Aldo Anzi escorts me on foot to the edge of the Salto San Pietro – Saint Peter’s Jump – about half-way down the Stelvio ski race course, the site of the men’s downhill the day after the official start of the Milan Cortina Olympics on Feb. 6. Anzi, who is 81 and designed the Stelvio in the early 1980s, describes the jump as “the wall.”
The name is apt. The wall has a plunge of more than 50 degrees. When I peered over the edge, Anzi, who noticed I was not wearing proper snow boots, told me “Be careful. If you fall, you’re going to the bottom of the course.”
Racers on the notoriously technical and fast Stelvio will reach the wall’s lip at 100 kilometres per hour or more. At that instant, they become airborne for 50 or 60 metres and will hit 140 km/hr – almost the cruising speed of a small Cessna propeller plane – a second after returning to earth and making a high-G turn to the left. I felt my heart rate go up just looking at the wall.
The Stelvio terrifies lesser racers from the start to the finish, even some of the best ones.
The run’s maximum gradient is 63 degrees, which makes Saint Peter’s Jump look rather tame. The top speeds are reached near the top, right after the near-vertical start. The best racers can hit 150 km/hr within 15 seconds or their near free-fall.
American racer Bryce Bennett has said he suffered “trauma” plunging down the Stelvio. Italy’s Christof Innerhofer, 41, a two-time Olympic medal winner who was the 2011 Super-G World Champion, says the Stelvio will be the “toughest” men’s Olympic downhill in many decades – and possibly the most exciting.
He should know. In December, 2023, he was airlifted covered in blood off the Stelvio after a nasty Super-G crash. His calf was stitched up in hospital. He wasn’t being reckless – the Stelvio, which the locals say has its own spirit, turned nasty that day. Thirteen other racers registered DNF in the same race. “It was dark, it was icy, like a frozen lake, without grip,” Innerhofer told me.
The Stelvio, which is located in Bormio, about a two hours’ drive north of Milan, has hosted two World Championships and three World Cups since it opened as a proper race course in 1985. The races in February will mark the course’s Olympic debut (the women’s Alpine events will be Cortina D’Ampezzo, 300 kilometres east of Bormio).
The Stelvio is the name of the run, not the mountain, which is called Vallecetta and whose peak is at 3,148 metres. The Stelvio’s steep, twisty runs hang over Bormio like a massive green and white oil painting. It looks foreboding in parts, since it is steep and often sun-free, but the locals love it, consider it part of the Bormio family.
“Everyone adores the mountain and the Stelvio course,” said Marzia Zappa, 72, the owner of the Hotel Cepina just beyond Bormio. “It’s a mountain that’s alive and strong. It has energy. The water, the animals, the change of colours. It’s magic to us.”
From the base, it’s clear how little natural snow Stelvio has. Most of the course is artificial, and icy, winding more than three kilometres down the mountainside toward Bormio.
Local business owners like Marzia Zappa at Hotel Cepina are familiar with Stelvio’s moods. Soon, the world’s top skiers will be too.
It was Anzi, a former member of the Italian national ski team who owns a resort hotel on the Stelvio, and his racer buddies who decided that the mountain should be more than a fairly primitive, though challenging, family affair. In the early 1980s, he and his team shaped and extended the run and added lifts and snow-making equipment.
Their goal was to upgrade it to the standards required by FIS, the International Ski and Snowboard Federation, and they succeeded. They also created a monster.
The Stelvio course today has a length of 3,442 metres, according to official Milan Cortina statistics. The vertical drop is 1,010 metres and the average incline is 34 per cent. It’s a highly technical run with no room for error. The slopes are often in shade and the snow, usually artificial – climate change has hit the Italian Alps and Dolomite mountains hard – is often icy. The course curves like a snake and there are no flats. There are bumps and jumps, big ones, for those who like being airborne.
Italy’s Christof Innerhofer, competing in Bormio in 2018, today recalls it as an ‘exhausting’ course to run.MIGUEL MEDINA/AFP/Getty Images
“When I was young, the Stelvio was my favourite race of the year,” Innerhofer said. “I was strong and I liked technical courses. But it’s exhausting. You don’t have a moment to relax. There is zero gliding. You have to say, ‘I risk it all in this race’ to place well.”
Innerhofer said that the northern Italian snow conditions – that is, a general shortage of regular fresh snow – will favour the European races on the Olympic Stelvio events.
Among the leading candidates for podium finishes, he said, are Marco Odermatt and Franjo Von Allmen of Switzerland, Vincent Kriechmayr of Austria and Italy’s Giovanni Franzoni. (As of Jan. 23, Innerhofer did not know if he would make the final cut to compete for Italy, and the Canadian roster had yet to be announced.)
Beppe Bonseri, owner of Sunny Valley, doubts that any long-shot competitors will have a chance at the Stelvio.
Beppe Bonseri, owner of the Sunny Valley mountain lodge on the nearby Santa Caterina mountain, a former director-general of the FIS World Alpine Ski Championships and fervent promoter of Bormio-area racing events, says one thing is certain: No dark horse, no outsider will take gold or silver on the Stelvio. “In my 40 years experience with the Stelvio, I know that no long shot wins,” he said. “There are a lot of competitive racers at average speeds of 85 or 90 km/hr, but not at the much higher Stelvio speeds.”
Innerhofer could not agree more, saying it’s highly unlikely the Stelvio will see any Olympic surprises – no one lucks out here. “Only the very best skiers stand a good chance of winning,” he said.
Luca Bruno/The Associated Press
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