TechnoAlpin Setting Up For 2023 World Champs

In 2023, Courchevel & Meribel in France will host the FIS World Skiing Championship. In 2020, the ski resort operator of Courchevel has started already to work on the slopes of its skiing terrain in order to accommodate the requests from the FIS for this major winter sport event, in order to be able to offer the best conditions to the elite of world ski racers.

Indeed, the site of Courchevel will be hosting the Men’s events of the 2023 championship, Super-G, Giant, Slalom and of course the most prestigious one, the downhill race. For this very special event, a new slope has been designed, “Les Jockeys”, starting from the elevation of 2230m, above Courchevel 1850. With just shy of 1000m of vertical drop, the slope arrives at Courchevel Le Praz, and it offers 3200m of skiing, sometime challenging, in the prestigious setting of Courchevel and its beautiful landscape.

Of course, a new slope, particularly one that has been designed to host major world skiing races, called for new snowmaking equipment. And the ski resort operator, as well as the Sport Club of Courchevel associated to the organization, placed its confidence once again in TechnoAlpin, the longtime partner of the resort for snowmaking (with the first installation dating back to the mid-80s).

For this project, with the perspective of the world skiing championships, the production capacity was a critical point, with an objective to produce in the shortest time possible the amount of snow required to prepare the slope for the ski races. This has led the Experts of TechnoAlpin to offer a solution based on the utilization of Rubis Evo lances. However, with a special feature, with snow pits equipped with two snow producers instead of the usual standard of one lance per snow pit: This will allow to double the production at key areas on of the slopes.

On the new slope, out of the 76 snow pits that have been installed, 42 have been fitted with double lances. In addition to the lances, in order to increase the production capacity, particularly at the bottom of the slope, 5 additional snow pits have been installed and equipped to receive fan snow producers.

Of course, such a large snowmaking system expansion requires additional water resources in order to fully benefit from this increased fire power. For this purpose, a new machine room has been built at the elevation 2257m at the “Col de la Loze” and also a new snowmaking pond with a capacity 170 000m3.

The new machine room offers an additional pumping capacity of 2400m3/h, including 1400m3/h which is gravity-fed. In an existing machine room, a new pump has been installed to in order to pump water to the new snowmaking lake and increase the overall efficiency of the water system. The new pieces of equipment, as well as the new machine room, have been integrated into the existing Liberty control system.

This has been a major project in 2020, and the Experts from TechnoAlpin are very proud to contribute to the future successes of Courchevel, particularly the 2023 championships. But before in 2022, the French ski resort will host the World Cup finals, like a rehearsal before the big day!