Philippe May's comments

17 countries and 83 skiers… these are the impressive numbers of the 2008 FIS World Cup Final in Verbier/Nendaz. In 5 years, the XSpeedSki has become an unavoidable event of the international Speed Ski circuit. An event we can be proud of.

However, this year was a bit disappointing. Even if the results were good, some very good, we could not use the full potential of the track. Thanks to the heavy snow falls of this winter, to the fantastic job of Laurent our ratracker, to all the volunteers, the track was so beautiful and promising. Unfortunately, unlike last winter, the weather conditions were not good and did not allow us to start at the top of the Mt Fort.

We could manage to organise all the races planned and the show was huge and promising. The FIS World Cup Final crowned the best three speed skier of the moment (Origone I, Origone S, and May for the men, Tidstrand, Dubouchet, and Banfo for the ladies). Same podium than last year for the Swiss champs except for the come back of Roger Stump… (May, Stump and Goumoëns for the men; Moll for THE lady..). In the Speed Master, Simone Origone took his revenge and beat Philippe May. Allan Grimm was 3^rd. In the ladies race, Sanna Tidstrand was in front of Karine Dubouchet and Tomoko Shimbo. In category production, the previously pros took the first ranges : Marc Poncin then, Jonathan Moret and Markus Munzer. We also have to note the arrival (KL and not production) of Mike Aeschbach with an excellent 10^th place at the Speed Master and the very good performance of Ismaël Devenes in the top 5 of the FIS World Cup.

The KL POP was also a success with a large number of skiers and even a world record : Yann Grandjean went at 141.246 Km/h on his snowscout !!! All these fantastic results plus the wonderful track we found this year let us dream of a next XSpeedSki 09 better than ever. To make it possible, we need an organization committee and a volunteer team as good as the ones of this year. Therefore I send a huge thank you to  the Organization committee, the members of the FSSV who worked for this XSpeedSki 08 (Fritz Burri, Jürg Graf, Alexandre Barblan,…), Albert, Berthe, François and all the persons who spent almost 2 weeks at an altitude of 3000 metres, and also to all the volunteers and sherpas who worked very hard.

This event could not be possible without our sponsors : the Loterie Romande, l’Etat of Valais, the Commune of Bagnes, the tourism offices of Verbier and Nendaz, and our title sponsor : Tag-Heuer.