March 5, 2010
A few looks at a passing season
by Tony Chamberlain/
Despite the Olympic success of New Englanders such as Bode Miller, recreational skiers don't flock to ski races. (photo: Alain Grosclaude/Agence Zoom/Getty Images)
This time of year always amazes me a little bit, especially when the snow dumps are heavy and the weather between them is bright and sunny. In other words: perfect weather to be out skiing and snowboarding.
The bases are deep, all terrain is open — even the gnarliest, thickest woods — your quads have rounded into shape, and most ski areas are offering spring specials.
Contrast this with, say, the month leading up to the Christmas holidays. The bases are slim to non-existent, few glades are open yet, and after a run your legs are quivering like Santa’s proverbial bowlful of jelly.
And bargains and deals are few and far between. Yet everyone is in a fever pitch to get skiing and snowboarding.
In other words, when the skiing is at its worst, we can’t get enough of it, and when it’s best — about the six weeks from after the winter vacation until about the end of March — skiers begin falling away.
I suppose this is a puzzle for either a macroeconomist or a poet to ponder. But from my travels I can predict that this season will end with some prolonged fabulous skiing and riding.
For starters, the odds are with me. With the exception of last season, when early March got a little washy and blah — not that there wasn’t some decent snow around — conditions are almost always good on the ground.
Yes, I remember being goaded some spring days into skiing with a trash bag on in the rain, but if you’ve never tried it, do you know how wonderful skis feel on a sheet of rain over the snow? Just think how slick it is when it pulls your feet out some morning when you’re going for the paper.
But I guess that’s just the way we are and shall be. Once the golf and trout fishing begins and you take the cover off the boat, what flatlander thinks of going skiing? Except that you should try it. Really.
► We have just witnessed the greatest ski racing ever from a U.S. Olympic team. And we have in our midst the two finest ski racers in U.S. history — Lindsey Vonn and Bode Miller, who, of course, is a New Hampshire boy.
Andrew Weibrecht, who won bronze in the super-G, is a Dartmouth student though a Lake Placid native.
Vonn and Julia Mancuso may be Rocky Mountain girls, but they have a certain universal appeal, not to mention racing skills that simply cannot be hyperbolized.
Modest question: I see throngs of golfers following professional golf, ditto tennis when, say Andy Roddick appears in Newport or the U.S. Open in New York. Why, then, don’t skiers — the recreational variety — get motivated to follow ski racing?
Sure, spectators do fill the stands at the Olympic games themselves, but the racing that goes on in New England — from the NorAms at Sunday River to the collegiate carnivals throughout all the states — is really top drawer. But I never see throngs of ski fans out there.
This dawned on me when I watched the 2007 NCAA alpine finals at Attitash. Here were the top ski racers in the land — both East and West — competing in giant slalom down slopes most of us have run a hundred times, Dartmouth is in line to win its first NCAA title in more than three decades, and where are the crowds?
Insert crickets here.
I was standing with Dartmouth’s Rick Adams, a few of the parents and assorted classmates, including Nordic team members who had finished their competition.
And indeed, Dartmouth did win the title, beating a host of teams from the Rockies and the East. There were hugs of congratulations, awards, then back to campus to study. Maybe in this age of overhyped sports, this minimalism was refreshing.
I suppose ski races are hard to watch — you only can see them going through a few gates. And the events are underpromoted. But again, to see 20,000 snowboard fans turn out for the U.S. Open at Stratton every year, it’s just hard to figure where the fans of ski racing are.
► About 30 years ago, around Poultney, Vt., a nest of Nordic ski racers became known to the world. Led by Bill Koch, there were names such as Jim Galanes, Tim Caldwell, Stan Dunklee and Audun Endestad.
In 1982 Koch became the first American ever to win the World Cup in cross country.
Whether there was any connection, that was about the time cross country skiing caught on as a high growth sport in this country. It was seen as a healthy, inexpensive beautiful way to partake of New England’s winter beauty, and Nordic skis, ski shops and ski areas were popping up everywhere.
In my coastal town south of Boston (where we get lots of winter rain) there was a ski shop whose owner, Chris Schneider, stocked a full complement of “skinny” skis and poles to rent to townspeople.
The golf courses and town forests were full of cross country skiers every weekend we had snow, and I know the scene repeated itself in towns everywhere.
I’ve never decided for sure whether this eruption of interest in recreational cross country skiing was connected to Koch’s appearance on the world and Olympic scene or not. Certainly, tennis seemed to boom in this country when U.S. players such as Jimmy Connors and Chris Evert were catching the spotlight.
If there is a connection, I wonder whether the historic Olympic success of Billy Demong, Johnny Spillane and the whole Nordic combined team in Vancouver can re-start a movement toward cross country skiing in this country.
The sport is today what it always has been: healthy, beautiful, and cheap.
