Hi everyone, here's what's coming up on Ski Sunday this week (17 February, 1900-2000, BBC Two and BBC Sport website), all the latest news from the slopes; plus comments about your reactions to the new series.

World Cup news:

It’s a strange season this year with no World Championships or Olympic Games, and I have to say that the International Ski Federation have not done the best job of filling the calendar during the current period.

The Bell Report on Ski Sunday - part four

The men do not race a downhill for four weeks and if you include the cancellation of Val d’Isere, that is five weeks without a downhill. On the bright side, Finlay Mickel should have plenty of time to recover from his ankle injury, but really.

The difficulty they have is finding a resort that will shut off the main run into resort during the busiest time in the season. At least for the next three years we have Worlds in Val d’Isere, Olympics in Whistler (Vancouver) and Worlds again in Garmisch Partenkirchen, snow permitting.

So this weekend we have the men’s and women’s slaloms from Zagreb. I have never skied in Croatia, only Slovenia and Bosnia, for the 1984 Olympics in Sarajevo (yes I am that old!). I have heard that it is the biggest party on the circuit and the local fans will be encouraged by Ivica Kostelic’s third place in the last World Cup slalom in Garmisch (further highlights from Zagreb are available on BBCi from 2000 GMT on Sunday).

Celebrity Ski Race
This week’s celebrity laughed out loud when we used the C word (Celeb). I think he would rather be known as a hard working news reporter.

Frank Gardner lost the use of his legs when he was shot six times by an Al-Qaeda cell in Saudi Arabia filming for the BBC. Although he was an accomplished skier prior to the attack, he had only skied for three weeks in a sit-ski.

I have ridden a sit-ski once before the Aspen 24 hour race, and I can tell you that they are not easy! Luckily we had some expert help from Dave Chugg of Disability SnowsportUK, himself a former British Team skier, turned coach.

Frank will be the first to admit that he was quite a long way out of his comfort zone on the giant slalom but he is made of stern stuff.

Summer Trek
This week we cross the boarder from St Moritz in Switzerland, to visit the Adamello Brenta National park, where they have been re-introducing brown bears into the Alps.

It was from here that one of their bears, Bruno, went walk about two summers ago. It’s a sad story; apparently he roamed through Switzerland and Austria before making the mistake of heading for Germany. After feasting on a couple of sheep the hunters were called in and he was shot. It was during the World Cup football, so did not really make the news over here, but it did cause quite a stir.

From Bruno’s birthplace we travelled through the Dolomites to Cortina d’Ampezzo to visit the First World War trenches dug high into the hillside at Mount Laguzio. If anyone is skiing in this region, they are well worth a visit. A truly eerie place.

Watch the fourth part of my trek during Ski Sunday (17 February from 1900-2000 on BBC Two and the BBC Sport website).

Comments
Thanks for all the comments on the new format; we are clearly the Marmite of sports programmes right now - you either love us or hate us! The thing is we are not, as you may have noticed, purely a sports programme anymore.

Although Ski Sunday is produced by a very talented group of people in the BBC Sport department, we were commissioned directly from BBC Two to produce a winter sports entertainment programme.

There are one-and-a-half million skiers in the UK, and only a tiny proportion of them have ever skied competitively. As powderjunkie so rightly says in his article (The new-look Ski Sunday), we are trying to broaden the reach of the programme to everyone who enjoys the mountains.

Hardcore skiers should really count themselves lucky to have so much access to what is in real terms a minority sport in the UK. The USA has no real coverage of ski racing at all, and they have Bode Miller!

Yes, Eurosport and Channel Four do a good job of showing ski racing, and that’s the point. Do you really think that the BBC would commission one hour of ski racing in prime time when Eurosport have already shown the race live? It might have worked in the eighties.

I have been a fan of ski racing since I was eight years old, I learned to ski in leather boots, have raced in five Olympic Games and have been to another two as a BBC commentator. I hate to say it, but the snowboarders are right, there is more to the sport than lycra-clad muscle men.

Incidentally, Eurosport is able to show live racing because it negotiates a pan-European satellite deal, whereas BBC and Channel Four have shared non-exclusive, non-live rights. I think that’s how it works anyway.

The interactive service is the BBC’s best way of showing large chunks of winter sports, the trouble seems to be getting the word out on when they’re being shown. And yes, it would be great if we could start showing the skier-X, bob skeleton, half-pipe and anything else we can pick up as well.

No, we are not trying to copy Top Gear, although if we had one quarter of their budget we would be happy. And yes, I think Konnie Huq is great too, although I am not sure how well she would cope off-piste on a 45ş couloir.

Best wishes
Graham