In the sneak-a-peek world of the Winter Olympics, better lock up your luge, cover up your mogul moves and, when it comes to Hannah Teter, put up your dukes.
Teter, an 18-year-old snowboarding champion, isn’t one to divulge her dopest tricks – at least not without a fight.
“Top-secret information,” Teter says in her sly shredder’s voice. “If you want to know, we’ve got to battle.”
Less than four months before Turin’s opening ceremony, cold-weather events already are crawling with snoops hoping to see their rivals’ sicker spins or slicker sleds. On the flip side, many Olympic athletes are shielding their gear and their game plans as though they are guarding, well, gold.
Simply put: Sports spies are putting the “shhh” in schussing.
“As far as espionage, that happens. You never leave your sled unguarded,” says Brian Martin, an American luger.
While many luge athletes from around the world are chummy off the track, “people will come and be interested in what you are riding – the shape of the edge you are riding on,” Martin says. “It’s not malicious, but there is an interest level. You want to know what everyone else is doing and you don’t want them to know what you’re doing.”
Equipment upgrades that snip precious time from racers’ runs always invite prying eyes. Innovators in the Netherlands invented clap skates in the mid-1990s, helping Dutch speed skaters set records at the Winter Olympics in Nagano but leaving Team USA temporarily flat-footed. During other recent Games, sports scientists also have unveiled fluorocarbon “waxes” to quicken downhill skis and high-altitude simulators to energize low-country athletes.
But leaps in game-day creativity have come even faster. Bigger spins, twirls and grabs boost snowboarding, figure skating and aerial skiing to new heights. At the Turin Games, some halfpipers are expected to bust out “back-to-back 1080s” – a combination of jumps, each involving three complete rotations above the snow. That’s the scouting report from 2002 gold medalist Ross Powers.
“We’re at most all the events, like every weekend during the winter, so we’re always seeing the new stuff. Practice days at the events is where stuff happens,” Powers says. “You’re seeing the new tricks going down. And once someone does it, you’re going to have to try it.”
Sure, it’s tough to keep secrets when everyone is warming up on the same hill or halfpipe. But a few aerial artists, like Jeremy Bloom, try to save one wrinkle for just the right time.
“I have a new trick in my back pocket I’ve been working on, kind of a wild card,” says Bloom, the World Cup moguls champion. “If I have to do it, I’ll do it.”
Bloom, of course, won’t say more. He doesn’t want his own creation drawing mountainside cheers for a mogul rival in February.
But that could happen in freestyle aerials when Team China takes its turn on the slopes. This past summer, Chinese athletes were invited to train with the American freestyle ski team on water ramps in Park City, Utah.
“They eye what we’re doing and they try to mimic what we’re doing, then they develop their own styles here and there,” says American freestyler Joe Pack.
“Every style they have comes from myself, (or from U.S. teammates) Eric Bergoust and Jeret Peterson. They’re watching us and saying, ‘These guys are at the top of their game, so let’s watch them and see how they do it.”‘
Of course, familiarity also can uncloak some sporting mysteries – while adding fresh layers of anger.
The U.S. men’s bobsled team, for example, has built such a rivalry with the Germans, they sometimes crank German music to motivate them in the weight room.
At the hockey rink, the Canadians and Americans already have clashed five times in 2005 and likely will duel again for gold in Turin. U.S. women’s hockey coach Ben Smith doesn’t need a scouting report so much as a vacation from his Northern foes.
“When we get down to it in a couple of months, it will be pretty much back to playing in the mirror – stymie here, checkmate there,” Smith says. “We try to play a cat-and-mouse game with them. But they know what our tendencies are and I think we have a pretty good idea of what theirs might be.”
Smith then stops and smiles at his assessment. It’s safe yet pithy without giving away any secrets.
“Slippery game,” Smith adds. “And it’s played on ice.”
Staff writers John Meyer and Kevin Dale contributed to this report.
Bill Briggs can be reached at 303-820-1720 or bbriggs@denverpost.com.
