The competition was as good as the beer at Beaver Creek last weekend, as mountain biking’s best battled on the slopes and Oktoberfesting spectators hoisted their steins to the dusty racers.
Like brats and ale, the annual village party and Jeep King of the Mountain 2006 Mountain Biking World Professional Championships blended well, with both the men’s and women’s races delivering speedy passes, scary crashes and surprising upsets.
The course combined giant slalom, banked turns, tabletops, gap jumps and rollers in two parallel courses.
Brian Lopes, a 17-year professional mountain biker from San Clemente, Calif., took advantage Sunday of the course he designed to edge Czech Republic phenom Michal Prokop, whose second-place finish earned him the season series title.
The women had veteran champions Jill Kinter of Seattle and Australian Katrina Miller in the final. In their first heat of two, Kinter spectacularly spilled over the bars on the rolling gap jump near the finish, forcing evasive maneuvers from Miller, who narrowly missed her downed friend. Kinter sat out the second heat, delivering victory to Miller. But defending champion Kinter’s top finishes in the series’ previous two stops gave her the overall title.
FREESKIING
U.S. Open moves to Copper Mountain
After nine years in Vail, the U.S. Freeskiing Open is moving east to Copper Mountain. The patriarchal event of jib skiing, the open’s first slopestyle comp, pipe and big air contests have served as launching pads for new-school luminaries such as Tanner Hall and TJ Schiller. With a $60,000 purse – one of the fattest in jibdom – the 2007 showdown from Jan. 17-21 promises to again lure the best of skiing’s aerialists. It also delivers a good glimpse of what’s to come the following weekend under the brightest lights at Aspen’s Winter X Games.
POWDER SKIING
Steep-and-deep aces get more runs
Hidden within the millions resorts are spending on swanky villages and fancier cafes for the upcoming season, the state’s steep-and-deep seekers are getting a worthy slice of the real goods. Silverton picked up 164 acres, eliminating the brutal 20-minute hike called Stairway to Heaven and opening even more gnar for Silverton’s rabid powder hounds. Beaver Creek is dropping the ropes on 180 acres of super-steep shots in the Stone Creek drainage. Those Stone Creek Chutes are short – 400 to 600 vertical feet – but they deliver. The tree-trimmers at Aspen Highlands have been busy this summer, opening some 30-plus acres on the flanks of the mountain’s ballyhooed Deep Temerity lift. And a new triple chair at Winter Park will zip up the backside of the powder-stashed Parsenn Bowl, eliminating the lengthy traverse through groomed greenland to get back to Vasquez Cirque. The resort has gladed 76 acres and seven new trails on the backside of the secretive Parsenn, which will further gird Mary Jane in her aggressive quest for Colorado’s best treeskiing crown.
ULTIMATE
U.S. dominates in junior worlds
Americans love to throw the disc. As the birthplace of ultimate – the “ultimate sport,” a sort of disc football – it’s not so surprising that America’s young disc flingers swept the men’s and women’s titles at last month’s 2006 World Junior Ultimate Championships in Massachusetts. In the first world contest on American soil since 1998, the American boys crushed the 2002 world champion Canadians 17-7. The American girls defeated the 2002 and 2004 world champion Canadians 14-13. The final point lasted more than 25 minutes.
