Last week, the men of the U.S. Ski Team concluded their annual preseason training camp in the awe-inspiring Andean hideaway of Portillo, Chile, and for the first time since leaving the team last March, Daron Rahlves missed being with them.
“Great downhill training, great training for every event – but you also get some good free skiing,” said Rahlves, recalling Portillo memories from his home in Sugar Bowl, Calif. “That was a highlight. That trip was awesome.”
For the first time since the early 1990s, Rahlves didn’t have to spend his summer following a strict Ski Team training regimen. He did a lot of motocross racing, mountain biking and surfing, but hasn’t been in the gym since the end of the ski season. This month he will compete in the world’s richest marlin-fishing tournament in Los Cabos; next month the Baja 1,000-mile motorcycle race.
“From here on out, I won’t miss anything until Beaver Creek,” said
Rahlves, who captured two of his 12 World Cup victories and five of his 28 podium finishes there. “Race days are the days that are going to be tough, but now I have my own competition days to get focused for.”
Rahlves hasn’t retired from skiing. This winter he will compete on The Ski Tour, a new four-stop domestic circuit that will pass through Breckenridge and Aspen in February. Each stop will showcase skier-cross racers (Rahlves, Casey Puckett, Zach and Reggie Crist) who previously raced on the World Cup, and halfpipe freestylers (Tanner Hall, Simon Dumont, C.R. Johnson). Skier-cross most likely will be added to the Olympics at Vancouver in 2010.
“It’s basically to bring skiing out of the hole, bring it to the people and let people attach to it,” Rahlves said of the tour. “We’re trying to draw the best skier-cross athletes, the best halfpipe athletes, and have them involved in one tour. I think it’s going to be a great thing.”
Since leaving the World Cup as America’s most accomplished downhiller, Rahlves has insisted he was merely “transitioning” to other forms of skiing, not retiring. The Ski Tour addresses two of his long-held gripes about World Cup racing – too few opportunities to compete in the U.S. and abysmal marketing.
“It’s followed really well over in Europe, but in the U.S. it’s only every four years,” Rahlves said. “We get a lot of attention for our sport if the Olympics are coming up. The X Games is huge – it draws a lot of people – but other than that, there’s no tour in the U.S. We have one week out of the year, Beaver Creek for World Cup, we draw a good crowd of people for that, but there’s not enough time spent exposing the sport.”
Zach Crist, formerly an ordinary World Cup super-G racer who has flourished on the free-riding scene since leaving the ski team in 1998, sees The Ski Tour as a vehicle to showcase the evolution of the sport.
“A lot of the creative innovations are coming from freestyle,” Zach Crist said. “It’s got a really huge cultural following behind it. That’s the part of the sport that’s most healthy right now. Racing has a nice look in a contemporary form like skier- cross, but the truth is that it has a much more edgy and contemporary look with this new- school element of having a halfpipe involved. It really showcases a lot of the innovations that have been made.”
The man behind The Ski Tour is Kipp Nelson, a former University of Colorado racer who serves on the board of the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association. He sees the tour as a way to bring different elements of the sport together in a festival environment with big-name bands and bonfires to create a celebration of the skiing lifestyle.
“Part of what I feel is missing in the sport, if you look at the 10 million skiers who are out there, is that too many of them don’t really feel any of the competitions represent what they’re doing,” Nelson said. “It’s too remote. For them, it’s about skiing, it’s about the lifestyle, the great weekend, the fresh air, the après ski and all that stuff.
“What we want people to see is a bigger lifestyle thing they all associate with.”
The Ski Tour might even become an avenue for Rahlves to return to the Olympics in skier- cross, although he is committing himself one year at a time.
“I’m excited because it’s new motivation,” Rahlves said. “It’s a way for me to expend some competitive focus and energy. Just to completely drop off from racing, 12 years on the World Cup to nothing, just free skiing, wasn’t really going to do it for me. … I think this is going to be the biggest thing to happen for skiing and ski competition in a long time.”
The Ski Tour
Skier-cross and halfpipe
Sun Valley, Idaho: Jan. 11-14
Breckenridge: Feb. 1-4
Aspen: Feb. 22-25
Squaw Valley, Calif.: March 8-11
