Indoor snow centres have been providing off-season training facilities for decades now, but during the pandemic, with travel to glacier resorts and southern hemisphere ski camps difficult or impossible for many racers, they have been coming in to their own this summer, since they have been allowed to re-open in most countries.

The International Ski Federation (FIS) recently ran a quick check on who was where and report…

When not on the Stelvio glacier he Italian speed team have been training indoors at SnowWorld Landgraaf in The Netherlands, one of the world’s largest centres.

This has itself been the location on World Cup races in the past and has hosted many World cup teams over the years, and ebven helped a Dutch athlete take gold in snowboarding at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics.

Christof Innerhofer, Emanuele Buzzi, Mattia Casse, Alexander Prast and Florian Schieder were amongst those training there.

Meanwhile Slovakian ski superstar Petra Vlhova travelled north to Lithuania to train and test new equipment there, as she did in 2019 (pictured above).

The French, Germans and Norwegians have stuck with their own facilities, the French at Amneville, one of the world’s longest indoor slopes at over 600 metres long in the northeast of the country, the Germans in the Oberhof ski tunnel for cross country training and the Norwegians in the huge new Sno centre near Oslo which opened earlier this year.

There are now more than 100 indoor snow centres operating in 25 countries on 6 continents according to IndoorSnowNews.com