Bromley/Stratton - The Battle of the Trenches
and the Clash of the Titans
You just can't explain to people why you love it-that special little squeak-crunch-croak snow makes at minus 10, the way the nature of the plastic in your boots alters to become so stiff you need a sledge hammer to insert your foot, the way the metal in your poles gets thin and brittle and snaps if you get the wrong angle of impact with the gates. They don't get it. The temperature at the start of the Thomas Inneson Memorial Slalom, 34 gates on the East Meadow Trail at Bromley, was reportedly 5°, but the wind made it feel some indeterminate multiple colder. This is the 25th year the Bromley Outing Club has organized this race, and experience shows. Both races started on time, course maintenance and timing were flawless. No tricks to the course. Wide set, more turns than a country road, a nice see-saw rhythm. Snow was packed powder, perfect for recreational skiing-and there was the rub. Skier by skier the ruts grew deeper and this race turned into the Battle of the Trenches. One racer quipped, "I could have gotten down it faster if I'd had a sled."
They opened up the set on the second run, straightening out the line so the same 34 gates skied about 3 seconds faster. But still the troughs developed early, and by the time the Class 8 men started, skiers were bushwhacking their way through parts of the course and there was nothing consistent about the surface except its unpredictable inconsistency. While the course looked innocuous on inspection, at speed the rolls exacted a tricky balance between pushing and sucking it in. Many misjudged the angle of approach and speed going into the final flush and got snarled up in it.
Spectators were again wowed with a Super Seed, a spectacle of the randomly dangerous, of gymnastic feats of athletic brinkmanship, and of plain physical brutality, in which the head to head proximity of the 10 best racers amps up the level of competition. Football is a rough sport, which is why we use words like "crushed" and "pounded" and "kill" when we talk about it. But the general population fails to appreciate that slamming again and again into a slalom gate while your body center simultaneously battles gravity and centrifugal force, your knees act as pistons, your legs jostle to both maintain balance and propel you forward in timely bursts of speed, all while your mind scrambles to process information about speed, angle and force and make split-second judgment calls, is not a wholly different experience from banging your head into the viciousness of a snarling brute on the other side of the line again and again. The average person, if he ached in places the way ski racers do after a slalom run, would go to a hospital and get checked out. John Pierce, who slammed into the flush combination and windmilled at alarming velocity into a resounding head plant that left him queasy and spectators gasping said, "No big deal."
Class 2's Matt Aeschliman skied brilliantly. Skiing very near the end of the field on a course that looked like a demilitarized zone, he managed the 3rd fastest time in the 1st run, and earned himself a position in the Super Seed--where he held onto his position. New York State's Class 7 Pepi Neubauer, who consistently bedazzles with his style and speed, controlled the second place slot. But he was not a match this day for Class 5's Bob Hill, who bolted full throttle from the start gate with the offensive intensity of a defensive end rushing the quarterback, and whaled his way to victory with almost a full second lead.
The women's race was a cliff-hanger too. The three leaders have met before, as all three have consistently been in close contention for the SISE Cup championship. Last year's SISE Cup winner Jessie McAleer had about a tenth of a second lead over Lisa Densmore (a perennial winner) after the first run, with 2001 SISE Cup Champion Carolyn Beckedorff about eight tenths out in third. A competitor who remains cool and draws strength from the challenge of coming from behind, Lisa corked her second run to ease into first place by two one hundredths of a second. Carolyn held onto third. New York State's Class 1 Lauren Bennett whacked her way through the course for 4th. And joining New England Masters this season, all the way from New Jersey (well, okay-by way of Austria first, which explains a lot), a skier likely to put pressure on the leaders in the near future, was Class 2's Annelease Fejan.
Part of the weekend's entertainment package now is the guided tour before each race (and New England Masters gratefully acknowledges Andrew Keith for this suggestion). For those of us who see ourselves as works in progress, these tours are an invaluable bonus feature-free pointers from some of the best skiers in New England, many of them former US Ski Team members. For those who believe they have it all dialed in, the tours offer the benefit of a second expert opinion. But perhaps the best bonus of all is the pleasure of shared libation in the company of fellow combatants, a celebration of life enhanced by a raffle, wherein Chance rather than skill determines the victors, enabled by our sponsors Atomic, Buchika's Ski Shop, Florian Tools, Denby Pottery, Artech, Swix, and Mogul Mountain Travel.
Stratton is one of the longest GSs on the circuit, and if you're not in shape, the body sends up a distress flare about two-thirds of the way down the course. Many racers gasped for breath at the finish, unable to frame coherent sentences until they'd stabilized their heart rates. Conditions were near-perfect for racing, and after a precarious little pitch at the top, the course established a turny rhythm, using the fallaway line to test skiers' ability to diagnose and ski line. General consensus was that the first run skied slow, that the exhilaration experienced felt more like the childhood elation associated with a roller-coaster ride than the giddy thrill engendered by speed. The second course opened it up-still safe and controlled, of course--but let 'em roll.
The win went uncontested to Stratton Mountain's Class 4 Scott Hardy, who blitzed the field by more than 4 seconds. But the real race was for second place, and if Saturday's race was the Battle of the Trenches, Sunday's race was the Clash of the Titans, and here was a story. New York State's Class 7 Pepi Neubauer, who won this race outright in 2001, faced a formidable opponent, also in Class 7, Dorin Munteanu. Both men ski at such a rarefied level they tease perfection, with supple grace coupled with explosive power and an economy of line, their skis undulating over the snow in a way that confuses the senses with the irrational impression that they never touch the snow yet never leave it. They were separated after the first run by a World-Cup-style microtime measurement of nine one-hundredths of a second. Not far behind the sensational sevens was Class 5's awesome Bob Hill, a tenth of a second behind Pepi on the first run, two one-hundredths ahead of him on the second, for a valiantly defended fourth place on the day. Only about 3 tenths behind Hill, clearly within striking distance, was Class 4's Jim Harding. Dorin attacked the second course with vivid focus and retained his lead among this group to finish second. Harding held onto fifth.
The woman's race was again good enough for TV coverage. Class 6's Sally White (and Class 6 had serious depth this weekend, with New York State's Barb Settel and seasoned competitor Meg Nutter) established the lead in the first run. Jessie McAleer put pressure on her, pulling into the finish area a little over a tenth of a second behind. New York State's Lauren Bennett finished a clean run in close contention, and Lisa Densmore, who did a Bode Miller and lost a couple seconds, is always a threat. A pernicious little patch of ice coming off the top pitch gave a lot of skiers a problem in the second run, and one bobble lost the race by one deep breath, eight one-hundredths of a second, for Sally White. Jessie McAleer emerged the winner, her third SISE Cup victory this season.
There was some serious competition for this year's Janeway Cup, an award bestowed since 1945 on the fastest male and female racer over 40. Eight of the top ten male finishers were over 40; 5 of the top 10 women finishers. The names to be engraved on this year's cup will be Sally White and Scott Hardy.
Arguably the real champion of the day, his victory blared by the announcer to half of southern Vermont, was Rodney Aller. Eight-six years old. "Well," remarked Aller, "Guess I'm not going to be able to pass as a boy any more." Ski racers are indeed a hardy breed of individuals, possessed of an ornery optimism ("It's not about real confidence," says Barb Brumbaugh, a tough competitor with the enthusiasm of a cheerleader and the survival instinct of a Navy Seal, "It's about having the courage to pretend you have confidence, attacking each and every run.") and, male and female alike, a kind of clannish machismo. Ski racers appreciate and respect speed, but they revere grit. Hard to explain to other people the calculus of the tenacity of spirit of a ski racer, or to try to quantify the rewards of years of training, blown knees, broken bones, and frost bite. It's an equation of character so elaborate that the computer program has yet to be devised to evaluate all the variables, and the sum of the parts will never add up to the whole-because there's still no way to compute the power of dreams or to explain how the magic of the sport gets integrated into the persona to the point where the hard part becomes not doing it. |