Weather delays again turn Olympic skiing into an uphill battle

Reporting from Whistler, Canada — 

The running of the most prestigious Olympic Alpine event, the men’s downhill, was scrubbed Saturday because of warm weather and deteriorating snow conditions on the Dave Murray course.

You could see this postponement coming from as far away as a snowy place like, you know, Dallas.

If things don’t improve soon, Whistler might have to be converted to a Water Park with medals being awarded in the GSSS (giant slalom slip ‘n slide).

This is my fifth Winter Olympics, so weather delays roll off my back like H2O flowing over what used to be the 60-meter jump known as “Murr’s Hope.”

The way it looks now: The men’s downhill would begin Monday at 10:30 a.m. The women’s combined event, originally scheduled for Sunday, has been tentatively kicked to Thursday.

The men’s combined is still scheduled for Tuesday -- but please call an update hotline before making plans -- with the women’s downhill still on tap for Wednesday.

Keep in mind this could all change in the next 10 minutes.

These delays appear to have been heaven-sent to American star Lindsey Vonn, who entered the Games not knowing whether she could compete after bruising her shin Feb. 2 on a training run in Austria.

Weather postponements are nothing unusual at the Winter Games. And this is nothing (so far) compared to 1998 at Nagano, on a mountain in Hakuba, when the world waited five days for the downhill and the entire Alpine schedule got scrambled like eggs.

The Japanese had a difficult time saying no, so every day we’d trudge to the media center to begin the tortuous process of waiting around for the inevitable postponement.

It was like being stuck at the airport during a Biblical storm and the airline rescheduling your flight departure to 5:34 p.m., as if they had it nailed down to the minute.

The Japanese did the same thing: “The men’s downhill has been delayed 15 minutes. The new start time is 2:16.”

This went on for days. My longtime partner in Alpine ski-delay coverage, the diminutive but devilish David Leon Moore of USA Today, would answer these announcements with “LIARS!” It caught on in the press room.

It wasn’t easy, but they squeezed in all 10 Alpine events in Nagano, doubling up events some days. This led to my missing Hermann Maier’s epic win in the super-G, three days after he crashed in the downhill.

Why? Because Picabo Street was racing in the women’s downhill that day.

Hey, as they say in this sport: “That’s ski racing.”

So here we sit, again, this time in Whistler, waiting for the clouds to clear, the rain to stop and the temperature to drop.

The Winter Olympics should never, ever feel like Cleveland in the spring. You should never, either, bring back a souvenir umbrella from the Olympic mountain.

No time to panic . . . yet. They build in Olympic off days for delays that are often inevitable. Monday and Thursday were dark on the original schedule, so there’s still time to get back on track.

But we’re running out of time. And I’m running out of ways to describe mist, fog, slush and mud on my pants.

chris.dufresne@latimes.com

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