mraynrand
01-24-2009, 03:13 PM
WTF? Anyone know anything about this? It looks totally dangerous to me. Lotso injuries on the horizon...
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/24/sports/othersports/24cross.html?_r=1&ref=sports
WILMINGTON, N.Y. — The edgy appeal of ski racing has not changed in 100 years. There is the ageless thirst for speed, the enduring dance with danger and the zeal to be first to the bottom of a mountain.
Skip to next paragraph
Multimedia
Ski Racing Gets a MakeoverSlide Show
Ski Racing Gets a Makeover
But what’s an edgy sport to do when its history and tradition are seen as so, well, outdated?
In an appeal to a younger generation, ski racing has taken all its natural, alluring elements and modernized them with tricked-up ramps, supersize jumps and scary turns, then packaged the whole thing into a made-for-TV format that promises mishaps, calamity and confrontation worthy of a reality show.
Behold the event of ski cross, or roller derby on skis, in which four to six racers simultaneously dash through a snowy version of a carnival fun house — with banked turns, bumpy surfaces and soaring leaps — all while elbowing and pushing their way to the finish line. Last racer standing, or limping on one leg, wins.
Once a novelty of competitions like this week’s X Games in Aspen, Colo., ski cross next year receives the ultimate sporting sanction as a new sport for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, British Columbia.
“It goes back to pure skiing, like when I was a kid racing my buddies from the top just trying to get to the bottom first,” said Daron Rahlves, who retired three years ago as America’s most decorated Alpine downhiller and has since made a comeback in ski cross. “But it is kind of crazy. You can bump into someone and go flying out of control in an instant. It connects more with a younger skier, and it is the most exciting thing out there.
“But it does make me more nervous than Alpine racing. With all the close combat, sometimes at the finish line it’s almost like you want to start boxing someone.”
There are two fundamental differences between ski cross and the traditional ski racing that has been contested for decades. One, ski cross (often also called skiercross) is a head-to-head competition instead of an event in which racers are timed individually to see who has been the fastest down a racecourse.
When four ski cross racers are sent out of a starting gate like the kind used in a horse race, there is a sudden mad dash — eight sharp-edged skis and eight ski poles flailing — to gain the lead position by the first turn or jump. The fighting for position continues for the next 45 seconds or so and often leads to collisions, injuries and high-speed crashes that become popular on YouTube.
The second difference is that, unlike in Alpine racing, where downhill courses are laid out through the contours of a mountain face, ski cross is far from man against nature. The ski cross racecourse is man-made. Bulldozers and snow-grooming machines form huge jumps that send skiers 15 feet in the air, as well as dips, off-camber hairpin turns and successive dips and bumps called whoop-de-dos.
It’s a bit like motocross and Nascar except that there are more midair accidents. And because the course is in a compact space, there is no such thing as a comfortable or safe lead. Last year, Casey Puckett, a four-time American Alpine racing Olympian now ranked fourth on the worldwide ski cross professional tour, was well ahead in a European race when the last-place competitor soared incorrectly off a jump, cut a corner in the racecourse, and landed on the shoulders of a skier just behind Puckett.
In the tumbling pileup, Puckett was tripped from behind just as he was preparing to leap from the course’s final jump. Puckett flew through the air upside down, landing on his head, neck and shoulder. Unconscious, his limp body slid toward the finish line. He was delivered by helicopter to a nearby hospital with a severe concussion and a serious shoulder injury that ended his season.
“People like the fact that anything can happen at any moment — you can’t turn your head away from watching it,” Puckett said this week as he competed in a World Cup ski cross event at Whiteface Mountain outside Lake Placid, N.Y. “Americans like their crashes. They also like ski cross because, unlike Alpine racing, which has a lot of technicalities, our race is simple to understand: you know, first one upright at the end gets the trophy.”
Because the course is a tight, narrow corridor, it also sets up well for television coverage, which can capture every angle top to bottom. That includes the occasional postrace conflict.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/24/sports/othersports/24cross.html?_r=1&ref=sports
WILMINGTON, N.Y. — The edgy appeal of ski racing has not changed in 100 years. There is the ageless thirst for speed, the enduring dance with danger and the zeal to be first to the bottom of a mountain.
Skip to next paragraph
Multimedia
Ski Racing Gets a MakeoverSlide Show
Ski Racing Gets a Makeover
But what’s an edgy sport to do when its history and tradition are seen as so, well, outdated?
In an appeal to a younger generation, ski racing has taken all its natural, alluring elements and modernized them with tricked-up ramps, supersize jumps and scary turns, then packaged the whole thing into a made-for-TV format that promises mishaps, calamity and confrontation worthy of a reality show.
Behold the event of ski cross, or roller derby on skis, in which four to six racers simultaneously dash through a snowy version of a carnival fun house — with banked turns, bumpy surfaces and soaring leaps — all while elbowing and pushing their way to the finish line. Last racer standing, or limping on one leg, wins.
Once a novelty of competitions like this week’s X Games in Aspen, Colo., ski cross next year receives the ultimate sporting sanction as a new sport for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, British Columbia.
“It goes back to pure skiing, like when I was a kid racing my buddies from the top just trying to get to the bottom first,” said Daron Rahlves, who retired three years ago as America’s most decorated Alpine downhiller and has since made a comeback in ski cross. “But it is kind of crazy. You can bump into someone and go flying out of control in an instant. It connects more with a younger skier, and it is the most exciting thing out there.
“But it does make me more nervous than Alpine racing. With all the close combat, sometimes at the finish line it’s almost like you want to start boxing someone.”
There are two fundamental differences between ski cross and the traditional ski racing that has been contested for decades. One, ski cross (often also called skiercross) is a head-to-head competition instead of an event in which racers are timed individually to see who has been the fastest down a racecourse.
When four ski cross racers are sent out of a starting gate like the kind used in a horse race, there is a sudden mad dash — eight sharp-edged skis and eight ski poles flailing — to gain the lead position by the first turn or jump. The fighting for position continues for the next 45 seconds or so and often leads to collisions, injuries and high-speed crashes that become popular on YouTube.
The second difference is that, unlike in Alpine racing, where downhill courses are laid out through the contours of a mountain face, ski cross is far from man against nature. The ski cross racecourse is man-made. Bulldozers and snow-grooming machines form huge jumps that send skiers 15 feet in the air, as well as dips, off-camber hairpin turns and successive dips and bumps called whoop-de-dos.
It’s a bit like motocross and Nascar except that there are more midair accidents. And because the course is in a compact space, there is no such thing as a comfortable or safe lead. Last year, Casey Puckett, a four-time American Alpine racing Olympian now ranked fourth on the worldwide ski cross professional tour, was well ahead in a European race when the last-place competitor soared incorrectly off a jump, cut a corner in the racecourse, and landed on the shoulders of a skier just behind Puckett.
In the tumbling pileup, Puckett was tripped from behind just as he was preparing to leap from the course’s final jump. Puckett flew through the air upside down, landing on his head, neck and shoulder. Unconscious, his limp body slid toward the finish line. He was delivered by helicopter to a nearby hospital with a severe concussion and a serious shoulder injury that ended his season.
“People like the fact that anything can happen at any moment — you can’t turn your head away from watching it,” Puckett said this week as he competed in a World Cup ski cross event at Whiteface Mountain outside Lake Placid, N.Y. “Americans like their crashes. They also like ski cross because, unlike Alpine racing, which has a lot of technicalities, our race is simple to understand: you know, first one upright at the end gets the trophy.”
Because the course is a tight, narrow corridor, it also sets up well for television coverage, which can capture every angle top to bottom. That includes the occasional postrace conflict.