Winter Olympics: US ski team trained in garage

An Olympic team needed a place to train on snow in the middle of summer. They found it in an unexpected place.

A refrigerated garage in the Slovenian town of Planica has a remarkable indoor facility.

There is a team of Americans that exploited a very strange advantage on its way to the Olympics, and it was only there for them because the people of a small mountain town in Slovenia had a very strange problem.

They wanted a ski tunnel. They also wanted a parking garage. They didn’t have room for both.

“So what they did,” said Bryan Fletcher, a Nordic combined athlete for the U.S., “was build a parking garage that could be converted into a ski tunnel.”

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The refrigerated parking garage in Planica is an extremely odd and remarkably effective innovation that has become an important training site for the U.S. Nordic combined team at the PyeongChang Games. This is where the Americans came to ski on perfectly groomed snow in the middle of summer. “It’s like being in a giant, walk-in freezer,” Fletcher said.

They bundled themselves in hats, gloves and vests as they entered the subterranean cooler that kept its thermostat around 32 degrees. They paid a small fee to use the 800m loop that’s open to the public. They climbed downstairs. And for the next two hours, they skied. They went up and down and around three levels of the underground garage until they were so dizzy and exhausted they couldn’t take it anymore.

“Crazy, man,” says a skier in one video specifically made to promote the ski tunnel inside the parking garage. “How neat is this!”

As it turns out, the Americans at the Olympics had about the same reaction.

“It’s a very smart idea,” Taylor Fletcher said.

“It’s a genius idea,” Bryan Fletcher said.

“I have a lot of questions about it,” Ben Berend said.

The obvious question is how the Slovenians carpeted a parking garage with snow. The answer is that they recycled. “We use this snow three times,” said Jelko Gros, the general manager of the €40 million complex. It goes from the ski-jumping hills one winter to the ski tunnel the following summer to the cross-country track the next winter. “We bring this snow to the garage,” Gros said, “and it says there for so long that it’s snowing outside.”

The better question to anyone who happens to be unfamiliar with the global politics of Nordic combined is why a team of Americans is training underground in Slovenia. That answer is more complicated.

The 2010 Games in Vancouver, where the U.S. improbably won four medals despite never having won any medals in the history of the Olympics, were the apex of Nordic combined in a country that barely knows what Nordic combined is. (The Nordic is because of ski jumping and cross-country skiing; the combined is because they’re combined.) But not long after the 2014 Games in Sochi, the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association slashed its funding in a budget crunch. The Nordic combined skiers were left out in the cold.

They had no choice but to scrap together resources to save their obscure American sport. They banded with the ski-jumping team and rebranded as USA Nordic, which is led by Bill Demong, the U.S.’s first and only Nordic gold medallist. They took offices in a Park City co-working space along with a real-estate company and accounting firm. They found sponsors to fund the national teams and the developmental program. And they formed a strategic partnership with Slovenia.

Slovenia had everything the U.S. needed: a surplus of coaches, easy access to mountains, reasonably priced housing and the stunning complex with the refrigerated parking garage, plus eight jumps of various sizes, plus a roller-skiing track, plus a soccer field, plus an outdoor cross-country loop that’s not inside a parking garage. The Planica Nordic Centre is the place to be.

Which is why they’re in Slovenia so much that a nation many of them couldn’t find on a map a few years ago now feels like a second home.

“It’s a very underrated country,” said Ben Loomis, an Olympian from Wisconsin.

It would take a miracle for the U.S. to medal in the remaining Nordic combined events, which are traditionally dominated by countries that don’t have to strike deals with European countries, but the reason they’re here is because they’re also in Slovenia.

The Americans live together in apartments within roller-skiing distance of the facility. Their location is convenient in the winter and crucial in the summer. They can ski outdoors in Europe, but the nearest glacier is hours away. Slovenia lets them ski indoors.

The concept of a ski tunnel was foreign to the Americans before their arrangement with Slovenia. What they found there was something unlike anywhere they had ever skied. For one thing, it was indoors. For another thing, it was supposed to be a parking garage. And there were many other things.

The facility isn’t particularly secret. “There are lots of people looking through the windows at you,” Berend said. The exercise isn’t exactly stimulating. “They ski up and down ramps,” Demong said. The air quality isn’t entirely pristine. “It’s like you’ve been huffing fumes,” Berend said.

They get bored so easily they have to find ways to entertain themselves. “It gets pretty repetitive pretty quickly,” Bryan Fletcher said. They vary between skiing with poles, without poles and without pole straps, and they listen to This American Life on their headphones as they loop the same brief loop. “You go around them quite a bit,” Taylor Fletcher said. They can only tolerate skiing in circles once a week. “Anything more than that,” Berend said, “and you’d just go crazy.”

The refrigerated garage opened in 2016. But it hasn’t become a parking garage as it was envisioned. The entire complex became so popular that Planica needed certain amenities for all the competitions it was suddenly hosting, like space for very important people and very important ski waxing, and it no longer seemed feasible to park cars there.

The idea of the refrigerated garage now lives on through the Americans. Whenever he finds himself admiring a local parking structure, which isn’t never, Berend can’t help but see the lack of creativity in American infrastructure.

“This could have snow in it,” he thinks. “This could be a cross-country ski loop.”

WSJ