Skiers and snowboarders ramp up their game in preparation for 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics

Once pariahs on the slopes, freestyle skiers and snowboarders are ramping up their game to prepare for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.

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      If people want to understand why skiers and snowboarders spin and flip through the air, they have to try it for themselves.

      “You’re going to fall a bunch of times,” Mercedes Nicoll told the Georgia Straight, “but do it. There’s this sense of fluidity in the air—it’s just smooth.”

      When Nicoll first dared a run through one of Whistler Blackcomb’s intimidating terrain parks, she had plenty of inspiration to draw on.

      “I moved back to Whistler when I was 12, and there happened to be a halfpipe on Blackcomb right when you got off the lift,” she recounted in a phone interview. “You could see all the pros riding it. I remember, back in the day, when we had the Westbeach Classic on Whistler, and Shaun White and Todd Richards and all those guys would come out. That was really cool.…If that wasn’t there, I wouldn’t be where I am now.”

      Where Nicoll is now is near the top of professional snowboarding. The two-time Olympic competitor placed sixth in the 2010 Games and, more recently, successfully defended her women’s halfpipe title at the 2013 Snow Crown nationals in Calgary. This season, she has her sights set on a podium at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.

      Having Whistler Blackcomb’s terrain parks and halfpipes in her back yard definitely hasn’t hurt those ambitions. “There is nothing like practising in your own country,” Nicoll said.

      Halfpipe and, for the first time at the Olympics, slopestyle competitions are events that draw crowds by the thousands. But it wasn’t until the early 1990s that resorts even allowed these activities on their hills. Jumps and rudimentary halfpipes were largely adapted from natural terrain features and had to be built by the skiers and snowboarders riding them.

      “Times have changed,” said Brian Finestone, Whistler Blackcomb’s park and pipe guru. In a phone interview, he provided the Straight with a little bit of history and divulged something special he has planned for Blackcomb’s “highest level” terrain park.

      “When I saw the spec for the Sochi slopestyle course…I said, ‘Let’s duplicate that,’ ” Finestone revealed. “ ‘Let’s do that a) so that the [Canadian Olympic] team guys can come and train on it if they want to, and b) so that everybody else who can ride that level can test their mettle against an Olympic type of course.’ ”

      Brian Finestone

      He said Whistler Blackcomb gives him the resources to “pretty much do whatever we want”. But it wasn’t always that way.

      “I came out here in the early ’90s as a snowboarder with starry eyes,” he recalled. Back then, Finestone said, he was building halfpipes by hand. Today, he has 15 park-specific grooming machines, a day crew of about 15 staff maintaining the resort’s various parks and pipes, and another team of 12 people working night shifts, building new features to keep regular riders coming back.

      “On a day with good visibility, we’ll see 14,000 descents through the park on each mountain,” Finestone said, “[and] 28,000 terrain-park laps a day.”

      For that, he gives a lot of the credit to Stu Osborne, a Whistler legend who moved to B.C. around the same time Finestone did. With snowboarders still something of a collective pariah on hills that for more than a century were solely the domain of skiers, Osborne wasn’t immediately welcomed by management. But it wasn’t long before he convinced the resort to create a position for him.

      “It was sort of his begging and pleading that got them their first Pipe Dragon [a vehicle used to carve halfpipes],” Finestone recounted. “Then he talked them into buying park-specific grooming machines that had bigger blades, a bit more power, and better pushing capabilities. And over time, it became a line item in the budget, and then it became an entire department.”

      As the money and manpower going into parks and pipes have increased, so has the complexity of the tricks that riders are launching out of them.

      Two-time Rolling Stone cover man Shaun White trained for the 2010 Winter Olympics on the world’s first private halfpipe, which, Finestone guessed, cost sponsor Red Bull something in the neighbourhood of $60,000. That project let White perfect a double-McTwist 1260 (two flips performed while spinning three-and-a-half rotations) that he employed in Vancouver to earn a gold medal. More recently, Simon Dumont’s team used lasers to design a “cubed pipe” at Squaw Valley that sent the U.S. freestyle skier spinning and flipping over gaps at heights of four or even five storeys.

      In 2014, the bag of tricks that 20-year-old Montreal snowboarder Sebastien Toutant will take to the Olympics will include a triple-cork 1440. (YouTube it.) Two of them, actually, he told the Straight by phone from Montreal.

      “That’s the trick you’ll need to win the Olympics,” said Toutant, who’s known to friends and fans as Seb Toots. “So I’m going to try and work on different triple-cork variations to try and have a couple of those in my run at Sochi.”

      Nothing bigger? “We’ll see,” he said with a laugh. “The triple-cork 1440 is a lot of flipping and a lot of spinning.”

      Toutant said he’s going to be working on that up at Blackcomb with the rest of Team Canada’s freestyle skiers and snowboarders. He described Finestone’s plan to replicate Sochi as a “big advantage for our country’s riders”.

      Toutant noted that you can’t practise tricks of the complexity and risk required for a medal run just anywhere. “With the Olympics, it changes the game a little bit,” he said. “Those tricks, you can’t do them on a crappy jump. You need a jump that’s safe enough and big enough to do the rotation right.”

      Toutant is likely Team Canada’s best shot at a Sochi gold medal for snowboarding. For freestyle skiing, there are equally high expectations for Squamish local Mike Riddle, who’s taken home first-place trophies from the past four contests he’s entered.

      On the phone from New Zealand, where he was attending a training camp, Riddle recalled how—just as snowboarders once had to sneak onto ski hills—halfpipes and parks were once no-go areas for skiers.

      “When terrain parks first came out, it was definitely snowboarders-only,” he said. “Skiers kind of had to fight their way in there. You’d go through and get yelled at.” Nowadays, everybody is getting along, Riddle continued. As skiers and boarders train together ahead of the Olympics, he described the full-time job extreme sports have become.

      “Our national-team program is year-round and very intense,” he said. “All summer, we were on the [Whistler] glacier skiing, and now we’re down here in New Zealand and there is gym time and trampolines and air bags—we’re trying to take as much risk out of it as we can.”

      Yet after all that work, Riddle said the sense of accomplishment that comes with learning a trick hasn’t changed since he was a boy on ski trips with his family.

      “When I land a new trick, I’m just as pumped as a kid that’s landed his first 360,” he said. “I just do it because it’s fun.”

      That being said, this is an Olympic year and training schedules are going to reflect the demands of a competition of that calibre. For which Whistler Blackcomb is happy to oblige, Finestone emphasized.

      “Everybody wants to give their athletes the best leg up that they can,” he said. “Mark McMorris and Seb Toots are Canada’s hopefuls this year, and I just want to build them a place where they can come and practise their lines before game day.”

      You can follow Travis Lupick on Twitter at twitter.com/tlupick.

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