With ski cross, the best take no prisoners

Aleisha Cline is a snow leopard learning to change her spots as she mounts her skier-cross comeback. Since withdrawing from competitive sport five years ago, Cline, one of Canada’s most well-rounded athletes, has focused on raising a family in Squamish with her husband, mountain biker Shamus March.

Five months after giving birth in May to her second child, Asia, she was back on the prowl. Smiling large, Cline related “In August, I felt like a bag of bones going downhill at the Continental Cup in Australia. But I won, which was a big surprise to me. I figured I might as well keep going.” Interviewed during training at Cypress, the four-time Winter X Games ski-cross champion admitted that an unforeseen challenge was learning how to flip the switch from “mommy to meanie” mode on race day.

Cline’s current quest? Nothing short of a gold medal at the 2010 Olympics. That’s the only bauble not yet on display in her trophy cabinet of ski and mountain-bike honours. On February 6, she took the next step toward achieving her goal at the Freestyle Grand Prix events that previewed Olympic action on the aerial, mogul, and ski-cross courses at West Vancouver’s Black Mountain in Cypress Provincial Park. She won.

Like short-track speed skating, ski cross features fast, furious, take-no-prisoners action among four competitors simultaneously plunging downhill. National alpine ski team alumnus Chris Kent, event coordinator with the B.C. ski-cross team, stated what it takes to thrive in this fledgling Olympic sport: a “diffused focus” frame of mind. “You need a wide view to see the whole group, like Gretzky on a hockey rink, with eyes in the back of your head. Champions like Aleisha look for a hole in the midst of the flow. Once she gets out in front, nobody can pass her.”

When Kent likened ski cross to a “slow-speed downhill”, he meant that racers are launching off jumps and absorbing gravitational forces in banked corners at speeds of 60 to 70 kilometres per hour, far slower than the then-world record 215 kph that Cline clocked at a speed skiing competition in France in the 1990s.

Her talent for gliding across both snow and air has served her well. But skill is not all that’s needed to triumph these days. “The girls are really dirty now, pushing and grabbing. They’ll skate into you!” she lamented with a regretful nod to a more chivalrous era. Funny what being elevated into the global spectacle will do to a once tightly knit, fringe sport family.

In Kent’s experience, cussedness has been a hallmark of men’s ski cross since the sport’s inception in 1994. “When I entered my first ski-cross race at Whistler, I got in the gate next to [American ace] Daron Rahlves. He stuck his pole in front of my ski and I was on my face before I knew it. Such a rip-off!”

Despite that still-smouldering memory, Kent said he’d definitely compete if he were a decade younger. “People who do well in this sport have strong alpine-race backgrounds and stand tall, like Stan Heyer,” in reference to the national ski-cross team member who spanked Rahlves in the final heat to win last month’s Winter X Games ski-cross crown in Colorado.

That rivalry is sure to play out again on Black Mountain. That’s where ski-cross and boardercross course designer-builder Jeff Ihaksi recently gave me a guided tour. The Whistler-Blackcomb millwright draws on his snowboard-racing background “to get a feeling for what the athletes want and how the course should flow by maximizing aspects of the topography. You build using the mountain.”

Ihaksi shaped his first boardercross course a decade ago at Whistler’s World Ski and Snowboard Festival. By 2006, his talents were in high demand in Turin, where he sculpted the inaugural boardercross Olympic course. This season, the 35-year-old is designing all the World Cup cross courses, though he takes pains to credit his team of groomers. In a tradition originated by a Canadian ice maker at the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, Ihaksi predicted there will be more than a few loonies buried among the run’s rollers, tabletops, berms, and Wu-Tangs.

At a viewpoint that took in both the Lions and Howe Sound, Ihaksi pointed out where the starting gates will be positioned. Cypress’s Upper Forks Trail plummets in steep, tight turns—“B.C.–style”—then unwraps from the forest into a wide-open, X Games course that favours gliders. “Skiers making air in a corner is one of my favourite sights. No matter what feature I throw at them, they’ll master it.”

Think that Cline didn’t know that? -

Follow Aleisha Cline’s blog at www.aleishacline.com/.

Here’s her account of events leading up to her victory:

“Official training started on Tuesday and on the second run the first big double finished off my shins and I was done for the day.
I suffered through the next day of training with a few quarter runs, watching how the course ran.

On Quali day, I opted out of any training runs at all and had my first run under the clock…
I finished 10th! That had been my best finish in a world cup thus far. Honestly, I was quite happy with the result and decided that if worse came to worse it would end up a top 15 at the end of the day, but I’d do my best to make it to the second round!

Well, I went through the 1st and 2nd round finishing both rounds in second place behind the french skiers, Ophelie David, World Champ was in the second round. I mentioned to her before the race that we hadn’t race together in at least 4 years, I think it was in Torino at the World Champs, I was both excited and nervous to start the round with her in it!

To make a long story longer, my starts had been fast all day and in the 3rd round I got out just ahead of Ophelie and safely made it to the bottom ahead of her. She wasn’t very happy and made it know to me at the finish….She should have passed me if she didn’t like skiing behind me!

The final round brought Ophelie, Ashlegh, Karin Huttary [Note: see News post on Karin elsewhere on jc.com] again I was first out of the gate and kept my focus on being first off the double and into the turn. As the race progressed through the second turn and off the 3rd jump, I heard some screaming and hoped it wasn’t something I did, watching the video that evening, it wasn’t.

Near the bottom Ophelie miss judged the step down step up combo and flew upside down and landed quite hard banging her head. She seemed OK at the finish but was shook up and not very happy.

…and the final outcome was that I finished my 40th day of skiing (in 5 years), my daughter’s 9 month birthday and the first ever Canadian held World Cup Skicross event on top of the podium!”

Text CR Jack Christie
Photo CR Louise Christie
Original Article