining. I played horrible tennis with my host father junior year.

Skiing is what I love -- it always has been. I did my hobby sports without the pressure of competition and that definitely helped keep me from comparing them to ski racing. It also gave me a break from the stresses of trying to be the best. Some would say that I did do more than one sport in high school but I disagree. To me they were hobbies, like knitting or reading. I did them only second to everything else I had going on. I didn’t spend a lot of time on them, not nearly the same amount that a school sport would demand.

The problem with the route I took is that there are certain athletic disadvantages I have, chief among them that I have incredibly bad coordination. One advantage I had was that I was able to attend more weight lifting sessions and I am stronger for it. Many girls who tried to play another sport (mostly soccer) couldn’t get enough strength sessions in before the season. There were also some sports that I would have liked to play when I was young that I simply couldn’t because my family didn’t have the funds. Yes, I never got to play tennis but in the end they paid for a lot of ski camps and for that I am grateful.

I have recently been reading Anders Ericson’s study on deliberate practice. You may know it as one of the building blocks for Malcolm Gladwell’s 10000 hour rule (there are some great blogs coming). He noted a study that I found interesting stating “Greater height is an obvious advantage in basketball, high jumping, and most sports emphasizing strength. Shorter height is an advantage in gymnastics. Differences in height were found to discriminate well among male athletes of different events at the Olympic games in Montreal, although the average height of all athletes did not differ from that of a control group of students.” This implies to me that there is a sport for everyone out there -- you just have to find it.

Most of these articles and studies reach conclusions based on what the best did.  They don’t look at the general population compared to the best. So most of the people recruited to Ohio State football played two sports. My question is: Out of every kid in Ohio who played another sport and football as opposed to just football, who got recruited to Ohio State?

In conclusion I think that from my standpoint this debate doesn’t make sense. If you want your kids to be great at some sport (especially on a professional level) you should know that there isn’t some magical algorithm to being the best. Yes, you need to be athletic and you need to put a lot of time in, but you also need passion. Don’t make your kids play basketball in high school just so Ohio State will recruit them. Don’t tell them to quit swimming for soccer when they are ten because they are better at soccer at that point. When your kids are little, do as many sports as you can afford and have time for and let them figure out what excites them. Then provide them with the opportunities to continue those sports as long as those sports enchant them.

More food for thought and articles that inspired this post:

http://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/research/probability-competing-beyond-high-school

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/04/sports/olympics/olympic-athletes-may-win-gold-but-a-pot-of-it-rarely-follows.html?_r=0

http://highschoolsportsstuff.areavoices.com/2015/01/20/one-sport-athletes/

https://stevenashyb.wordpress.com/2014/10/20/the-race-to-nowhere-in-youth-sports/

Brains or Balls?

(These are pics from my recent race in Santa Caterina, Italy, where the men's World Cup was held in December)

Ski racing has got some contradictions. Just to name a couple: cold weather without warm clothing, and going downhill side to side. As the women head to Cortina and St. Moritz (where I will be racing this week!

) and the men head off to Wengen and Kitzbuel I thought I would talk about brains and balls, and why you need them both for this sport. This is one of the reasons that ski racing is so hard. We rocket down a mountain as fast as we can but we also need to use our heads so that we don’t kill ourselves doing so and -- perhaps more importantly -- can win.

Interestingly, in my opinion, younger kids seem to have more of one or the other of these characteristics. They are either more go get ‘ems or they are great thinkers. You can develop both but some who are too much one way never make it as they get older. I know some girls who were incredibly good but fizzled out because they couldn’t put the gas pedal down and push it, or couldn’t put on the brakes when things got hairy. The former normally became slalom skiers if they can deal with moving quickly albeit at a slower speed, and the latter normally had some gnarly crashes (not that everyone in this sport doesn’t have those, theirs were just a little too predictable) and quality time in physical therapy rooms before bowing out of the sport.

Ski racing is beautiful but as you will see if you do a google search of ski racing crashes it will b*tch slap you if you don’t use your head. The movie The Thin Line talks about this a lot, and if you have not seen it I highly recommend it for the ski racing fan, especially this time of year. The unfortunate thing is, and Bode will attest to this, it is in the thin line between destruction and safety that winning occurs. As a speed skier I will say that intelligence is my brake and audacity is my gas pedal and they fight over the clutch and steering wheel.

Brains:

In downhill we travel at speeds up to 120 km/h and after some quick math that means we travel about 33 meters per second at that speed. Last second decisions -- heck talk about last hundredth of a second decisions. Add in bad light and varying snow and it’s a bit of a wonder we make it down at all. In inspection ski racers do a lot of analysis, trying to figure out just how something is going to ski. One thing the veterans have over the newbies is that they may have run a course countless times (factor in doing two training runs and a race per year at each venue and it starts to feel like home). They know just how much they can let fly and just how high the line needs to be because they tried it last year and it worked or it didn’t. The goal in ski racing is that you figure out exactly where you want to be in inspection and are capable of executing that line perfectly; then you adjust with course reports and the way you feel while skiing down. Adjusting during a race run is the most advanced stage of ski racing intelligence. It takes a lot of experience to identify what is going on (remember you’re moving 33m/s) and have time to adjust and also be able to pull that adjustment off in that same perfect way you would pull off your inspected line. 

Balls:

If you are more of a weekend skier then you probably gawk at the way ski racers haul their bodies out of start gates. Even I am a little mesmerized when the boys tuck on Kitzbuel. I think this is one of the most confusing parts about ski racing. You have to turn your brain on and off. Ski racers have to act on what their circuitry tells them, when, say, it’s telling you there are bumps ahead and you have to adjust your line a body width, but then we have to ignore the pleading of our self preservation circuitry telling us “throw it sideways! This is steeeep.” Differentiating the two is so challenging it can take an entire career to develop. Trusting yourself is incredibly tough and trusting yourself and going as hard as you can, while not going too hard is something only the greats have in spades.

So when you are watching the upcoming January classic races, with their big air, high speeds, and demanding corners watch as athletes press on the gas and brake. Watch as racers balance what is smart and what is fast. The physical side is important but the mental side wins the race.

Are We Having Fun Yet?

 (me having fun at Bogus Basin as a little person.)

It seems to be coming up a lot recently. How to make ski racing more fun. Let me first establish that I have a lot of fun at what I do. I enjoy ski racing and I find that the sport, at its best, gives me a blissful joy that cannot be matched doing anything else. However, ski racing is not always fun and fun is not why I do it. We as a society teach our kids that life is not always fun. I haven’t heard people trying to solve the problem of high school dropouts by trying to make school more fun. We don’t try to make the workplace more fun. But athletics, well if you’re not having fun at all times then suddenly there are big problems.

It seems interesting to me that we put athletics up on this pedestal, a seeming utopia where there only exists fun and joy, and we participate under this cloud where we don’t even realize we are working. I can’t speak for everyone else but I know I am working when I am working and most of the time it is not fun. When I am doing circuits until I literally can’t see straight in the summer I am not having fun. When I am packed like a sardine in the back of an airplane surrounded by people I am not having fun. When it’s twenty below and I am in full strip at the top of a course where the wind is blowing sideways and now we have a course hold because you can’t see down there but my clothes are at the bottom I am not having fun.

Last year I went to Europe. I spent approximately 57600 seconds flying to Europe and back. I added up all of my times from my races last year in Europe and the total number of seconds came to… wait for it… 520.66 seconds (about 8 and a half minutes). The ratio: 110/1. I spend 110 seconds cramping in the back of an airplane for every one second on a racecourse. And that doesn’t count time spent in the van on two lane roads winding through the back woods of central Europe. At a race in Spital I spent approximately four hours at the start waiting for a fog hold that never ended. They counted the race but I was listed as a DNS1. This means that I spent 14400 seconds waiting for a fog hold for 0 seconds of racing. I think you can do that ratio.

I am not saying that ski racing is never fun but as far as sports go it has many aspects that make it an unlikely candidate for “most fun sport in the world.” I mean you are talking about a sport where you literally throw yourself down a mountain in who-knows-what-weather in spandex and boots that don’t fit. People used to ask me “are those suits warm?” No, they are not warm -- do they look warm? Furthermore we have endless amounts of equipment and we have to tune it for one to two hours a day. If I had a dollar for every time someone said “why can’t we just be swimmers” in the tuning room I could pay for my ski career.

Everyone talks about all of the life lessons people get out of ski racing but people still think about fun when they think of keeping kids in the sport. I am not sure we can make it this sport fun enough for all the kids out there who are only looking for fun to continue to do it. I believe that we should focus on the principles kids learn: hard work, responsibility, time management, self-respect, and focus. Kids learn to buckle down for what is important, they learn to live with other people, they learn to push their limits. I believe that if we help focus on these things kids will stay in the sport not because it is fun but because it helps shape their identity and they believe that ski racing is critical to who they are.

Got Bibs?

Ok this post isn’t going to be as deep as this blog can be. You may find it funny, you may find it strange but here is a letter to all bib makers and ski clubs buying bibs from an athlete who has experienced it all.

First we must establish when a set of bibs must be replaced. Many clubs replace their bibs when a sufficient number are missing that trying to figure out who is who becomes distracting and annoying. As a racer I kindly request that if your bibs are loose and flap in the wind, please replace them. If your necklines look like they could make frills on dresses, they are loose. Chances are that if your bibs are old and loose some are looser than others, and it sucks getting thrown that bib that falls off you like a billowing sail. And it’s not fair! Also I once saw a bib obviously sewn back together after EMTs or ski patrol had cut someone out of it. If you have a bib like that please hang it on the wall and get a replacement bib for it. No one wants to think about what the story is with that bib in the start gate.

Great! You want new bibs. Any athlete loves new bibs and everyone will fully support you. Hopefully even a sponsor who will pay for new bibs!  Now use these tips to buy the perfect set that everyone will love and will last longer than your budget needs it to.

I think a lot of bib makers think of bibs like stretchy tight shirts and I want to first say that the thought process behind that, while well intentioned, is incorrect. Bibs are much more than that and the way ski racers use them means that you need to throw that off of the table right now. Ski racers don’t just wear bibs on their chests – on race day they are wearing bibs all different ways, and pulling their bibs on and off all day. They may have a bad shoulder or elbow and so getting in and out is tough. We also follow no rules of etiquette for donning clothing. Bibs get pulled up over boots as well as the traditional pull over the head and down. And realize that we also are basically living in spandex onesies. We have to get in and out of those to do basic human things … you get the idea. Bibs get wrapped around arms, shoved down on hips, and tossed over necks. Pretty much any way you can put clothing on, bibs have gone on that way. They also go on every body type imaginable from 240 pound boys to 100 pound girls, so think accordingly.

Every thread of a good bib should be stretchy. Like really stretchy. Most everybody has stretchy waistbands but we need stretchy armholes and stretchy necks too. Necks are super important and I want to emphasize this. Bibs are like giraffes--they need great necks. Many companies don’t make the neckline with stretchy thread. The neck needs to stretch to fit over a large waist without pulling out the stitching. This is the most common way bibs get loose. The neck gets ripped because racers are pulling them every which way and the neck isn’t stretchy enough, so the thread there gets ripped and then your bib looks old and loose and frilly, and it’s flapping in the breeze – which is, umm, not fast.

Next we have the classic concept that a bib should be short. Wrong. Bibs should be longer. Especially on girls, bibs ride up. Remember that women are hourglass shaped. So the waistband on a short bib will ride up to somewhere around our bellybutton. This makes them slow and it makes it hard to read the numbers on the back. We try to pull them down in the gate but it doesn’t always work. If you make bibs a little longer they don’t ride up as much.

Last we must address the issue of girls vs. boys. There are some boys out there that are big. When bibs aren’t big enough for them they have to rip under the armpits to fit into them. This brings us back to both the extra stretchiness and that girl bibs and boy bibs should not be shared. Ever. If you have a race for just one gender, use their set of bibs. Don’t use the other gender’s bibs because they were the first ones you found. If the numbers on the bibs are easier to read… too bad! You should have made the boys bibs a different color. If you have to make the girls’ bibs pink or purple so that you don’t confuse them – and so the boys refuse to wear them -- do that. Just don’t mix them.

So that is about it. That was a lot longer blog than I thought it would be but I hope you use this info to better make or buy bibs. If you read all the way to here give yourself a big pat on the back! If you use this information and make your next set accordingly know that I, along with every ski racer around, thank you.