Bad news for Finnish alpine skiing and especially for Lapland’s tourism business:

 The scheduled FIS alpine slalom race in Levi, Finland is canceled. Despite the furious effort to prepare the slope for next weekend, the organizers couldn’t fight the mother nature. They should have had freezing temperatures of about -10~15 degrees C for the upcoming week but now the forecast is showing warming temperatures for couple of next days.

FIS officials  said that they couldn’t be sure of the slope base holding up through the whole race. Especially the steep parts of the slope didn’t have enough snow to impress the FIS controllers. Most likely at least the last racers would have suffered too much from the softened and/or very rough course (those world cup courses are usually pretty close to concrete hard snow - this making the conditions more even for every racer)

All in all, the estimate is that the snowmaking was only late for about one day. Talk about bad luck with the weather!

This won’t be the last time when races are going to be canceled/moved. I guess that in the near future this is going to be even more common. Sharp weather changes seem to be more common every year (whether this is due to permanent climate change is yet to be seen IMHO). Anyway, Levi has a contract with FIS until 2011/2012. So, I’m pretty sure we’re going to see another race next year (next year’s race is also planned to be one week later in November).

The CEO of Levi Area, Jouni Palosaari, says that the biggest lost is made for the general image of Lapland as a very snow-sure place. Also, when all the losses are calculated together one can talk about tens of millions of Euros. (this according to Finnish site: http://www.mtv3.fi/urheilu/alppihiihto/uutiset.shtml/arkistot/alppihiihto/2007/11/577929)

 The race will be moved to Reiteralm, Austria. If I’m trying to be positive: good for them, and good for skiing in general that Austria is already having nice conditions. Last year we had good snow up north through the year but the whole central Europe was from suffering the warmest autumn/early winter for about 1000 years!