Five things to know about the parallel slalom Alpine skiing World Cup event in Austria

This weekend sees the second race of the 2021/22 Alpine Skiing World Cup season, the parallel slalom event – both men’s and women’s competitions – which take place in the Austrian resort of Lech Zürs. The women’s edition takes place on Saturday (13 November) with the men’s on Sunday (14 November). This is the only Alpine skiing format that sees skiers compete side by side, tackling the slopes on identical courses in a knockout format.

This weekend’s event is the only parallel slalom scheduled for this season’s World Cup, which means the winners of the men’s and women’s races will also take home the prestigious big crystal globe, which indicates the overall World Cup winner in that discipline for that season. For the other events, such as downhill and super-G, the scores are taken from the results of the combination of races in which they have competed across the season.

At the World Cup, this event is an individual format, so skier against skier, but at the Olympic Winter Games Beijing 2022, it is solely a mixed team event, so it’s a nation against nation battle.

But back to the World Cup, here’s five things you need to know ahead of this weekend’s event.

Mikaela Shiffrin out due to injury

Superstar skier Mikaela Shiffrin is out due to a “frustrating” back injury. The double Olympic champion revealed last week that she has not been able to ski “at full intensity” for the past couple of weeks.

The American, who started the season with a win in the giant slalom at Soelden, Austria last month, would have been after a 71st World Cup victory, which would put her just 11 behind compatriot Lindsey Vonn, the retired skier who has the most World Cup wins with 82.

Last year’s men's winner returns

Alexis Pinturault will be on the start line to try and defend his title from last year. The Frenchman was also the overall big crystal globe winner, beating breakout Swiss star Marco Odermatt to the top of the standings in the last race of the season. Norway's Henrik Kristoffersen, who came second in last year's parallel slalom, will be hoping to make it one step higher on the podium this time around.

Last year's women's winner ducks out

Petra Vlhova, last year’s winner in the women’s event, will not be competing in Austria however. Vlhova, the first Slovakian to win an overall title with last season’s triumph, announced that her preparations in this busy season would instead focus on the following two stops in the race calendar – in Levi, Finland (20-21 November) and Killington, USA (27-28 Nov).

In the first race of the season in Soelden, Vlhova finished third behind Shiffrin and Switzerland’s Lara Gut-Behrami.

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Adriana Jelinkova makes her return

Dutch skier, Adriana Jelinkova, will make her long-awaited return to the fray after a 10-month lay off after a devastating knee injury. The 26-year-old crashed in a World Cup event in Kranjska Gora, Slovenia, in January, tearing her anterior cruciate ligament.

This was just a day after she qualified a quota place for the Netherlands at Beijing 2022. Jelinkova should officially be selected to compete by her National Olympic Committee come January, becoming the first alpine skier to represent the Netherlands at the Olympic Winter Games since Margriet Prajoux-Bouma in Oslo in 1952.

Returning to competition on Saturday, the comparatively short event is a good place to start getting competition fitness back, says Wopke de Vegt, the technical director of the Dutch ski association.

The ACL injury is common among skiers, enough that Jelinkova wrote a letter to the body part on an Instagram post.

Mixed team parallel slalom at Beijing 2022

The difference between the parallel giant slalom event this weekend in Austria and the Olympic event at Beijing 2022, is that it is a mixed team format in the People's Republic of China, which pits nation against nation.

Four skiers from each country – two men and two women – take on four skiers from another country in each round, winning a point for each race win. If after four races both teams have the same number of points, so 2-2, then the team with the best aggregate time wins.

The event starts with a round of 16 before the quarter-finals, semi-finals and final.

The parallel slalom for Alpine skiing debuted at PyeongChang 2018 with the event proving hugely popular due to the skiers 'facing off' against each other in a duel held on two identical courses, which sit side by side on the slope.

Spectators and viewers can immediately see the winner and loser – and their very different reactions – the emotions especially fraught in the latter stages of the knockout competition.

The format is also a different kind of challenge for the skiers: can they focus on their own race or will they get put off by their adversary who may have inched ahead?

With the mixed team parallel slalom race the last Alpine skiing event of the Beijing 2022, tiredness also becomes a factor, so anything can – and often does – happen.