ADVENTURE SPORTS BY WINA STURGEON 2/13/08
JEEP KING OF THE MOUNTAIN COURSE SUCKED, SAY ATHLETES
Daron Rahlves was pissed. Other racers bitched to their coaches. The athletes who follow the skicross circuit were all annoyed at the short, flat skicross course at the Squaw Valley stop of the 48 Straight/Jeep King of the Mountain.
The event is a made-for-television competition that will be broadcast on CBS later this week. But a serious storm brought high winds and eight feet of snow to the mountain, forcing the course to be redesigned into something that could be fashioned quickly. It was short, only 40 seconds long, less than a third of the length of the X Games course, very flat and with no jumps.
"Strictly a wax race," said one of the techs.
Coach and ski tech Jeff Sadis said, "There's been some protests, but the organizers don't care.They also are not very well organized. They still don't have the results in (from the skicross), and it's 7:00 p.m. They didn't even have a scoreboard at the bottom, so no one knows how anyone did. We've kind of all guestimated how everyone did. That's kind of disapointing for the professional skiers, to see it so badly run."
Rahlves didn't make it past the quarterfinals. The event was won by Tomas Kraus for the men, and Ophelie David for the women.
FORMER PRO RACER BACK IN THE GAME
Back when there was a pro ski race tour, one of the long time dominators was Stein Halsnes. He was so unbeatable that he became as famous as any U. S. ski team racer. After the Pro Tour collapsed, Halsnes disappeared.
Now he's back, on the Masters Circuit. "I trained for it last year, but didn't race. This year, I will start racing again, seriously," Halsnes said as he skied to the scoreboard to see how he had done in the second run of the Western Regional Championships slalom.
The former pro had already won his age group (50-54) in the super G, where the second training run counted as the race after snow forced the race to be canceled. But in the slalom, he came in silver, more than a second behind class winner Bill Skinner, the head coach of the Park City Masters Program. Both were competitive with the younger racers. In fact, the men's 50-54 and 45-49 classes were, on average, the fastest guys on the hill.
LOPES WINS FIRST CYCLOCROSS
Here's how good mountain bike racer Brian Lopes is: He happened to be in Fresno at the end of January, when he heard about a cyclocross race; the multi-lap event where racers have to get off their bikes and carry them across and around obstacles and pools of mud. He had never done a cyclocross before, and this one had a good field.
Lopes borrowed a bike from a friend and signed up for the race; which consisted of 11 hard laps, each a little over six minutes long. He won.
The next day, he came back to the rutted course and rode with some of the local kids just for fun.
PHIL MAHRE STOPPED BY SNOW
The wicked series of storms that has hit the western half of the U. S. from the Rockies on has interrupted Olympian Phil Mahre's efforts to earn a berth to the U. S. Alpine Championships. His home is up a long mountain pass, and snow closed the road so Mahre could not get out to enter some of the races he had scheduled to be in.
That makes this week the do or die time. Two races this weekend will be the deciders of whether Mahre will reach his goal of earning enough points to qualify for the Nationals. Stay tuned, Adventure Sports Weekly will have the full story on his results in our next issue.
HOW TO LOCK YOUR LUGGAGE LEGALLY
Everyone who takes a plane learns that it's no longer legal to lock your luggage. If the TSA (Transportation Security Administration) decides to inspect your bags, the locks will be broken and TSA will assume no responsibility for the damage.
For many, leaving luggage unlocked is inviting the rummaging hands of strangers to play with their delicates, a stressful situation. But you can "lock" your bags legally and without risking any damage at all.
Buy a container of those plastic zip ties, the kind where one end is inserted through a little hole in the other end. Slip it through the lock holes in the zippers and pull it tight. If the TSA decides to inspect the bag, they can easily snip off the zip tie with no damage. A card will be inserted into your luggage that explains that TSA has opened the bag. But the tie will act as a lock to any casual explorer who wants to go through your stuff.