what makes bode different

If you've been following the current World Cup season, you may know that Bode Miller already has three wins this year, more than he won all last season. He's still as unpredictable as ever — winning one day and missing a gate five seconds into a course the next day — but he's still one of my role models in ski racing, for one simple reason: he races for himself and no one else. He wrote a whole book outlining his philosophy on this, but I think it's summed up well in something I just read in his online diary:

"The best run I've ever laid down was in Val Gardena back in 2001 — I came in 6th, but to this day it stands out in my mind as nearly perfect. "

Is Bode Miller just delusional, or does he have a bad sense of when he's skiing well and when he's not? I don't think that's the case. There might be a hundred reasons he didn't win that day (bad wax choice, a strong gust of wind while he was on course), but if he's never felt better on his skis than he did that day, and he can recall that feeling and harness it for future performances, that's something significant. For 99% of athletes, if you ask them to recall their best day, it will be a day they had their best results. But not for Bode: he has that rarest of abilities, the power to separate his own feelings about his performance from the outcome associated with it.

bramble in n.y. times

As astute NTAA reader Botice has pointed out, the sports section of yesterday's New York Times featured a profile of my teammate Kevin Bramble, Paralympic downhill champion, monoski designer/builder, and lover of cannabis, alcohol, and women. You can read the story here (free registration required).

The article begins with the observation, "Kevin Bramble is a madman." This is not inaccurate. The whole profile, in fact, does a pretty excellent job of deconstructing one of the most intriguing and self-contradictory people I've ever met. This is a guy who, at times, literally seems not to care whether he lives or dies, and yet seems to survive incidents no one else could; a guy who tells a story about getting banned from a particular California town for an incident involving an underaged girl, an empty wine bottle, and a video camera, and yet has told me, passionately, about his desire to meet a woman to settle down with (he's now engaged, apparently); a guy who gets more media coverage than anyone on the team except maybe Ralph and who bragged to the Times that he has "taken [my] sport to a place it had never been" and yet is easily the most down-to-earth person on the team; a guy who never trains and has atrocious technique, yet regularly wins downhill races by full seconds; a guy who wants to be a successful businessman and yet missed an appointment to meet with me so I could try his monoski and perhaps purchase one — because he was in jail. As a result, I'm one of the three current U.S. team members who doesn't ski on his equipment, but somehow I still like the guy.

There are a few facts the article doesn't get quite right. For starters, a caption implies that the accompanying photo shows Bramble building a monoski; in fact it appears to be some kind of wakeboard. And the story says that he "left" the team in 1999 because he wanted to go powder skiing instead of racing, while my impression on that trip was that he was kicked off the team for telling a staff member to go fuck himself. And Bramble himself is wrong when he dismisses the accomplishments of Bode Miller, saying "He didn’t invent the skis. He hasn’t redefined the convention”; in fact, that is pretty much exactly what Bode did at the Junior Olympics in the late 1990s when he became the first racer to have significant success using new super-sidecut skis. But the article's only egregious error is one of omission: it doesn't mention Bramble's significant "lifestyle-related" health problems, which (combined with his distaste for training) have kept him from attending any team training camps or competitions since the Paralympics. Given that there are no downhills scheduled on the disabeld race circuit this year, I'll be surprised if we see him show up to a single race this year other than the X Games sit-skiercross at Aspen in January. For all intents and purposes, Kevin Bramble seems to be retired.

coincidence? OK, yeah, probably.

Who knows, maybe the art director of Jay-Z's 2006 Kingdom Come was a fan of Warren Zevon's 1978 Excitable Boy. (Or maybe Hova himself is? Now that would be odd.)

finally...

USSA got around to putting out a press release about Friday's GS in Breckenridge. Our head coach Ray had some nice things to say about me, and they put a very unflattering photo of me at the top. I like these better, althought I'm still making the same weird constipated face in the action shot. You can see and download these photos and others here.

From the New York Times:

BAGHDAD, Dec. 12 — At least 56 people, most of them laborers looking for work, were killed today when a pickup truck packed with explosives was detonated in a crowded square in the city’s center this morning, Iraqi officials and witnesses said. At least 220 more were wounded.
...
American military officials have described the battle for control of Baghdad as a steady stream of individual killings of Sunnis carried out by Shiite death squads, punctuated by bombings and larger attacks carried out by Sunni insurgents or Al Qaeda members against Shiites
....
The speaker of the Iraqi Parliament, Mahmud Mashhadani, a Sunni, also denounced the attack, saying it was the work of “outlaws and those without a religion.”

Riiiiiight. This sure sounds like the work of the Iraqi Militant Atheists' Brigade. We just need to teach the bombers to be more passionate Muslims and this will all be solved.

categories

Wikipedia has a category for almost everything. They should have a category for "People whose names and biographies sound like they should be fictitious, but aren't." Then they could include 47-year-old Mexican ski racer Prince Hubertus von Hohenlohe-Langenburg, who raced in the World Cup super combi race held yesterday in Reiteralm, Austria, placing last — about 24 seconds behind winner Ivica Kostelic and 16 seconds behind the second-to-last-place finisher.

Free U.S. Ski Team pin to the first reader who posts here with the correct pronunciation of the name Hohenlohe. (And I don't know the answer, so you better also convince me you're right.)

sometimes you win by not losing

I managed a win in today's GS, even though I skied better yesterday. A mistake in the first run left me in third place, two seconds behind Tyler and one behind Nick after CDY and Gerald both crashed. My second run was solid but I didn't think it'd be enough to move me up to first or second. I didn't count on both of my remaining teammates crashing, giving me my second career Nor-Am win.

Here are some links to a press release and photos from yesterday's slalom. Both of those sites should have updates for today's race pretty soon.

close, but no cigarillo

First race of the young season today in Breckenridge, Colo. We raced slalom first and I've been feeling pretty positive about my slalom these days, so I felt a lot of pressure from myself to perform well. On the first run I totally did, winning the run by about a second. I didn't make any real mistakes, but I didn't feel outstanding either so it was a nice result to beat some of my perennial rivals like Tyler and CDY.

I'd only been in that position after the first run once or twice before, and it's tough. It's way too easy to start picturing myself on the podium when the race is only halfway over. I had to keep refocusing myself over and over again as I waited a couple hours for my second run. Sixteen male monoskiers had finished the first run, which meant that that after the top fifteen were reversed to determine the second-run start order I'd be starting second-to-last — way too much time to sit at the top and think about how I could win, how I could crash, and that I really had to pee. When I finally pushed out of the gate I skied just as well as I had in the first run until I got to the course's only flush. I bobbled coming out of it, and while I recovered almost immediately, I had lost a little bit of momentum. The rest of the run was smooth, but when I crossed the line I knew I had given too much away. Sure enough, Tyler beat me by 0.4 seconds or so.

Despite that, I certainly learned something today about being in the lead, and I was stoked about my skiing.

USSA press release

Disabled Alpine Tunes Up at Keystone Team Set for Hartford Ski Spectacular

KEYSTONE, Colo. (Dec. 4.) - The U.S. Disabled Alpine Ski Team capitalized on the recent training agreement with Keystone Resort, scoring five days of unparalleled training on the U.S. Ski Team's exclusive Starfire training run on North Peak.

"It was the best training we've had in a long time," said Coach Ben Roberts. "It was great for us to be on a steep, challenging hill with hard snow. We are expecting these conditions at our Aspen World Cups (Jan. 17-21) so it was great preparation for those races. Everything the Alpine Team has been saying about how great the training is at Keystone was is true."

It was the third and final on-snow training for the Team before the competition season opens Dec. 7 with the 19th Annual Hartford Ski Spectacular at Breckenridge, CO."The opportunity for us as members of the U.S. Disabled Ski Team to train on the same hill as the U.S. Alpine Teams was invaluable," said 15-year veteran Chris Devlin-Young (sit-ski; Campton, NH). "We had very hard snow and steep terrain, just like at our World Cups. We almost never see conditions like this during training, only at our races."Devlin-Young was joined by George Sansonetis (standup; Fraser, CO), Ralph Green (standup; Brooklyn, NY), Hannah Pennington (standup; Denver, CO), Sandy Dukat (standup; Chicago, IL), Carl Burnett (sit-ski; Cape Elizabeth, ME), Brad Washburn (standup; Highlands Ranch, CO) and Gerald Hayden (sit-ski; Fresno, CA). Also on board for the week were development athletes Ian Jansing (Granby, CO) and Ricci Kilgore (Reno, NV) of the Winter Park National Sports Center plus their coaches Hiro Taniguchi and Erik Petersen along with volunteer coach Matt Weiler from Aspen's Team Summit.

"The training was incredible," added Coach Kurt Smitz. "It was really nice to catch up with John McBride (combined coach for the men's Alpine Team) and the other alpine coaches who were on the hill with us and at the NorAm. Our athletes are really stepping up in preparation for our first races."

To continue that preparation, the team now heads to the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, CO, to wrap up their series of physical testing sessions before opening the season at Breckenridge.

19th Annual Hartford Ski Spectacular Schedule:
Dec. 7 - Slalom
Dec. 8 - Giant Slalom
Dec. 9 - Corporate Challenge

Disabled Alpine World Cup to Open in Aspen

ASPEN, Colo. (Nov. 22) - The U.S. Disabled Ski Team is set to open the 2007 International Paralympic Committee (IPC) Alpine World Cup tour Jan. 17-21 at Aspen Mountain. Hosted by Challenge Aspen, U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association (USSA) and Aspen Skiing Company, the U.S. Team joins more than 15 nations in the quest for the Nations Cup.
Over 80 athletes will compete in super G, giant slalom and slalom for a total of six out of 17 World Cup races on the 2007 schedule

"Challenge Aspen is very excited to host the fastest disabled skiers in the world this January and show the town of Aspen how incredible they really are," says Kevin Jardine, Director Of Skiing.

Jardine and Bryan Peterson, both residents of the Roaring Fork Valley, were coaches for the 2006 U.S. Paralympic Team and the U.S. Disabled Alpine Team. They have been instrumental in securing the bid for the Disabled World Cup and are working for a successful event as members of the local organizing committee.

Following the Aspen races, the World Cup will move on to British Columbia for three competitions before taking a short training break. Five more races will then run in early March in Abtenau, Austria, before the World Cup finals slated for Arte Therme Zoncolan, Italy on March 14.

Aspen/Snowmass, considered one of the worlds top ski areas since the Aspen Skiing Company hosted its first FIS World Championships in 1950, has become an international hub of sport and culture. The picturesque ski resort was chosen to host this years event based upon the excitement and support of area residents during prior World Cup events. World Cup racing events have helped build Aspen/Snowmass' reputation as one of the top ski resorts in the world.

Volunteers interested in working with the World Cup races are asked to contact Evan Zislis at Challenge Aspen at 970.923.0578, extension 17, or via email at evan@challengeaspen.com.

Raich, Schild to join mile-high club?

From SkiRacing.com:

Sunday, 12 November 2006
LEVI, Finland — What’s good for the goose, is good for the gander. Benjamin Raich kick-started his defense of the overall World Cup title with a runaway win in the opening men's slalom, matching the result his girlfriend Marlies Schild had registered one day earlier. ... "It is great to win like this after what Marlies did yesterday,” Raich said. "Marlies will fly back with me on the plane and we'll get a chance to celebrate this together. It's really nice."

tux article & photos

I just discovered this press release about our Hintertux training camp the U.S. Ski Team website. The article has a quote from me and a photo of me skiing slalom. If you want to download a full-res version of the photo and see pictures of some of my teammates from the camp, head right over here.

update from WP

I made the move from Boulder back up to Winter Park last week, just after getting home from Austria, and now I'm getting settled in up here. (The Comcast guy was here this morning to set up broadband, and damn is it fast.) I'm living in the same apartment I was in last winter, with my teammate Gerald. There's been a foot of snow on the ground here for a couple weeks now, and the ski area is making a lot of snow, too. We racers get to start skiing here this Wednesday, and then the resort opens to the public on the 15th.

If you need to write to me here, my address is the same as it was last year:

P.O. Box 3090
Winter Park, CO 80482

And my physical (shipping) address is:

21 Kings Crossing Road, Apt. 302
Winter Park, CO 80482

As a side note, this week's New York Times Magazine has a nice primer on how neologisms enter the OED.

last day in Tux

Today was supposed to be our last day of training here in Hintertux, but lots of rain meant the snow was too soft to set a course. (Click here, here and here to see the view up there on the glacier at the moment; as I write this, it's a whiteout on the upper two cams.) So we're back at the hotel packing up our stuff and relaxing a bit. Tomorrow morning at 4:45 a.m. we'll leave for the Munich airport and then back to the States.

This has been a pretty productive couple of weeks for me. I haven't made any major advances in my skiing, but I've become more consistent, especially in my slalom skiing, and I've relished the chance to do plenty of skiing on sub-optimal snow conditions. In particular, it's been helpful to get out on some of the glare glacial ice, the real hard stuff that I used to train on back in Maine but don't see very often — OK, ever — in Winter Park. In fact, the skiing here during this camp has reminded me how helpful it is to ski on that stuff, so I'm thinking about taking my ski equipment home to Maine with me when I go back for Thanksgiving or Christmas and doing some training with my old ski team at Sunday River.

Hans

Today I rode up the gondola with a guy in sixties named Hans. He lives half an hour away in Mayrhofen and has spent his whole life here in the Zillertal valley. He learned to ski as a small boy in these mountains. His family owns a farm in a village he pointed out on the other side of the mountain, but now Hans works in the mountaintop lodge on Hintertux Glacier, serving tourists. I might've thought he'd be bitter about having to make his living from tourism after his ancestors made theirs from working the land, but he saw things differently. Before tourism and modern farm machinery came to Tirol, he said, people had to work too hard just to survive. In the early 1900s, he said, lots of people in Zillertal left Austria for more prosperous places; his uncle emigrated to Chicago, where he opened a schnapps distillery that counted "all the important people" among its clientele. The uncle married an American woman but died childless, so Hans no longer has relatives in America.

I asked Hans if the glacier used to be bigger than it is now. "Oh yes," he said. When he was a child — before the Gletscherbahn, when you could only get up to the glacier on horseback — they used to have to struggle to keep the glacier from tearing down the Spannagelhaus. Now, that building is separated from the glacial ice by several hundred meters of rocks and dirt.

(r)emoting

When operating a European TV remote control, why in the hell are you required to press "1" instead of "Power" to turn the TV on? If someone could explain the origin of this utterly ridiculous practice, I would be eternally grateful.

the push

First of all, check out this sweet 360-degree panorama image of Hintertux Glacier that I just found on their website.

Today was our fourth day on snow here in Austria. The last three days we've trained GS on the same narrow lane. One of the things about training in Europe is that teams set their courses very close to one another, and it can be a nerve-wracking experience skiing 30 m.p.h. down a course, with another skier two meters away skiing a parallel course at the same speed — not much room for error. It's funny how much has been made lately of the American trend toward doing everything faster and more recklessly, when it's the Euros who seem to be faster and ruder with everything they do.

A prime example is the phenomenon known — on our team, anyway — as "the push." The push happens every morning around 7:45 in the parking lot of the Hintertuxer Gletscherbahn gondola, when several hundred junior ski teams crowd into a small area between metal barricades, vying to be one of the first on the gondola when it opens at 8:00 a.m. It's one of those sights that has to be seen to be believed: something happens to make one or two people decide that the gondola might be about to open and pandemonium breaks loose, every kid and coach grabbing his or her equipment and pressing forward against each other to try to get as close to the lift entrance as possible. It's a free-for-all that's simultaneously hilarious and pretty disturbing. I'm sure people have been trampled in the push; this is exactly how people die at rock concerts.

Kildow's Spirit Award Enables Six Physically Disabled Female Skiers Chance to Compete at The Hartford Ski Spectacular in December

U.S. Paralympics // October 17, 2006

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – U.S. Paralympics, a division of the U.S. Olympic Committee, has announced that it will sponsor six aspiring female Paralympic skiers at the 19th Annual Hartford Ski Spectacular in December, thanks in large part to the generosity of Lindsey Kildow, 21, (St. Paul, Minn./alpine skiing) two-time Olympian and winner of the 2006 U.S. Olympic Spirit Award Delivered by DHL. DHL provided a grant of $5,000 on Kildow’s behalf, which was to be donated to a qualified Olympic or Paralympic-related non-profit organization of her choice. Kildow chose U.S. Paralympics. Excited by her gesture, U.S. Paralympics has chosen to match her donation in an effort to reach out to as many prospective Paralympic skiers as possible.

“Our goal in assisting six women to Ski Spectacular is twofold,” said Stacey Wooley, Associate Director Winter Sports, U.S. Paralympics. “We want to create a developmental outlet for middle echelon skiers to compete, in hopes of developing a direct feed to the National Team. We also want to boost the number of elite female athletes vying for a spot on the team.”

Athletes will be chosen by U.S. Paralympics based on their previous participation in local skiing programs and coach recommendations. The top six will participate at The Hartford’s 19th Annual Ski Spectacular, Dec. 3-10, 2006, in Breckenridge, Colo.

Paralympic-eligible disciplines include sitting, standing and visually-impaired. Applications can be found online at http://www.usparalympics.org. Once there, click on the link in the left-hand column of the page. All completed applications should be faxed to Stacey Wooley’s attention at (719) 866-2029. The deadline to apply is November 6, 2006.

Kildow became the first athlete in the history of the award to win despite not winning a medal at the Olympic Games. Despite being hospitalized after a spectacular training run accident on the second day of the downhill practice, Kildow returned to the slopes to compete the next day, finishing eighth. Still struggling with the injuries, she demonstrated incredible courage and commitment and went on to compete in four of her five events which resulted in two top-ten placements.

During the Olympic and Paralympic Games, DHL honors two individual athletes (one male and one female) and one team with the Olympic Spirit Award for best representing the Olympic Spirit through their courage, commitment, performance, perseverance and vision, both in competition and in pursuit of their Olympic dream.

For more information, please contact Beth Bourgeois, U.S. Paralympics, at (719) 866-2039 or beth.bourgeois@usoc.org.

bis Hintertux

It's great to be back in the Tux Valley in Zillertal, Tirol, Austria. This is a really special place that I've been lucky enough to visit for three years in a row now. To get here you take the highway to Meyerhofen and then drive 20 km up a narrow mountain road that passes through half a dozen small villages. Each village has several classic-looking, family-run hotels and restaurants and a bahn (gondola/cable car) that takes you up the surrounding peaks. Some of these are closed this time of year, but others continue to shuttle hikers up throughout the off-season. At the end of the road you come to the town of Hintertux and then the bottom station of Hintertuxer Gletscherbahn, the series of three gondolas that take you up to the glacier. Our hotel, the Hintertuxerhof, is near the gondola station and surrounded by green, pungent-smelling farmland. There is really nothing like going outside at 7:30 a.m. into cold, sunny air that reeks of cow manure. The three Gletscherbahn lifts take you up 1750 vertical meters (5740 feet) in about 45 minutes; when you get to the top you're in what Zillertal's tourism board calls "Die Gletscher-Welt" — the Glacier World — and it's a really appropriate name. You feel like you're on another planet, with blinding white everwhere, dotted by huge rocky outcroppings, gray and blue cravasses in the ice fields that lie in between the groomed pistes, and then lots of green farmland, houses, barns, and hotels far, far below. From one of the T-bar lifts you can see a swatch of farmland, with a house and a barn, down in an otherwise uninhabited valley over a mile from the town of Hintertux. The dirt road to get there is insane, winding up over an imposing peak; in winter there must be no way to get there except by snowmobile or on skis. This is the way the people here still live, old Tyrolean farmers living alongside flashily dressed ski coaches from Innsbruck.

Actually, the coaches and athletes training here right now are from all over the world. It's common to see ski and snowboard teams here from the U.S., Canada, Japan, Korea, and all over Europe, especially the Eastern European countries that don't have strong alpine skiing traditions but are getting more and more competitive on the world scene: Russia, Croatia, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Bulgaria... last year I even saw teams from Greece and Israel. In addition to our team, there are also disabled skiers training here now from Finland, Slovakia, and the U.K. Everyone is busy up on the glacier from 8 a.m. till noon or 1, running courses, riding T-bars and generally failing to notice what an amazing place this is. Then in the afternoon everyone comes down off the hill, goes back to their hotels, and then goes outside into the 60-degree weather to go hiking, play tennis and soccer, and just generally enjoy the sunshine.

Today was our first day on snow, so we were mostly on our own, getting readjusted to skiing and riding T-bars and trying to remember all the things we were working on improving at Mt. Hood in July. We have two weeks of training here, so in a few days we'll start running courses and by the end we should be taking timed, race-like runs.

getting ready for Tux

It's October, which means that Northern Hemisphere ski resorts are starting to get new snow. (Some American resorts, like Loveland in Colorado, should be opening pretty soon.) It also means it's almost time for the U.S. team's annual training camp on the glacier at Hintertux, in Austria (live cams: 1 2 3). We depart next Monday, the 16th, and will be there until the 30th. I'm looking forward to being back on snow for the first time since July, and also to being back in the Alps. Most of us on the team have certain things we've come to love about central Europe; for me it's the coffee and the chocolate, and of course the mountains themselves. The only things I'm not looking forward to: (1) the heady manure smell that dominates the Tux river valley until it starts snowing down there, and (2) not being able to watch the World Series on TV.