Olympic Alpine Skiing Betting Odds For Beijing 2022

What Are The Rules For Olympic Alpine Skiing?

Olympic Super G Rules

The Super G, also known as the Super Giant Slalom, involves skiers racing down a slope while making long turns around poles. To distinguish this race from the Giant Slalom race, the slope is steeper and the poles are set further apart from each other, at a minimum of at least 25 meters. The men have 35 poles installed, while the women only have 30. Any Olympic Super G skier who misses one of the posts will have a time penalty added to the total duration of their run. As with Downhill skiing, Olympic Super G competitors get only a single opportunity to post their best time.

Olympic Slalom Rules

As a skill discipline, the Olympic Slalom rules are also pretty easily understood once broken down. Competitors must race between poles, also known as gates, which are set at distances as small as 75 cm apart to as large as 15 meters apart. There is any number of gates in a given race. Generally, they range between 45-60 gates for women and 55-75 gates for men. Unlike the speed events, Olympic Slalom racers actually get run the course twice. The top 30 competitors from the first run move on to the second run to determine the outright winners. (Those returning 30 skiers must race in reverse time order, meaning the competitor with the 30th highest score from the first run is now the 1st skier in the second run.)

Olympic Giant Slalom Rules

The Giant Slalom is similar to the standard variety, as it’s really just the slalom on a larger scale. There are thirty or more gates installed in any given race, and they are set more widely apart to compensate for the longer track. The scoring setup is identical to the smaller Slalom event, and the Olympic Giant Slalom rules similarly allow each athlete two total runs.

Alpine Combined Event Rules

The Combined event has both a downhill race and a slalom race, each of which is timed. Per Alpine Combined Event rules, the Downhill race is run first, followed by the slalom portion. In the Combined, the slalom is only run once. The times of each portion of the race are combined, and winners are determined by the best combined run time.

Alpine National Team Event Rules

The Alpine National Team event – a team-based twist of the Alpine Combined tradition – is new to Olympic skiing as of 2018 Pyeongchang. Each team consists of four athletes: two men and two women. 16 teams will compete in an elimination-style tournament to determine a winner, with one country’s representative racing another country’s head-to-head along a parallel course. Alpine National Team Event rules then determine a winner based on aggregate score, with the victor in each race earning one point for their country. (In the event that both racers fall, whoever was farther along the course wins a point for his or her team.)