Good athletes make the difficult appear easy, most of the time, but not always. Ski racing is a challenging sport that requires strength, agility, skill, courage, and luck. The challenges can be external. The nearly endless list of external variable includes course surface conditions (soft, hard, or even both); course set (tight, loose, eccentric); atmospheric conditions (wind, fog, snow, rain, bright sun, dark shadows, and sometimes all of them); pitch (flat or steep, or both).  Sometimes the challenges are self-imposed, caused by an error in technique or tactics (the racing line). 

The ultimate reward for a race observer is seeing a really fine race run or even a really fine turn at a difficult spot.  These moments are gifts from athletes making the difficult look easy, graceful, nearly foreordained. They seem to be conveying a message that they are enjoying demonstrating their skills for themselves and anyone who might be watching. They seem to say that they know they are making racing look easy, but that it is harder than they are making it look. But in fact their real on-course messages would instead be a series of self-communications, assessing each turn as it recedes behind and trying to optimize each approaching turn, gate by gate, in a series of struggles to ski around each gate as fast as their skills and experience permit.  This is as true for Mighty Mites as for World Cup racers. 

Each turn requires different skills and tactics, but fortunately racers largely respond automatically, drawing on experience and skill. Brand-new Mighty Mites making only the second gate runs of their entire lives are already drawing on what they experienced in their first runs.

Here are some images that show racers, some still very young (the first two are U14s), skiing at a high level and making the hard seem easy. 

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Skiing fast slalom requires keeping the body in the corridor between the gates, i.e., inside the racing line; this means the torso follows a line far inside the line followed by the feet (which must, or course, pass outside the turning pole).  This in turn can require very unweighted turns to get feet and torso where they need to be.

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Terrain changes at a gate require agility and quickness. 0M0A4391-2

Three very skilled racers make even high-effort, high-G, giant slalom turns on the racing line seem easy. 0M0A2439-2-Enhanced-NR 0M0A9625 untitled-0M0A8051-Enhanced-NR