Ski Racing, Again, Part 10; March 31, 2018
The U16 Western Region Championships ended last weekend. Very predictably they provided some exciting racing. There were, as expected, some remarkably fast individual racers who were pretty dominant in one or more disciplines. But what was really impressive was the level of skill deep into the start lists. The seeding system used necessarily meant some very skilled people began further from the front than might have been expected. But the result was that even racers with bibs in the sixties and seventies were fast and particularly capable. I was standing with a very enthusiastic ASC coach, Steve Mashburn, during the Ladies' SuperG, and was the beneficiary of his admiring comments about some of these very skilled late starters. "She's really into it. Love how she's into it!" I agreed.
Under "Velocity" Roget's Thesaurus lists verbs that range from vivid to dull in context of alpine racing. They include "speed" and "hurry," and more graphically "run, fly race, . . . , shoot, tear, . . . , sweep, . . . , rush, dash, gallop, . . . , charge, . . . ." And so on. More colloquially, there are "go all out, . . . , go like a bat out of hell, . . . , make tracks. . . ." And indeed, there were a lot of people going like "a bat out of hell." They all seemed to be hurrying. They swept down courses like aggressive angels. They were consistently "making tracks": railroad tracks in firm snow. Pending arrival of the next racer, their tracks briefly memorialized turns that were technically and often tactically ideal. The broad SuperG piste allowed the greatest variation in turn shape and location, so there was a scrim of clean tracks crossing and intersecting and sweeping down the course, curves defined by the mathematics of gravity, strength, ski geometry, and course set. A race run creates tension between what is theoretically ideal and what the racer can achieve; each gate is a challenge that asks "what have you done for me lately"; each course is a summary of arcs and tangents and reality.
Great light, great racing, great effort: what more can you want? For a spectator, nothing more. Thanks, racers.
Here are a few images from the U16s.
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After a lifetime of mainly expressing myself with words, my postings here will mainly rely on images. They will speak for themselves to some extent, but I'll usually add a few comments of explanation. I've taken photographs for decades, since the 1950's, inspired in part by my father's photographic skill. Four years of photo assignments and quality darkroom time eventually gave way to decades of casual and family picture-taking. I re-immersed myself when I left film and turned to digital.