Beaver Creek – Even apart from the fact it’s a place where human beings throw themselves downhill at speeds approaching 80 mph, the numbers are staggering.
It takes almost three months and 25,000 man-hours to build the 1.7-mile Birds of Prey downhill course at Beaver Creek, and that’s if Mother Nature cooperates with sufficiently cold temperatures for snowmaking in a narrow window of time.
Even then, it can all go for naught.
Last year, 4 feet of snow fell during World Cup week. All four races were successfully (if barely) staged, thanks to 60-70 slope maintenance workers and an army of 250-300 volunteers, who labored through miserable conditions day after day to clear the racing surface.
“You spend the hours, the time, the months up here, and you have so many people who come in to work for the event,” said Greg Johnson, who manages the race and events department for Beaver Creek. “It was probably the most rewarding year I’ve had personally, because it was such a struggle. So much snow during the race week, and the team of people worked so incredibly hard to pull those events off.
“We pulled them off by the skin of our teeth, basically. It couldn’t have been any closer.”
Despite the irony of too much snow, they easily could have lost what turned out to be one of the most successful weeks in the history of the U.S. Ski Team. Daron Rahlves won the downhill and Bode Miller finished second. The next day they exchanged positions in giant slalom with teammate Erik Schlopy finishing fourth. Then Ted Ligety earned his first podium in slalom.
“You go through all that, the huge effort, and then you see what the U.S. Ski Team did,” Johnson said. “You can’t ask for a better reward.”
The process begins around Labor Day, when safety nets are taken out of storage, inspected for tears and repaired, then trucked up the mountain and hung. The start of snowmaking depends on weather.
“We’re always under a huge amount of pressure in the middle part of November,” Johnson said. “You usually wait until November 1 to start snowmaking, unless there are some really good temperatures in October. Financially it’s too expensive to make just a little bit of snow, and it’s not responsible in terms of energy. We wait, and then what always seems to happen is we get a week or 10 days of really mild temperatures in November.”
October this year offered about 10 days of especially cold temperatures, giving snowmakers and groomers a nice head start.
“It takes a lot of pressure off,” Johnson said. “Last year their regular daily shift was about 14 hours through the whole middle part of the month. Then it got closer to 20-hour shifts for a while in the crunch time. You’ve got to wait until the weather gets cold, then you make a whole bunch of snow really fast.”
Hard icy surface ideal
On Nov. 5 this year – only 23 days before today’s start of downhill training – crews had finished the upper flat and the steepest pitch on the hill below The Brink. The snow guns were going full blast on the next section down, known as The Talon, while winch-cat operators pushed piles of heavy, wet snow.
Because racers want a hard, icy surface, the snow blown on the course has a much higher water content than the product skied by tourists. Water dripped into the cab of the 26,000- pound winch cat driven by Jeff Dow.
“It’s a lot easier to groom it for the guests because you don’t have as many critical sections where you need a smooth entrance and exit (for racing),” Dow said. “We can get this done in one night (for recreational skiers). To do a final till and have everything smooth for World Cup, it’s a solid week of tilling and micro-managing the course to make it nice and smooth.”
The Talon section is one of the most complicated on the course.
“It’s extremely technical in here, because every turn is different, from a 40-45 degree slope up above us, down onto a road for a second or two,” Johnson said. “Then (comes) The Talon jump, which gives them a compression on a side-hill that turns into a jump. Within about a half-second, they’ve got to get their ski back on the ground and get the right ski loaded up so they can dive (left) down the hill.”
Understanding athletes key
Johnson is a former racer who competed for the University of Colorado in the early 1980s. Knowing what racers can and cannot do is crucial in shaping a terrain feature like The Talon jump.
“You’ve got to understand what they go through,” Johnson said. “If you go too far, it’s unskiable. It goes from a road feature, and you actually go uphill a little bit, it compresses you so your body weight compresses down onto your skis. About the time you get used to feeling that – and that’s only for a split second – then the terrain falls away underneath you and all of a sudden you’re in the air. Within a couple hundred feet, which is not much when you’re going 70 mph – that goes by in a second at the most – you have to get your right foot on the ground and initiate that turn at the right time.”
Below The Talon is a series of turns that comprise the most technical section of the course, followed by an easier section where racers reach top speeds pushing 80 mph, then a series of jumps leading to the finish. Johnson uses an inclinometer to shape those jumps.
“It’s really important that we build them in a consistent manner from one year to the next,” Johnson said. “We sort of build off what worked well in the past. We want to build them to where they’re spectacular and exciting, but not too big for the athletes and thus dangerous.”
By Christmas the nets will be stored, the surface will be groomed to corduroy and one of the world’s best race courses will be turned over to the public.
By the numbers
3 months – Time needed to prepare course
25,000 – Man-hours required
1.7 miles – Course length
2,483 feet – Vertical drop
11,427 feet – Top elevation
8,943 feet – Finish elevation
1 minute, 39.59 seconds – Course record, set by Daron Rahlves, 2003
60.98 mph – Average speed on record run
77.13 mph – Maximum speed on record run
This week’s schedule
Men’s World Cup at Beaver Creek
Today and Wednesday: Downhill training, 11 a.m.
Thursday: Super combined – downhill, 11 a.m.; slalom, 2:30 p.m.
Friday: Downhill, 11 a.m.
Saturday: Giant slalom, 11 a.m., 2 p.m.
Sunday: Slalom, 9:45 a.m., 12:30 p.m.
