2023-24 Alpine skiing World Cup schedule drops parallel, adds new team event

The 2023-24 Alpine skiing World Cup will have no parallel races and will debut a new team Alpine combined event.

Organizers also confirmed other previously proposed changes for next season, including having no women’s races in Lake Louise, Canada, and spreading the season-ending World Cup Finals out over two weekends.

The season begins as usual with women’s and men’s giant slaloms in Soelden, Austria, in late October.

For the first time since at least 2009-10, there are no parallel races on the schedule. Last season, the one men’s and women’s parallel stop was canceled due to weather. Individual and team parallel events were held at the biennial world championships last February with some stars skipping them.

The IOC said last spring that the team parallel event that was on the Olympic program in 2018 and 2022 has been dropped for 2026.

At the annual men’s January World Cup stop in Kitzbuehel, Austria, an Alpine combined team event has been added.

A team combined event, where a nation uses a different skier for the speed run and slalom run, had been proposed to debut.

The individual combined, which has been an individual event on the Olympic program since 1988, will go a fourth consecutive season without being scheduled on the World Cup. The IOC said last June that the combined was being provisionally included on the 2026 Olympic program, subject to further review. The individual combined has remained on the world championships program.

Lake Louise has traditionally hosted men’s and women’s speed races in late November and early December. But this year, the women’s races are replaced for a different stop in Canada — two giant slaloms in Mont Tremblant in Quebec. It will be the first time since 1993-94 that the women’s World Cup will not have races in Lake Louise, save the pandemic-affected 2020-21 season.

In 2018, Lake Louise announced that its downhill run would be renamed “Lake Lindsey Way” after Lindsey Vonn, who earned 18 of her 82 World Cup wins at Lake Louise in 44 career starts there.

Vonn was so successful there that, in the middle of her career, the venue started unofficially being called Lake Lindsey.

Mikaela Shiffrin earned her first World Cup downhill and super-G victories at Lake Louise.

The season-ending World Cup Finals in March in Saalbach, Austria, will switch from a one-week event to spread out over two weekends. A proposal published earlier in May outlined technical races of slalom and giant slalom on the first weekend and speed races of downhill and super-G on the second weekend.

With no world championships in even years, the World Cup Finals will be the most prestigious competition of next season.

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2023-24 Alpine skiing World Cup schedule drops parallel, adds new team event originally appeared on NBCSports.com