The Kitzbühel Downhill Is Ski Racing's Biggest Party

Updated February 27, 2025 11:26AM

Stepping off the train in Kitzbühel, Austria, feels like entering hallowed ground: one of the most famous ski towns in the Alps, chartered in 1271 by Duke Ludwig II of Bavaria. I inhaled the crisp afternoon air and began a short walk to my accommodations, passing fur boutiques and high-end ski shops, medieval churches, and brightly lit, glassed-in hotel lobbies. I came to a tiny concrete stairway one block off the main drag and descended into a snow-covered garden, where I passed a few ducks, quacking and nibbling on lettuce. I buzzed the doorbell and waited.

It was Tuesday, January 22, 2025. I had come to Kitzbühel to cover the baddest ski race on the World Cup circuit: the Hahnenkamm downhill, alpine schussing’s holy grail, where skiers become legends on a twisting elevator shaft of ice called the Streif. It is staged in this quaint Tyrolean hamlet of 8,000 residents, and each year attracts 45,000 paying fans, as well as celebrities and politicians who intermingle with depraved commoners like few places in the winter world.

I’d planned my trip late, in mid-December, when most of the area’s lodging had been gobbled up. My options were to pay $600 a night for a room in a village four miles away, accessed by train; or $50 a night for a bed in a six-bunk room at the SnowBunnys Hostel, a five-minute walk to the race finish—breakfast included. I hadn’t stayed in a European hostel since I was 21. Now I am a 45-year-old father of two who enjoys sleep.

A few minutes after arriving at the hostel, a heavyset man named Dave with long, stringy black hair and a graying beard opened the door. I followed him upstairs to a small, stuffy quarters on the third floor. He coughed and sneezed without covering his mouth. “Everyone in the village is sick,” he explained.

Dave, a Kiwi in his fifties, showed me the bathrooms: a cramped toilet stall outside our room and a fourth-floor shower with a sign that read, “Only 2 Euros to watch!” A rabbit named Rocky hopped down the hallway.

I met my roommates: Josh, 41, a wildland firefighter from Sun Valley, Idaho, who was here to snowboard; and Jake, a Toronto dad in his sixties who’d come to watch his best friend’s son compete in the Hahnenkamm. More would arrive later in the week.

“Oh, hey,” Jake mentioned in the common room, before I headed upstairs to bed, “Josh is a bit of a snorer. I do, too, sometimes.” I soon learned this was like saying Hahnenkamm racers ski “a bit fast.” Jake started snoring ten seconds after he closed his eyes. But it was nothing like Josh, whose labored breathing sounded like a semi truck using its engine brake. That night I lay awake for six hours.
The following evening, we sat around a table while Dave held court. He told us he’d left school at 14, served in the British infantry, and moved to Kitzbühel in 1990 with 100 British pounds to his name.

Dave took a job at McDonald’s, which improved his language skills; he spoke English, German, Bulgarian, and Japanese. Dave’s family had run the hostel for 27 years. “Some people are so shiny,” he lamented. “We call ’em ‘shinys.’ They complain about everything to try and get their money back. ‘Oh, my wife was allergic to chickens.’”

Seeking a bit of optimism, he shifted to the week’s marquee event—the reason his hostel would be full come Friday.

“Now we have the Hanhenkamm. It’s just bullshit on bullshit. But it’s amazing how we can put 90,000 people in one little village and nobody’s shooting or driving trucks through the crowd.”

Skiers have raced in Kitzbühel since 1895, and on the Streif since 1937. Most World Cup downhillers will tell you they’d rather win the Hahnenkamm than an Olympic gold medal.

Much of its prestige is due to the course: the Streif drops 2,822 vertical feet in 2.05 miles, a run that racers complete in less than two minutes (top recorded speed: 95 mph). Whereas standard downhill courses build up to their most menacing sections, “On the Streif, you’ve got the devil at your heels right from the start,” Austrian racer Harti Weirather, the 1982 Hahnenkamm winner and former World Cup overall champion, once said.

Didier Cuche of Switzerland, the Streif’s modern master with five victories, wished he could have exited the start house’s back door rather than run the course the first time he saw it; he finished eight and a half seconds behind the leader that day. “Just to do this race,” U.S. World Cup veteran Jared Goldberg, who took fourth two years ago, told me, “you’re in a different realm of courage.”

I had ambitions of skiing the Streif—slipping sideways like a hockey stop—during one of the morning course inspections, to see how slick and sheer it really was. I begged the race director and then the media director, to no avail; TV reps only, they said. So I went freeskiing.

KitzSki, the sprawling area serviced by one lift ticket, connects seven villages. It had seen a lean winter. After riding the Hahnenkammbahn, the gondola that lifts you from the village center to the top of the Streif, I boarded the Steinbergkogel lift, an eight-seater with heated leather seats and a bubble, for the six-minute, 1,700-vertical-foot ride to the summit. There, in a worsening storm—Kitzbühel’s first snow in weeks—I ducked into a cabin called the Gipfl Bar, where my day came to life.

The place, built by a kilt- and beret-wearing Austrian named Stevé who had lived in Kitzbühel “since nineteen hundred and eighty-two,” was no bigger than a kitchen and was packed with revelers. Cas, a warm-spirited Dutch bartender, asked if I wanted a Super Shoki, which his buddy Max was sipping: hot chocolate with rum, salted caramel Bailey’s, and whipped cream. The bar was cash-only, and I didn’t have any notes. “It’s OK,” Cas said, already making my drink. “You can come back and pay tomorrow.”

A sign above the bar read, in German, “We don’t have internet, only ‘social media.’ Talk to your neighbor.” I spent the next two hours with Cas and his friends, ski bums who convened here every day before working at restaurants and lodges at night. None planned to attend the Hahnenkamm races. When I told them it cost 350 euros to sit in the grandstand, one said, “Is Beyonce playing as well?”

Soon a 26-year-old Belgian named Alexander began rolling a spliff. He had moved to Kitzbuhel the prior year and had fallen in love—with skiing. Now it was all he wanted to do. He was currently ranked 36th on the area’s vertical-meters-skied list—“and climbing.” I got the feeling he might never go back to Belgium.

I woke up Saturday morning to find our bathroom floor covered in urine. Someone had broken rule No. 2 on the SnowBunnys placard: “Aim!!!” Other edicts included: “Don’t flush accident underwear” and “If you find snot or shit on your finger don’t wipe it on anything except toilet paper.”

No matter. It was Hahnenkamm downhill day, and I’d just gotten six hours of sleep, my best night yet. Josh had departed, but Jake and I had welcomed four new roommates, including Will, 21, and Rupert, 16, brothers from England who had come to celebrate their dad’s 50th birthday. They’d stumbled in after midnight and proceeded to cough and loudly scratch themselves until they passed out.

A Europop version of John Denver’s “Country Roads” blared outside our window as six fans with Austrian flags painted on their cheeks pounded beers in a circle, chanting. It was 8:15 A.M., more than three hours before the World Cup start. On my way to the race, I saw two ticket scalpers and asked if I could take their photo. One ducked away. “Oh, is it illegal?” I asked. “No,” said the other. “He didn’t shave today.”

At the venue, the vibe felt similar to that of the X Games: young adults hopped up on energy drinks and booze, techno blaring, flags waving. Tickets had long ago sold out—a galaxy apart from the World Cup races I was used to, like the Birds of Prey at posh Beaver Creek Resort in Colorado, where attendance is free and fans are counted in the hundreds.

The stands were a place to be seen, like a heavyweight fight in Vegas. Attendees included ardent Hahnenkamm fan Arnold Schwarzenegger (“He’s baaaaaahhhhk,” blared the announcer when the big screen cut to Arnie’s white-bearded mug) and Swedish soccer star Zlatan Ibrahimovic, who was interviewed from the stands.

Finally, the action began. The announcer referred to Austrian racers by first name: “Yes, Stefan!” Crowd: “Babinsky!”

Swiss superstar Marco Odermatt, the three-time reigning World Cup overall champion and winner of the previous day’s super-G, made uncharacteristic mistakes and the mob groaned: Another year without the elusive Hahnenkamm crown for Odi.

Starting 20th, Canadian James Crawford aced the notorious Steilhang turn and emerged with a green split time, leading by .23 seconds. This was shocking for a few reasons: 1) Crawford had never won a World Cup race, 2) only once in nine Hahnenkamm downhills had he finished better than 23rd, and 3) his father Angus was my hostel-mate Jake’s best friend from Toronto.

Built like a bullet at 5-foot-8 and 180 pounds, Crawford, who goes by “Jack,” maintained his tuck down the rest of the Streif, arcing and soaring and barely holding on, until he crossed the finish to raucous cheers and another green number. Subsequent racers tried but failed to top him, and Crawford won by eight one-hundredths of a second, the first Canadian victory here in 42 years. Another Canuck, Cameron Alexander, placed third, sandwiching Swiss runner-up Alexis Monney.

Disappointed by their home country’s failure, some Austrian fans streamed out while the back of the pack continued to race. I found Jake and Angus later, clutching cans of beer next to the media corral, grins plastered from earlobe to earlobe. It was a far cry from Georgian Peaks, the private ski club in southern Ontario (vertical drop: 820 feet) where Jack learned to ski.

Angus told me he can’t stand still when Jack races, so he walked around during his run. People shouted at him to get out of their view. When Jack crossed in first, “We were jumping up and down, crawling on the snow,” Angus said. “Just the two of us. Then we had a beer. Shaking. We’ve been shaking for an hour.”

They knew about the tradition of Hahnenkamm winners showing up at the Londoner pub late at night, half-clothed, raising hell behind the bar. “I may not make it to the Londoner tonight,” Angus forewarned, to which Jake scoffed: “Oh, my shirt’s already off.”

On my walk back to the press center, I saw a young man dig a beer bottle out of the snow, hoping it was full, then toss it back when it wasn’t, next to a mother nursing her baby on the ground. I asked a cop at the railroad crossing, “Everyone behaving?” He smiled and rocked his hand back and forth. “So-so.”

That night, after wading through a street party unlike anything I’d seen, I talked my way into the Londoner through a side door. The scene looked like something from the 1978 comedy Animal House.

Jake and Angus arrived at 1 A.M. with a Canadian delegation that ran 20 deep, a few minutes before Jack rode in on his teammate’s shoulders, his entrance announced by loudspeaker. Soon a dozen burly downhillers were behind the bar, pecs and biceps glistening in champagne, shaking each other like animals let out from their cages. Drunken patrons made out amid the spray.

Later the racers would don black staff T-shirts, which read: “If the downhill didn’t kill you the Londoner will”—or, simply, “The mountain life is hard.”

Nobody stirred in our room until 9 A.M. I looked at my reporter’s notebook and noticed it was covered in mustard. Rain fell steadily outside, turning the day’s World Cup slalom into mush. Will and Rupert were packing to leave, Rupert’s bedding crumpled into a ball to contain a late-night upchuck. “He fell victim to some peach schnapps,” Will said. Rupert had to get home for his final exams.

Jake, too, was heading out, stopping for a few days in Casablanca, Morocco, en route to Canada. Dave, whose gruff exterior belied a kind heart, came to turn over the beds for the next batch of guests. He complained about a French girl who had paid with a bad credit card, and about Rupert’s soiled quilt. “Cheeky fuckah,” he sighed.

I hadn’t in years let loose as I had the night before. My head felt like it was floating in fog. A wet chill cut through our open window. I decided my best hope was to go skiing. I slipped on my bibs and shell, said goodbye to Jake and Dave, and headed for the Hahnenkammbahn, which would whisk me into the clouds and fresh powder.

I Survived Downhill Skiing’s Rowdiest Party