As the chair lift climbed over the only relatively flat stretch of what will be the 2002 Olympic men’s downhill course, Snowbasin Ski Area publicist Dave Smith was explaining how the course came to be known as “Grizzly.” It had to do with a bear that called the Snowbasin area home.
“When Chad Fleischer took a look at this run, he said he wanted to be Grizzly Adams and turn the course into Gentle Ben,” Smith said.
Fleischer, a U.S. downhiller, is among the elite skiers who will make their first attempts at taming the course in World Cup races beginning Friday. The two downhills and a Super-G are test events for next year’s Winter Games.
It won’t be easy, for this downhill also could answer to the name “Grisly.” It definitely is a bear of a course.
From the flat section, called John Paul Traverse, the view to the start a few hundred meters up the mountain is vertiginous.
The racers will begin from a point where the course falls away at a 75 percent grade. In the 8 to 10 seconds before they reach John Paul Traverse, their speed will be up to 80 m.p.h. It could be even faster were it not for having to turn at “control gates” meant to slow the skiers so they won’t fly off course and land in Wyoming.
“I liken it to dropping into an elevator shaft,” veteran skier Dean Perkins said. “It gets your attention in a hurry.”
Perkins, a member of the U.S. team at the 1950 World Alpine Ski Championships, has been skiing Snowbasin since 1946. He has skied all the great downhills of Europe, including the Streif at Kitzbuhel, Austria, and the Lauberhorn at Wengen, Switzerland.
“This is the only course I’ve seen that could compare to them,” Perkins said. “Some parts of it are perpendicular.”
Grizzly is 1.9 miles long, with a vertical drop of 2,987 feet from its start at 9,288 feet above sea level. The top men will run the course in about 1 minute 40 seconds, making it the shortest downhill in Olympic history. Stefan Eberharter of Austria led Wednesday’s training run in 1:42.69 under conditions, with new snow and warm sunshine, which slowed the racers.
Each second will be an adventure.
“It just never stops,” said Daron Rahlves of the U.S., who was fifth at the world championship downhill in Austria this month. “No time to relax.”
Rahlves had the 11th-fastest training run Wednesday.
The end should be especially dramatic. The racers will emerge onto RendezVous Face, where the angle of descent reaches 77 percent as the finish line approaches.
Bobbing and weaving: It was no surprise that a two-woman bobsled driven by Jean Racine of Waterford, Mich., won the second race of the pre-Olympic women’s test event last weekend at Park City, Utah. Racine and partner Jean Davidson won five of the six World Cup races this season.
The surprise was that a sled driven by three-time luge Olympian Bonny Warner finished second to Racine’s third in the first race at Park City. It was the first time Warner had been the fastest U.S. sled in her two years as a bobsled athlete.
Warner proved it was no fluke by finishing second to Racine in the second race. That gave Warner, a United Airlines pilot, and partner Vonetta Flowers, an assistant track coach at the University of Alabama-Birmingham, silver medals in the final three World Cup races of the season.
Flowers, 27, doesn’t have to worry about getting time off to push a U.S. sled. Her boss, UAB Athletic Director Herman Frazier, is a vice president of the U.S. Olympic Committee and won two medals in track at the 1976 Montreal Games.
Back to the future: Warner will return to her sledding roots by competing in the luge national championships March 3-4 on the Park City track. She isn’t trying to make the 2002 Winter Games in two sports, but Warner figures there is an important link between the two.
“The top four drivers on the [women’s] World Cup this year all came from luge backgrounds,” Warner said. “Why not take it a step further: If luge training helped me become a better bobsled driver, more training on a luge could help even more.”
Like the luge racers who tested the Olympic track in early February, the women’s bobsled competitors found it relatively easy.
“It’s a push athletes’ track,” Warner said, meaning the start is more important than driving technique along the course.
Globetrotting: Beginning with the long program at last year’s Grand Prix Final and ending with the second long program at last weekend’s Grand Prix Final, Irina Slutskaya of Russia has beaten Michelle Kwan of the United States in eight of the last nine sections of figure skating events where they met–long programs, short programs and qualifying rounds. But Kwan won the one that counted most, the long program at last year’s world championships. Beating Slutskaya gave Kwan her third world title. . . . Good news for Picabo Street. The oft-injured 1998 Olympic champion had the third-fastest time in a Wednesday training run for Saturday’s downhill at Lenzerheide, Switzerland . . . . Pole vaulter Svetlana Feofanova, 20, of Russia set her second European record of the indoor season Wednesday in Athens. Feofanova, the 12th-best vaulter in the world last year, cleared 15 feet 3 inches, just 2 1/2 inches off the world record Olympic champion Stacy Dragila set last week.
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E-mail Philip Hersh at phersh@tribune.com
