However, Maribor will not give up its ski race that easy.

The Golden Fox Alpine Ski competition has been taking place on Mt. Pohorje for a long five decades now. At the moment, all energy is being focused on keeping it that way. "When we noticed in some of the documentation that we were not in the calendar, we immediately conducted talks at both formal and informal levels, even before the Portorož conference of the International Ski Federation," said the general secretary of the Golden Fox organizing committee, Srečko Vilar.

"We agreed to send a polite letter, and not something that could be interpreted as an attack on FIS. In it we will write that after more than 50 years of successful competition, we cannot imagine Maribor not being in the competition calendar, and that they should think about that," said Tone Vogrinec, a member of the FIS Alpine Executive Board.

FIS Vice-President, Janez Kocijančič, has also joined the fight for the Golden Fox: "At the last FIS session I warned of the circling of such materials, which were most likely put together by the technical teams. We also touched on the matter at the meeting of the executive committee of the Slovenian Ski Association. We decided to insist that Maribor remains in the standard Alpine Ski World Cup calendar. We have many strong arguments in our favour. We will have to fight for our races, but I’m convinced that we will manage to keep them."

The hope is to keep the race in the FIS calendar in its classic format. Slovenia’s ski officials are still not considering any changes to the program or making the shift to staging parallel races, which is something FIS wants.
R. K.; Boštjan Ogris, TV Slovenija; translated by K. J.