I started racing when I was 12, I think in part because my neighbors, the Butlers, were involved. We signed up for the Winter Park Ski Team. I raced for five years--until I was 17 and realized that I was having more fun freeskiing with my buddies than racing. The fact that the sport was (and still is) highly competitive and I wasn't that good helped. I might have had some natural talent, but we didn't live at a ski area. By the time my parents purchased the condo at MeadowRidge in Fraser in 1976, I was already moving on from racing.
The upside: it taught me to ski really well. And created a lifelong addiction to a fairly expensive habit. But on the balance, a good one. No regrets here.
We took a trip to Aspen in 1973 (help me out here folks!) where I got raced my one and only NASTAR race. The picture below shows little grom Bob tearing it up. I got a gold medal.
I'm pretty sure that race was at the aptly named Buttermilk. It may have also been the same day some out of control idiot hit my little sister Catherine full on. I thought Jay was going to kill the guy. Same thing happened to Dylan at The Pass when he was a grom with more or less the same outcome. But that is beside the point.
I loved racing. I loved my coaches--a guy named Rogers Little was the head coach and worked with the big kids like my neighbor Larry Butler who was always much better than me. Us groms got to work with a lady name Sandy (whose last name I can't recall). What I do recall was one very cold and snowy day where we went into the warming shack at the bottom of the Looking Glass lift. Sandy was showing us the racing form. That was the moment it clicked for me. I got the award for "most improved" racer that year.
We did all the events, including downhill (which was much more like Super-G in today's terms). My favorite event was the Giant Slalom. The picture below is the downhill on Cheshire Cat probably in 1978 when I was 17. The skis: Rossignol Strato 102s that were 210 cm. I was probably 5'7" tall and 120 pounds at the time. Two things I recall about this particular race: (1) I didn't place; and (2) my buddy and Ft. Collins neighbor Mike Ferguson crashed bad.
Those downhills were tense. I always had serious butterflys before the race. I never had the total no fear whatsoever attitude that it takes to be a great ski racer. In 1976, Winter Park opened Mary Jane resort. That was the beginning of the end of racing for me. I was having too much fun skiing bumps over there. It was also the point where I started skiing a lot with my posse; racing was getting in the way of that.
Back to the present moment. Like the photo above, I drew #36 again. Must be some kind of cosmic coincidence. I've refined my style a bit, but look more or less the same as I did when I was a grom.
As for the race...it was a kick. There were two masters (e.g, old geezers that are eligible to join the AARP) in the race. I came in second in my class and third overall. I was chatting with the other master racer--he was good enough to ski for the UO in college and had the benefit of a high school program (something that, amazing as it is, did not exist in Colorado).
It was nice supporting the race program--the kids are having a lot of fun now and are learning a lot of lifelong skills--not only skiing, but lots of other things that racing teaches you.
As for my kids, they never had the passion for racing. Kayla absolutely hated the idea of skiing from the first time we took her at age 5. So we didn't go a lot. By the time she was 10, she only wanted to learn to snowboard. Dylan skied until he was 13, but I could never talk him into joining the race program. I didn't push it too hard--I was just happy that everyone wanted to come with me! Since he switched to snowboarding, he's barely looked at a pair of skis--much less strapped them on. I'm trying to convince him to give it a go again this year. So far he's having too much fun learning new tricks on the board.
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It was yet another stellar day at The Pass.
A great day for a race and a great day to be outside. Here's to all the kids that will learn to ski through a race program and carry that experience through their lives!
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