ASPEN — Freeskiing icon Tanner Hall and downhiller-turned-skicross racer Daron Rahlves have buried the hatchet. Nearly five years after their famous smack-talking squabble, the country’s fastest skier and the most aeronautically gymnastic skier have found common ground as they shared training tips and competitive strategies at the Oakley house party Wednesday night.
It was 2004 when Hall, in a pique of churlishness, was quoted in Freeskier magazine dissing ski racing as “easy.”
“Get me on a downhill, and I’ll make it to the bottom . . . but you put any ski racer in a pipe, and he won’t even drop in,” Hall said.
Rahlves, an eight-time World Cup champ, fired back: “I want to see him strap on some 215s. He couldn’t even turn those things, couldn’t even ski a clean arc on those things.”
Late Wednesday, the Red Bull-amped and sponsored duo praised each other’s talent. Hall called ski racing “a different art form.” Rahlves told how he was “blown away” the first time he saw X-level skiers in the halfpipe.
“It’s all about being a smart competitor,” Hall said, noting how he gauges his competitors — and ultimately his plan of attack — during training runs. And he asked Rahlves: “You guys ever start tripping, like ‘Oh, that guy just killed it in his training run!’?”
“Oh, yeah,” answered Rahlves. “They step it up to the next level, and I know if I don’t push it, I get dropped right there. Just like you and Simon.”
Simon Dumont and Hall have an ongoing and longstanding duel for supremacy in the halfpipe.
“It’s a beautiful thing,” Hall said. “He’s the one dude who makes me so much better.”
Parsons zooms to gold.
Joe Parsons thumbed his way to gold through three races Thursday night in the snowmobile speed and style final, winning a close finals race against Levi LaVallee, whose audacious goal of harvesting four gold medals this X Games was whittled to three.
Now in its second year, speed and style is establishing itself as one of X’s most vibrant contests, with head-to-head slednecks thumbing through a meandering course of jumps and berms. Riders are judged on both their airtime style and speed and race head-to-head in three races.
The jumps hurl the two-stroke machines skyward, and Parsons, from Yakima, Wash., owned the air. Parsons, 20, a rookie pro snowmobiler with a couple of freestyle world records to his name, threw back-to- back hands-free backflips in the final, edging LaVallee. Cory Davis, a 19-year-old from Alaska, took bronze.
White’s surfin’ horror story.
Snowboarding was one nosebleed from losing Shaun White. When he was 6, he showed some aptitude standing up on his boogie board.
“So my dad’s like, ‘You are going to be a surfer,’ ” White said.
So Roger White went out and bought his boy a surfboard. A big board. A hard board.
“He sends me down this wave and I’m like, ‘No, it’s too big,’ and he says it’s perfect and he sends me down this wave,” Shaun said. “I pitch over, and after being swirled, I can’t even come up, and I come up and the board hits me in the face, and there’s blood everywhere and I’m like, ‘I don’t ever want to do this again.’ ”
Jason Blevins, The Denver Post
