Observations from the Olympics I've watched.

[h.harb]

Head skis and boots are the fastest and most consistent.
Odermatt is amazing.
Mayer is a big event skier.
Strotz is a revelation, 4th in the combed downhill he beat established downhill winners and he wins slalom.
Radamas is the best potential US GS skier we have seen since Ligety.
The guy from Endora placed 9th in GS? He can ski.
The Austrian meltdown in GS, was terrible.
Hector is the Queen of these women's events.
Rossi alignment is bad.

[jbotti]

Mayer has a lot of Kjetl Aamodt in him. That guy showed for the big races and usually won.

[jbotti]

Head skis and boots are the fastest and most consistent.

So Harald's comment was something I noticed as well. Then I heard Steve Porino on the broadcast yesterday saying that everyone on Atomic struggled mightily in Beijing with the very reactive/aggressive snow. Apparently their skis and boots were a very bad match for the snow there and there was nothing they could do once they got there to mitigate the problems. So I tallied the results by skis/boots. There were 30 podium slots between the men and women (and not counting the team event). Of those, 15 went to Head, 7 went to Rossi (one was Dynastar but same thing) and only 3 went to Atomic (with Kilde getting 2 medals and Goggia one).

That is a pretty awful showing by Atomic especially when you consider how many skiers in the top ten they have on both sides. Clearly it has to do with the snow but it likely highlights Harald's ongoing point on atomic that most boots are set up too strong and this makes things very difficult and slow on aggressive/reactive snow. Not sure what about the skis, they couldn't fix but then again it might have been all about the boots.