Having watched the film you can see although highly trained and extremely physical these people are not good skiers.
I must say, credit where it is due, I skied with literally hundreds of people and the person who taught me to ski is the best skier I've ever seen. Ever. He is a power skier. He uses his weight set on his skis and with perfect form comes down like a cannonball. He is an exciting and exacting person to ski with.
One day having lunch at the clubhouse at top, sitting outside watching people below getting off the ski lift and turning around to ski down the mountain, up there at a picnic table drinking wine and becoming a bit tipsy at highest of high altitude, it occurred to me what my friend was doing when he skied. Where everyone gets off the ski lift and makes a dozen S shape turns, my friend makes one giant C shape. He slices right through little moguls. No messing abound. No pussyfooting.
He drilled into me, "Keep your shoulders parallel to the slope." And, "Put your weight on your downhill ski."
What does that even mean?
I couldn't process the meaning of these ski instructor adages.
Parallelism refers to lines. The slope is curved, my shoulders are these two lumps holding my neck. Weight on my downhill ski, what does that even feel like? Are you serious? All this goes counter to intuition.
It feels like your torso feels rigid the whole way down, and it feels like you're skiing on one ski the whole way down, and it feels like turns are simply switching your weight from one foot to the other, like a turn is made simple by switching weight from uphill ski to downhill ski on the slope aiming downwards, the opposite edge taking hold, and it feels like doing the opposite of what comes naturally to you when descending a hill. Your intuition tells you to lean back into the hill and crab downward on your legs, so if you fall you will fall flat into the hill backward and unharmed, but control in skiing comes from putting your weight over your skis away from the hill as if you intend to take flight and control comes from the edges of your skis digging into the slope. So if you fall you'll do the worst thing possible, a face plant ahead of you, a greater distance to fall, a larger catastrophe. But doing the counterintuitive thig is how you control. That's why my friend is such an awesome powerful skier.
Ski lesson 1. We're on the bunny hill. You're skiing on one leg the other one is just traveling along waiting its turn. It's got some weight on it but not much. It's turn comes when you step into it and transition from one leg to the other, one set of edges to the others. The whole time your back stays parallel with the hill.
The skiers in this video do not do that. Almost nobody on the slopes does. That's why advanced Denver skiers go to A-Basin. It's all mostly local people who know how to do this. People from Dallas, Ft. Worth, California, and Mexico and the like who only vacation a few times a year cannot ski the black diamond Pallavicini run. They just can't. You have to be really strong in the legs. You have to do leg exercises before even trying. It's all in the legs and this video above shows the men's shoulder curving around the turns following the skis, so their skis are flat on the snow with equal weight on both skis. They are not in control. They are not using the edges of their skis. Their shoulders are all wrong. They look silly.
My friend taught me that.
This is a story of his. On the ski lift, on a bench suspended over the slope, he was pointing out skiers coming down and critiquing their forms. I said, "I'm done learning things for today." For some reason he found that incredibly funny. He repeats it all the time.
I'm trying to get you to notice the character's torso is rigid while his legs switch back and forth. You can see his butt change from one direction to the other but not his torso. That sets the ski's edges into the slope and that's how good skiers control.
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