How to Lower Your FIS Points: Strategy That Actually Works
Every FIS racer wants a lower number. Fewer points means a better bib, better races and a truer measure of what you can do. But the athletes who actually lower their FIS points season after season are rarely the ones chasing the number hardest. This guide sets out what genuinely moves your points, drawing on our FIS coaching team’s experience of planning seasons for developing racers, and on the actual mechanics of the system. If you need those mechanics from the ground up first, start with our plain-English guide to how FIS points work.
What actually lowers your points
Strip away the mystique and three things move the number: how well you ski, how well you race, and where you choose to race. The first two are not the same thing. Plenty of athletes ski beautifully in training and cannot reproduce it across two race runs on a rutted course with a start interval and consequences. Racing is its own skill: managing inspection, adapting to conditions, delivering intensity twice in a day. Improving your skiing and, separately and deliberately, improving your ability to perform over two race runs is the engine of lower points. Race selection is the gearbox: it decides how efficiently that engine turns into results.
The maths says the same thing. Your points in a discipline are the average of your best two results, and each result is your gap to the winner (converted to race points) plus the field-strength penalty. In a technical race, a second per run is worth roughly 14 to 15 race points. There is no route to better points that avoids skiing faster relative to a field; there are only routes that waste less of the speed you have.
Stop chasing points, start chasing performances
Ask our head FIS coach the biggest strategic mistake athletes make when chasing lower points and the answer comes back without hesitation: it is the chasing itself. Athletes who go to races thinking about the number ski tight, force sections, and blow the second run protecting the first. The better strategy is to chase race performances: pick a couple of specific areas that will make a real difference, work on them relentlessly, and go into every start focused on executing your skiing rather than harvesting a result. The points take care of themselves. Some races turn out to be bonanzas and some turn out mean, and you control neither from the start gate. What you control is execution.
Choose races that work for you
Race results have an outsized effect on how athletes feel about themselves, even though they should not. A well-built calendar uses that instead of suffering from it. Some races are there to build confidence: fields you can compete in, courses that suit you, places to grow. Others are measuring races: stronger fields that show you where you sit in the grand scheme and what you are aiming at. Both are useful. One shows you what you can do, the other shows you where you have to go, and the balance between them is what gives an athlete a clear, honest picture of progress. A season of nothing but confidence races flatters you; a season of nothing but measuring races grinds you down.
In practice, our coaches earmark a handful of landmark races from the start of the season and leave the rest flexible, targeting specific races around six weeks out based on how training is actually going. That flexibility matters: entering everything months in advance commits you to a plan drawn before you knew anything.
Bonanzas, mean races and reading a start list
A bonanza happens when conditions align so that the best-ranked skiers in the field are relatively slow compared with everyone else. The winner’s time is soft, the gaps compress, and good points spread far down the results. These days come along most often in smaller fields. You cannot manufacture one, but you can learn to read the ingredients: study the start list and field size, and think hard about snow conditions and how the course will hold up by the time your bib runs. That thinking belongs in your course inspection too, because a course that deteriorates fast punishes late starters and changes what a sensible line looks like.
The flip side is the mean race: a big, deep field on bulletproof snow where the top seeds ski to their ranking and the penalty stays stubbornly high for everyone behind them. Racing well in a mean race is not wasted (it is often your best measuring day of the winter), but going in expecting a points harvest is how athletes come home demoralised for no good reason.
Look past the results sheet
One more coaching habit worth stealing: learn to see through the paper. A results sheet is a blunt instrument, and there are often excellent things happening in a race that never show up on it: a section skied faster than anyone in the field, a second run rebuilt after a first-run scare, a weakness from last season that has quietly stopped costing time. This is where working closely with a coach who knows you matters, someone watching what happens in races against what happens in training, and tracking the terrain you ski well against the terrain that needs work. Athletes who only read the sheet quit on progress they cannot see. If that sounds like the coaching relationship you are missing, it is the core of our FIS race training programme.
The pre-season is where points are really won
Ask how athletes who drop their points well actually do it and the answer is rarely a heroic race. It is almost always the pre-season. The most effective pattern we see is training something into your skiing: taking honest stock of your weaknesses from the season just gone and adding one concrete improvement to your arsenal for the next one. Skiing steep, turny courses better. Being cleaner on your edges. Being quicker and more intense in your movements. One trained-in improvement, consolidated until it survives race pressure, is worth more than a winter of scattered tinkering. Racers in their first FIS season especially should hear this: the winter is mostly decided before it starts.
Common questions
How much can I lower my FIS points in one season?
Honestly: it is impossible to say in general, because it depends on your starting points and a long list of variables. The reliable pattern is that big leaps come easiest when your points are high, and progress gets exponentially harder as the number drops. Once your points are genuinely low, finding a single second per run can take a full pre-season’s work. Set expectations accordingly and judge your season on performances, not on a target number.
What is a bonanza race?
A race where the best-ranked starters go relatively slowly compared with the field, compressing the gaps so that unusually good points are available down the results. They are most likely in smaller fields and cannot be predicted with certainty, only anticipated by reading the start list, field size and snow conditions.
Should I just enter weak races for better points?
No. The penalty system exists precisely to stop this: a weak field produces a high penalty that takes back most of what the easy win gave you, and the softest categories carry minimum penalties that cap your result. Weak races have a place as confidence builders, but a season built entirely on them produces a flattering number and an athlete who cannot deliver in a real field.
Does one terrible race hurt my points?
No. Your points are the average of your best two results in the discipline, so a bad day is only a missed chance. The following list simply will not include it.
Lower points are the output. The inputs are better skiing, better racing and smarter selection, and those are built on snow, deliberately, with coaches who know what to look for. That is the work we do year-round on our FIS training programme.