Who this programme is built for.
Race coaching at Snowtailors is not a slalom-stadium photograph or a novelty afternoon on plastic gates. It is for the skier — twelve years old or fifty — who has decided they want to ski faster, more cleanly, with proper technique against a stopwatch. That decision changes everything about how the lesson is structured, and we treat it with the seriousness it deserves.
We coach three kinds of guest. First, the junior club racer who arrives with a coach's session plan in their pocket and wants a focused week between FFS rounds — usually December for the early season, late February for the school holidays mid-cycle. Second, the teenager who has fallen in love with the gates without a club behind them, and who needs structure rather than enthusiasm. Third, the adult amateur — the citizen racer, the master's-circuit competitor, the parent who simply wants to be faster than their teenage son.
None of these guests are beginners. The minimum technical level is solid parallel skiing on red runs in mixed conditions. Below that, race coaching is counter-productive; we will gently redirect to private lessons or the Tailored Week and pick up gates again the following season.
A gate is a question the slope asks. Coaching is teaching the body to answer before the question is finished. Fabrice Galofaro, race coach
Fabrice, and the cabinet of certifications.
Fabrice Galofaro has coached Snowtailors race blocks for eleven seasons. Before joining us he was a club coach at Méribel for nine years, a member of the FFS regional staff, and a competitor on the master's circuit himself — he still races, quietly, every March, and we still ask him about every gate he runs. He holds the Diplôme d'État de moniteur de ski, the BEES race-coach specialisation, and the FFS national coaching certificate. The wall in his bureau in Reberty has the three diplomas pinned next to a photograph of his under-fourteen team from 2017.
What Fabrice brings is not, primarily, the certifications — every senior coach in the valley has a comparable wall. What he brings is the patience for the gate that is not yet right. Race coaching is a discipline of repetition, and the temptation, with an enthusiastic teenager or an impatient adult, is to keep adding intensity. Fabrice does the opposite. He shortens the run, simplifies the line, and refuses to let the skier move on until the small fault — a late edge, a hand crossing the body, a shoulder dropping — has been addressed in three consecutive runs.
For senior amateurs, Fabrice is also the coach who will tell you the truth about what you can no longer do. There is a particular age — usually around fifty-two, in our experience — at which slalom becomes harder than it used to be, and the answer is to switch to giant slalom rather than to resist. That is the kind of conversation Fabrice has, gently, around the lunch table on Wednesday.
The three stadia we use.
The 3 Valleys hold a serious set of competition pistes — the Olympic legacy of 1992, the World Cup women's downhill on Roc de Fer, and the slalom infrastructure that survives across the valley. We run gates on three sites, in this order of preference, depending on day and snow.
Reberty, Les Menuires
Our home stadium and the one Fabrice knows most intimately. A 320-metre slalom slope with permanent gate-fixings, north-facing, holding firm snow into late March. We usually start a five-day block here with two mornings of slalom drills before moving to giant slalom elsewhere. The lift access is direct and the chairlift uplift is fast — we manage twelve runs in a morning without rushing.
Roc de Fer, Méribel
The giant-slalom side of the programme. Roc de Fer is the World Cup women's downhill piste — wide, steep, with a perfectly clean run-out. We do not use the full World Cup gates; we set our own giant-slalom course on the upper section, with the resort's permission, on cleared mornings. The view down the valley from the start gate is, by itself, a reason to come.
Saulire, Courchevel
The third stadium, used most often for adult guests staying in Courchevel who prefer not to make the morning crossing. Permanent gate fixings on the upper Saulire face, accessible from the Verdons gondola. Less steep than Reberty, warmer in the morning, and a useful shape for working the long-radius turns.
Video, splits, the lunch review.
Every coaching session is built on the same three pillars: gates in the morning, video review at lunch, free skiing in the afternoon to apply what was learned. The structure is rigorous because the discipline rewards rigour, and because without it, a guest leaves the week with sensations rather than understanding.
Video is taken on every run, from two angles — the gate camera and the fall-line camera — and reviewed on a tablet during lunch. Splits are taken with a manual stopwatch on the second day; with our portable timing system from the third day onwards. By the end of a five-day block, the guest holds a printed sheet with every split time of every run, the deltas to their own previous best, and a short written commentary from Fabrice on the technical work that produced each delta.
The afternoon free-skiing component matters more than guests sometimes expect. Three hours on red and black runs, away from the stadium, asking the skier to apply on a piste what was drilled in the gates. The transfer is rarely automatic; it is the work of the afternoon. We end the day with a short video debrief at the chalet — fifteen minutes, no more.
Ski tuning and the boot fitter
We coordinate ski tuning every evening of a serious block. The skis come back from the gates with edge damage and need to be hand-tuned for the next morning; the partner shop in Courchevel runs a daily service for our race guests. The boot fitter — Antoine at La Cordée Sports, with whom we have a long-standing relationship — is on hand to adjust forward lean, canting and shell flex on day one and again on day three.
How the weeks are structured.
Three formats serve the majority of requests. We will quote against any other shape on conversation, but these are the ones the calendar is built around.
- Five-day intensive — the standard. Five mornings of gates, five afternoons of free skiing, daily video, daily tuning. The format that produces the largest measurable improvement on a competition timing sheet.
- Daily intensive — a single full coaching day, four hours on the gates with video review. For adult amateurs visiting on a short trip or for a junior racer between club sessions.
- Weekly course-prep block — built around a specific race date. We work backwards from the race day, taper the volume the day before, travel with the guest to the start gate if the race is in the 3 Valleys area.
Pricing
Race coaching is priced on quotation. Indicative figure: €1 200 per day for a single adult or junior guest with one coach, including video, splits, evening tuning and stadium access fees. Five-day intensives sit between €5 200 and €6 800 depending on the dates, group size and whether the timing system and boot-fitter coordination are required. As ever, lift passes and equipment hire are billed separately at cost.