Boulder –
Typically the story goes like this: Ski racer injures a knee, loses a year of competition, misses it desperately and returns with a renewed passion for the sport.
Alison Powers came to a different realization after fracturing her left kneecap in a World Cup downhill crash in 2001. The daughter of Winter Park ski patrollers discovered ski racing wasn’t that important to her after all, setting in motion a series of events that introduced her to a new passion: road cycling.
Now Powers is pedaling her way back to Europe, or so she hopes. Former U.S. Ski Team coach Marjan Cernigoj once described her physical strength as “immense,” and she has shown it in recent weeks, winning both women’s races of Durango’s Iron Horse Bicycle Classic, finishing fourth in a stage race at Hood River, Ore., and capturing the Colorado Time Trial Championship.
“I still have my dream, as I did with skiing, to have a little house in Europe,” said Powers, 26, who raced seven years on the U.S. Ski Team and won a bronze medal at the 1999 world juniors championships. “I want to live in Europe so badly. If I could do it with the excuse of riding my bike, that would be even better.”
People on the circuit say they believe she has a good chance of fulfilling her dream.
“There are no holes in her game,” said Kendra Keeley, a teammate on Powers’ Boulder-based Rio Grande- Sports Garage team. “She can climb with the climbers, she can descend like a ski racer. Some of the people in the race at Mount Hood were saying she was possibly the best female descender in the world. She can climb, she can descend, she can corner, she can sprint.”
Powers’ patella-breaking ski crash happened in Haus, Austria, two months into what was supposed to be her first full season on the World Cup when she was 21. Until it went wrong, she sensed she was having an exceptional run, having won a Europa Cup race there the previous season.
“In my mind, I turned off,” Powers said. “I was like, ‘All right, my first World Cup podium, way to go.’ Well, I still had 10 seconds left on the course. I was in my low tuck, and I forgot about the little jump right before the finish.”
As downhill crashes go, it wasn’t a bad one. Powers landed on her back and her rear end, sliding through a gate panel that knocked loose her left ski. Problem was, that ski struck her left kneecap, breaking it into three pieces. Powers didn’t ski for a year and 17 days.
“That was kind of the turning point,” Powers said. “I didn’t miss the skiing as much as I missed running, biking, lifting. That made me realize maybe there are other things in life besides skiing.”
Shelving the skis
Having grown up in Winter Park, Powers had done a lot of mountain biking in ski training. Post-crash, her knee couldn’t take the “jiggling” of mountain biking, so she bought a road bike and fell in love with it.
She wasn’t ready to quit the ski team, though. Her first season back she skied OK, but something was missing. She didn’t enjoy it as much, and when the season ended her knee required arthroscopic surgery. When she tried to ski after that, her knee hurt.
“It would be totally fine running and biking and doing dryland (training). Then I would ski, and my knee would hurt. Then I wouldn’t be able to run and bike and do that stuff. It was like, ‘If skiing is going to make it so I can’t do this stuff, why am I skiing?”‘
She decided to give it one more season because the World Cup scheduled another race on the slope where she was injured. Traveling over passes in the Alps with the ski team that winter, she found herself wishing she was on her road bike.
“I stuck with it, I had poor results and it was horrible,” Powers said. “But that was my goal, to go back to Haus. In my last run of my last race (there), I was super fast and I missed the last gate.”
That was January 2004. For more than a year, Powers thought her career as a competitive athlete was over. She enjoyed being able to eat what she wanted, riding when she felt like it, staying out late without worrying about a workout the next day.
It’s no wonder she enjoyed the interlude between careers. Ski team coaches say she was one of their hardest workers.
“Alison didn’t have tons of natural talent,” former U.S. women’s downhill coach Jim Tracy said last week. “What she lacked in natural talent she made up for in desire – by a mile. She worked really, really hard.”
In March 2005 Powers ran a snowshoe race for fun with her sister at Vail and finished second.
“All of a sudden I was like, ‘Oh, I still like being competitive, I miss this,”‘ Powers said. “I liked being an athlete. I can’t lie to myself.”
Last summer Powers began entering bike races, winning the 24 Hours of Steamboat and finishing fourth in the 24 Hours of Moab. She hooked on with the Sports Garage team and began seriously racing on the pro circuit this year.
Athletic phenom
Her knack for aggressive descents is no surprise given her alpine background, but her ability to hang with lighter and more experienced cyclists on climbs is harder to explain. It would be easier to understand if her ski career had been in cross country.
“That’s the mystery,” Keeley said. “She must be some sort of athletic phenomenon. Honestly, it doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t know enough about (alpine) ski racing, but it doesn’t seem like it would transfer to endurance sports. For some reason, for her, it has.”
Powers’ goals are fairly modest. She hopes to make a European team as a domestique, a racer who sacrifices herself to help the team leader succeed.
“I don’t get a whole lot of pleasure anymore out of doing everything for myself,” Powers said. “Ski racing is very much all about me, me, me, me. I’m kind of over that. It’d be really fun to work really hard for someone else.”
Nick Howe, co-owner of the Sports Garage, said Powers may be selling herself short.
“My suspicion is that it won’t take her more than a year to get picked up by one of those teams,” Howe said. “Her goal to be a domestique might even be shy of the mark. She may not realize what her real abilities are.”
