Anyone dig skiing?

Speaking of downhill....the only one to watch is Franz Klammer. You may have use the "way back" machine though. The single most impressive run I've ever watched.

 

Yep, I love the winter Olympics and remember watching that live. I can't remember who was announcing that race (I think it was Dean something, he did a lot of ABC winter sports) but his call of the race made it even more exciting. That's what hooked me on the downhill.

 

Midwest skier . Raced NASTAR . Moved to Aspen . Took me a month to get used to the altitude .
Moved back to Chicago 5 years later . Went to a demo day @ Indian Head right when Parabolics came out .
Instead of trying those, I went with some 203's . Ended up beating the course setters time . My one and only Gold NASTAR medal

 

Grew up skiing-racing 50-60 days a year in Banff Alberta, moved to Whistler and skied (instructed)150 days a year through my 20's and 30's. Pretty much over it now and prefer to be on track 80-90 days a year.

 

Did some racing when I was in HS and college. Think it was USSA then. It was an experience for me on how serious people took it. Probably the same as the kids motorcycle racing series. At the races, the whole family would be on the hill 'pit crewing' for their kid. At least two pairs of skis for each event that were different lengths. Scrape, brush, re-wax, re-sharpen between each run. Everyone one the current year ski, and a few hot racers on prototype stuff. And then there was stupid old me, with 1 pair of couple year old GS skis in a length that worked well enough for both GS and slalom course. Never could threaten the guys on top, but it was fun anyways. I wasn't eating and breathing ski racing like they were.

 

Vinko Bogataj caused me to avoid skiing.

 

Jim McKay?

 

Did some research, it was Bob Beattie. I posted the original run in the Youtube thread.

 

Big fan of Bob . I managed a pizza place outside of Aspen . Bob's office was right down the street . Talked with him numerous times . He never had to pay for a pizza as long as I was working

 

For many years he didn't know he was on TV every week in the USA.

 

Did the pizza place survive?

 

It did not . But not because of Bob's crew getting free pizza once a week .

 

I just spent a week up at Whistler. On my day with the instructor we talked a lot about the similarities between offroad and skiing. Great x-over training.

 

Just curious...ever run into Ted or Bode family on the hill? Those 2 guys were a notch above the rest.

 

Ligety? I've skied with him. He's younger than I am, I never competed against him. Well, more accurately at the same time as him.
But I've skied with him at PC. He's nuts, or was at the time 15ish years ago.

 

This was in Winterpark over Christmas. I was on my second day on my brand new Burton Process. 45 years old and can still cruise over my age in mph no problem. My 15 and 22 year olds still can’t go as fast as the old man. Then we hit powder for 5 days straight and I couldn’t get anymore good high speed runs. Just had to play in the trees for the second half of the trip

 

53 mph on a snowboard

You cray cray

 

Just so we can all reflect on how much difference there is between real ski racers and us, I'll share a funny story. One winter during the 80's, I was skiing at Aspen a day or so after a World Cup downhill there, and the snow fences were still up, and the top was open, and nobody was stopping anyone from going down the course--it was open to skiing. I thought, hm, I've got to try this, so I basically just pointed them downhill at the lodge and took off. The course was just as it had been during the races, frozen solid like pavement and very, very steep (like pretty much all of Aspen), and I very quickly was accelerating to a speed I was definitely not comfortable with, and eventually I thought two things--one, these guys are seriously crazy, and two, I should bleed some speed off right now. Trouble was, with the surface frozen solid, slowing down wasn't exactly an easy thing to do. Eventually I did get off to the side of the course, and find some snow with just a little traction in it, and I found a way out of the run, with my fantasies of trying a World Cup downhill now well behind me. Not unlike a weekend warrior motocrosser trying an AMA Supercross track--seemed like a good idea, but wasn't.

 

The water injected snow is insane. These guys are hitting near 100 now. Without the right ski prep it’s hopeless.

 

I don't think so. He would have been racing world cup then and not wasting his time on our dinky hills out east. There was some other probably college age guy who was an easy second ahead of almost everyone. Heard he managed top 5 in one of the seasons at a national event. Super nice guy.