Steamboat Springs – Four months ago Bill Demong became the second American to win a world championships medal in Nordic combined. Now he’s trying to develop the next Bill Demong.
In a perfect world, the U.S. Ski Team would be holding summer development camps for aspiring Nordic combined skiers to identify and groom talent for the future, just as it primes the alpine pipeline.
But the ski team isn’t doing that, so Demong decided to fill the void. He has brought together 10 prospects for a 10-day camp in Steamboat, overlapping with a U.S. Ski Team camp. He lined up a good deal on a condo, purchased $1,000 worth of groceries, and scrounged some more food from local restaurants. The Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club loaned a van.
The kids train on hot asphalt with roller skis and ski jump on plastic at historic Howelsen Hill. They get to see how Demong trains and show ski team coaches what they can do. They will celebrate the Fourth of July by competing with ski team athletes in the Steamboat Ski Jump Extravaganza.
“I really believe the years you’re 16, 17, those are the magic years,” Demong said. “Those are the years where you can take a kid who is not jumping great or skiing great and get them fired up, get them training a little bit and they can make gigantic changes, mentally and physically.”
Demong recalls a similar camp in 1996 at Lake Placid, N.Y., when he was 16.
“I was by far the worst kid on the ski jump at that six-week camp,” Demong said. “After two weeks I started to figure something out. By that winter I won almost all the (junior) jumping competitions. It was like magic. This is the age group I really felt like we needed to get to.”
Two years after that camp, Demong made the first of his three Olympic teams. Now he and Steamboat’s Johnny Spillane are the only Americans to win world championship medals in nordic combined, and they form the core of the team building toward the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.
“I really believe in the legacy we started,” said Demong, who includes Steamboat’s Todd Lodwick in that legacy. “We need to keep this going.”
Faced with limited resources, the ski team concentrates funding where it can get the most for its investment. That means alpine racing and, increasingly, cross country skiing. There are 12 medal events in cross country, as opposed to three in Nordic combined, so the ski team braintrust plays the odds and pushes cross country.
“The ski team is in the business of producing medals, not necessarily (from) these guys,” said Dave Jarrett, an assistant coach on the U.S. Nordic combined team. “We don’t have enough money even to do everything we want to do as a team, let alone do something like this.”
Demong and Jarrett started talking about the development camp during the world championships in Sapporo, Japan, where Demong won a silver medal.
“Our hands are pretty full,” Jarrett said. “We had talked about doing something like this, but Bill was the one who took the bull by the horns and said, ‘OK, I’m organizing this and doing everything I can to help them out.”‘
There are only three places in the country where Nordic combined can thrive – Steamboat, Lake Placid and Park City, Utah. Demong is organizing camps in Park City (August) and Lake Placid (October).
“I came into it not expecting a whole lot and I’ve gotten a lot out of it,” said Michael Odernheimer, 15, of Park City. “I think it’s definitely going to improve my skills.”
Steamboat’s Taylor Fletcher, 17, hopes to join his brother, Bryan, on the ski team. Demong’s camp is giving him a sense of where he stands.
“It’s awesome because it gives the opportunity for everyone in the nation to train together, the top athletes from each division coming together and seeing what everyone else has got,” Fletcher said. “I like it because our (Steamboat) group is smaller and it gives us the opportunity to train with other people.”
Demong likes to call the U.S. Nordic combined program “a small sport in a big country,” but he believes there are more medals to be won. Some might even say he’s helping to keep the sport alive in the U.S., but Demong opts for modesty.
“I don’t know if I’d go that far,” Demong said. “I’ve got 10 kids in a condo.”
Staff writer John Meyer can be reached at 303-954-1616 or jmeyer@denverpost.com.
