Vancouver: The "S" Words

I made it up to Whistler on Sunday in time to see a little Alpenglow on the peaks above the downhill course, a kind of football jersey benediction in advance of the men’s downhill. As night fell, the temperature dipped below freezing, offering hope that the lower half of the course would be relatively firm. Racers prefer that a course have the consistency and Mohs rating of marble. They won’t find that on the hill Monday. The ski technicians for various teams will have spent much of the night in their laboratories, trying to get their racers’ boards to glide as efficiently as possible across the many varieties of snow they will traverse in the three-thousand-foot descent. To the ski techs, especially the sleep-deprived ones, a race is a little like a dramatic reading of an Eskimo dictionary.

Here’s a Valentine to a well-regarded ski tech, Heinz Haemmerle—Lindsey Vonn’s guy Tuesday—by Nathaniel Vinton, a reporter for the Daily News, a paper that, like any other, doesn’t have nearly enough space in its pages to nba jerseys accommodate his enthusiasm for ski racing. (Hence his nifty Twitter feed, a boon to those of us similarly afflicted, two hundred and six weeks out of every four years, by such indifference.)

Every Winter Olympic sport, come to think of it, involves, either solely or in part, manipulating and maximizing the movement of a man-made conveyance across some kind of frozen water. And the conveyance, apparently, must begin with the letter S: ski, skate, sled, stone.

As for Cypress, which hosted a rousing men’s mogul final Sunday that did indeed look pretty sharp on TV, the lamentations of soccer jerseys the media seeped, unsurprisingly, into the coverage in the local papers. A Vancouver Organizing Committee spokeswoman apologetically referred to Cypress as a “special child”—the kind that’s good looking and a lot of trouble.

Today at Cypress, there’s the men’s snowboard cross. I’m rooting for Nick Baumgartner.