paralympic blog, day -5

First off today, a link. (I guess you need to be logged into a Facebook account in order to view this.) Susan Burgstiner, who as a steering committee member of SkiTAM is one of our team's biggest supporters, shot and posted this nice little glimpse into a U.S. Adaptive Team training session at Vail last week. Here it is.

We raced downhill today under the fierce Colorado sun, a very springlike day. The organizers decided not to groom the race hill last night after two days of training on the same track. This is how it's normally done — one doesn't want the snow softening up too much at night; it's better to let the track get firmer with each day of racing. In this case, it led to a pretty bumpy track that the standing skiers didn't have much trouble with but some of the sitting skiers found pretty difficult. There were lots of DNFs. I managed to power through the bumps and ripples and finish six or seven tenths faster than in yesterday's training run, good enough for sixth place. Joe absolutely killed it today, winning by almost two seconds over Germany's Thomas Nolte and Frenchman Yohann Taberlet. I was just two hundredths behind my teammate CDY. We'll do it all again tomorrow at 11 a.m., and who knows where the top skiers will end up with another roll of the dice?