Sinead O'Carroll Reports from Bormio

WHEN A FOUR-YEAR-OLD discovers something for the first time, their inquisitiveness and curiosity fires in a wonderful chaos. 

How? Why? When? But how? But why?

The most mundane aspects of life (almost unexplainable because of their mundanity) have to be picked apart and put back together so the child can relax and go back to playing again. 

Viewing the world through this lens can be equal parts fatiguing and delighting. Shoutout to all the teachers who do this for small humans they didn’t create. 

For adults, overworked and busy, most things now just exist. We don’t actually need to know how they put the fig in the fig rolls. 

But while covering the Winter Olympics in Bormio, Italy for the past few days, I had a moment akin to my daughter’s ‘But why is the moon out in the morning?’ questions. 

Every second person I have engaged in conversation has talked about the Stelvio slope, where the alpine skiing races are being held, as if it is a benevolent dictator. If you revere it and respect it, good things will come your way. 

The course renowned for its technical difficulty is 3,442m in length with a 1,023m vertical drop and a maximum gradient of 63%. 

“Gnarly” and “severe” are the words that Irish skier Cormac Comerford used most when describing it before or after his races. 

But why is it that difficult? And how do they tame it to make it safe? And why do they do things the way they do them?

Comerford is Ireland’s only skier to take to the start line in Bormio but there’s another Irish man behind the scenes who has ensured the entire event can go ahead. 

Wexford native Paul Wilson is one of a team of people tasked with making the slopes competition ready. A snowcat operator, or piste basher, the 45-year-old has worked the most famous and beautiful slopes in the world, a career culminating in being one of few go-to guys for when Olympic venues need to be prepped. 

(Snowcat operators are highly trained workers who play a pivotal role in every single ski resort around the world. They are usually tasked with grooming slopes in their machines between 4pm and midnight so the mountains are ready for morning skiers.)

The Pistenbully 800, the machine used to set the slope The Journal The Journal

Whether it was Sochi in 2014, preparation events for Pyeongchang in 2018 or Bormio 2026, Wilson got the call. 

A full-time salesperson for Pöttinger – an Austrian manufacturer of agricultural machinery – he is based in Ireland but has built up the required experience over decades of snowcat operating. 

There is a beauty of someone doing an interesting and unusual job and being willing to share the knowledge. Luckily an invitation to learn more came my way after the Irish connection made itself known.

“Who designs the course?” is one of my first, uneducated inquiries.

“The mountain is the mountain” is the answer from Wilson. Nature designs the course, human interference is tweaking for speed and safety. 

That tweaking is far from simple, though.

“It’s a very complicated process,” says Team Ireland Giorgio Marchesini. “It involves not just the snow and ice but water, salt, side skiers and the machinery.”

“The goal is a uniform, safe and consistent racing surface that provides fair competition conditions even at high speeds,” the Milan Cortina information service says. 

To the uneducated, speed and safety don’t go hand in hand. But the piste bashing – or snowcat operating, depending on where in the world you’re describing the work – and course setting balance the two requirements of alpine skiing like farming meets art. 

“If there’s no safety, there’s no race,” explains Wilson. 

Setting the red nets viewers will have seen snaking down both sides of the Stelvio slope was the first job undertaken by the team of workers who are a mix of volunteers, local experts and flown-in specialists. 

“The profile of the nets has to be right to make sure the skiers can’t go over or under when they crash,” continues Wilson. 

A conversation ensues, complete with various examples of catastrophic incidents where the skier has lost his or her life for this very reason. 

The job of setting the four-metre high nets is mostly done by hand and shovel in Bormio, with a little help from the Pistenbully 800 machines that Wilson and a small number of other men and women drive. 

“That’s one of the reasons they like us here,” laughs Wilson. “Even though we’re not local, we can take away some of the hardship of that work with the machines.”

To underline the extent of the labour, he recalls a time staying on a slope pre-competition for 36 hours straight to make sure they met the deadline. 

Once the team are happy with the nets, the snowcat operators work the profile of the mountain for the race, including the jumps and rolls.

Artificial snow, which is denser and more durable than natural snow, is used to build up the foundation. The snow cover is laid in layers and repeatedly compacted to form a uniform base that can withstand high speeds and repeated impacts.

The impressive-looking red machines driven by Wilson and his team are then used multiple times to produce a smooth, precisely contoured, and even slope. Key sections, transitions and steep passages are manually fine-tuned if necessary to remove soft spots and ensure maximum uniformity. 

“There are some pressure points,” continues Wilson. “Places that are difficult to get to or somewhere that is lacking snow, so we have to move snow to those areas and shape it in place.”

Technology helps to highlight areas that need particular attention from Wilson or one of the other operators, while a harness allows difficult-to-reach areas to be groomed. 

Once the snow is in place, it is also watered to perfect the consistency for the dozens of elite skiers who will pass through in the coming weeks, an event many of them have been dreaming of their whole lives. 

“Who passes the course as ready?” I ask. 

There is tremendous respect for the mountain’s own terrain but the International Ski and Snowboard Federation (FIS) designated person will approve the final product for the race. 

On Stelvio, there was one jump that was made more difficult after inspection and ahead of the first race of the Olympics, the downhill. 

A simple equation of speed by height by length, taking in the condition of the icy/snow cover, decides the profile of the jump in the end. 

How does a man from Wexford end up being an almost irreplaceable part of one of the most high-profile events of the Winter Olympics?

Somehow the story begins on a harvest season in the USA. As these things often go, a friend convinces another friend of a madcap idea – and then drops out. 

Although the harvest was his friend’s idea, Wilson was the one who followed through and did a season travelling the heartlands of America in 2006. He met a ski instructor driving a combine harvester somewhere between Texas and Montreal and that was that. 

He was convinced that a solo ticket to Calgary in 2007 was his path and so began a journey through ski seasons in Canada, Utah and New Zealand. As he moved around, he graduated from driving the car park snow plough to “bigger and bigger machines”.

“You get a bit of a bug because you start, like in a normal ski area, at four o’clock in the evening. And you’re done around 10 or 11 or 12, so you’ve all day to ski.”

What makes someone a good piste basher?

It’s a nebulous mix of skills: good driving of big machinery, understanding the slopes and an instinct for how they meet and interact with each other. 

“Also, I met the right people,” Wilson says. 

The trickiest but most satisfying part of the job is working with the people who best know the topography of the area. 

The team in Bormio is a mix of people with decades of experience and 20-somethings who volunteer between their actual jobs of dairy farming or hospitality. 

When there is no direct line of command, how does one get promoted to creating Olympic courses?

Someone who can handle the machines well is spotted and asked to do races on the World Cup circuit, and that leads to requests for Olympic test events and eventually the real thing. 

For Wilson, his first Games was Sochi, Russia in 2018. 

“You learn a lot through experience, to be honest, putting it all together. The most I’ve ever learned is from Hans (a Swedish colleague also in Bormio this month). He has over 100 work ups completed. He did the first one in 1980 and another Italian guy Pierre is doing it since 1983 – before you were born.”

Like many of the Irish athletes, the father-of-one has to juggle his Olympic endeavours with a full-time job and family at home. 

Wilson and the team work for the Olympics, for FIS, for the locals, for the audience but mostly for the racers. The athletes relish the biggest challenge and want to push the boundaries of their sport. To do that, the bumps and lumps have to be kept to a minimum, the race conditions have to feel fair and they all need to get down safely. 

The verdict?

Ireland’s Cormac Comerford was asked on Sunday whether the snow was starting to feel “tired” as it does during other events.

“No,” he said immediately.

“The surface is really nice. Grippy, not super aggressive but grippy and compact. I think with the little dustings of snow they’ve had throughout the two weeks or so, it’s topped it up nicely.

“They’ve had a lot of work to do. I don’t know how many volunteers they’ve had on the slopes every single day pushing snow out, icing the slope again, pushing the snow out again. 

“They’ve done a great job. The funny thing is, the fella who pisted the slope is a fella called Paul. I walked into the restaurant the first day and he tapped me on the shoulder, ‘Are you Irish?’ He’s from Wexford, a county in Ireland and he’s pisting the Olympic slope. 

“He’s done a great job and it’s always nice to see other Irish around.” 

Written by Sinead O’Carroll and posted on TheJournal.ie