Copper Mountain – The aerial ski stunt is called a Switch-540 – a flashy jump requiring a 1 1/2-revolution twist off a backward launch – and rising-star freeskier Asher Crank had landed it dozens of times.
But as he warmed up for a competition at Copper Mountain on Saturday morning, the 17-year- old missed his timing ever so slightly and under-rotated, landing sideways off the 15-foot-high jump and slamming into the hard snow.
“It sounded like a gunshot,” said Crank’s coach, Ben Somrak, who was skiing just behind his promising student. “I don’t know if it was his head hitting the ground or his ski breaking.”
Somrak, an emergency medical technician, raced to the motionless teen, expecting that Crank would get up in a moment after chastising himself for a silly mistake.
Within an hour, the teen had been rushed to Denver and was undergoing surgery for a fractured skull and brain injuries, but doctors could not save his life – a life dedicated to a high- risk sport in which every jump could be the last.
“Any time your feet leave the ground, there is an inherent danger,” said Somrak, the freeride coach at the vaunted Crested Butte Academy. “Everyone understands that.”
Coaches in the rapidly growing sport of competitive freeskiing – which ranges from steep slopes and cliffs to terrain-park rails and “sick” triple jumps that can toss skiers in the air for 50 feet – say the key is to take gradual steps but that the ultimate goal is to go big.
“I’m still pretty shocked at some of the jumps I see,” said Geoff Stump, a coach at the Aspen Valley Ski Club and a celebrated icon of freestyle skiing, the predecessor to freeskiing. “I’m like, ‘Wow, how’d he do that?”‘
Like many coaches, Stump takes his charges to the Utah Olympic Park, where they first perfect their jumps over water.
Then they land in powder, and when they finally get to the hard-packed snow of the terrain park, they watch others who are familiar with the launches before starting themselves with small, straight jumps before gradually building up to their stunts.
“By the fourth or fifth hit, they may be throwing big tricks. But you can’t just roll into a park and start,” said Stump, who competed in the 1970s and ’80s.
Nonetheless, crashes are common, and injuries are a part of the game.
“I tell the parents who come out for the first meeting: ‘What you’re asking me to do is to teach your child to do these acrobatic maneuvers that are very dangerous,”‘ Stump said. “It’s really dangerous stuff. You’re throwing your body through the air, and if you don’t land right, … you’re in trouble.”
Bob Holme, the innovative terrain-park manager at Winter Park ski area, has helped design a “natural progression” of terrain-park features that start with low-level, low-danger obstacles and escalate to the heights seen in events such as the X Games.
“You can go from 5 to 8 to 10 feet, and then there’s a 12-footer and a 15-footer and an 18-footer and a 20-footer,” he said. “There’s never really a big gap.”
Still, with each advance, the risks increase exponentially.
Wendy Fisher, an extreme-terrain ski instructor at the Crested Butte Academy and a former member of the U.S. Ski Team, said she often is torn between wanting to help kids achieve their dreams of perfecting outrageous stunts and wanting to protect them from the potential consequences.
“You’re always pushing them to a higher level and into a riskier situation. It’s definitely an uncomfortable situation,” said Fisher, who acknowledged that Crank’s death has “really shaken up” a lot of his teammates and is prompting them to rethink their desire for the sport.
Most of them attended a candlelight vigil for Crank on Sunday night, and the community will have a memorial service for him at 11 a.m. Saturday at the Crested Butte Community School.
Crank, a happy-go-lucky kid with a disarming sense of humor, had pretty much cleaned up in the junior-level freeskiing circuit and was set for a breakthrough season as he entered the Copper Series in advance of this week’s U.S. Open, held at the same mountain.
On his third and final warm- up run Saturday, he landed a 540 – 1 1/2 twists off the first of three big “tabletop” jumps – landing backward and zooming downhill at 30 mph toward his final stunt on the second jump, a Switch-540.
For Crank, it wasn’t even a particularly difficult maneuver, and one that was well within his repertoire.
“He’s hit this jump before. He’s done the same trick before, and he’s been fine,” Somrak said. “It’s almost an insult to him that this happened on such a small, routine jump.”
Staff writer Steve Lipsher can be reached at 970-513-9495 or slipsher@denverpost.com.
