A Marriage Made in Ski Heaven!

Deer Valley Resort and Freestyle Skiing share a very special kinship. Besides being a central venue during the 2002 Olympic Winter Games, Deer Valley has – with only two exceptions – hosted yearly Freestyle World Cup events since the beginning of the new millennium. Already in 2003, the resort hosted the World Freestyle Ski Championships and this early February, Deer Valley saw the culmination of this special relation crowned, as it hosted this world event for the second time, an assignment at the measure of Deer Valley’s excellence.

This year, Ski Cross (premiered here in 2008,) was added to the series of events and was contained into an ideal, contiguous and complete freestyle stadium, including both Moguls and Aerials. This unique site configuration for viewing the entire show, combined with the perfectionism that has always been Deer Valley Resort’s hallmark, has made it the freestyle skiing capital of the world and this might be another excellent reason for timing, if you can, your next ski vacation with an upcoming Deer Valley Freestyle World Cup, as competition schedules always allow to combine day skiing with afternoon or evening events watching.

Like many, I love freestyle skiing because it embodies a skier’s expression of his or her on-snow dreams and fantasies; unlike the regimented and sometimes ossified sides of its alpine cousin, freestyle skiing still has a wide open potential for creativity on snow and for pushing even further the envelope of what’s possible. This remains true, even though the athletes’ technical level keeps on growing by leaps and bounds, in all the events that I have watched during these recent championships.

What’s amazing though, is that unlike alpine skiing, in which differences between athletes are often hard to pinpoint, the vast and limitless register of options given to each participant remains wide open and lets the spectator see and appreciate the various styles between competitors and this bodes well for the sport future. Ski Cross is also maturing and showing that it can hold its own as a permanent fixture into the world of freestyle skiing while offering a more diverse and thrilling vision of what’s possible on the snow. Halfpipe continues shooting skiers back and forth, higher up in the air, giving them more time and tricks to impress all of us…

I wasn’t able to see the Slopestyle event, but heard it was one of a kind (another one!) and can only hope that it will earn a lasting spot in the family. This said, I do have a favorite, and it’s moguls. Why? Perhaps I can do it without too many restrictions and can still adapt it to my dwindling technical abilities, slowing reflexes, and practice it on the many runs Deer Valley Resort offers in permanence to its guests. The event that in my view captures the best of freestyle remains the Dual Moguls and was the crowning conclusion of this year’s World Championships. It combines skills and mental pressure, repeated and amplified four times in the space of a short evening, and takes the very best out of the greatest champions. I must say that even though I thought I was cheering the whole evening, the performances I saw left me mentally speechless!

Too lazy to go skiing!

Yesterday was a “blah” day; gray, cold and windy and for a while, I mentally debated if I should or shouldn't go skiing. It's funny what can go inside one's head when one is fortunate to live in a ski resort and is older than 30. For millions of people who claim to love skiing, that should never be a question. For the fewer fortunate ones who can afford to invest in an $8,000 family ski vacation, this is not even an option.

Everyone of the five days in Park City will be a skiing day, period. For me it's different, because I'm a spoiled, lucky one and should be penalized for thinking so lazily. They ought to take my pass away from me for two full weeks! At last, by noon I had decided that I would go skiing after all. I went, braved the apparent dreary weather and had a fantastic time, so much in fact, that while I had promised my wife I'd be home by 4 pm, I had to call her that I was staying for “a little more...”

On-line freedom power

On the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birth, we'll hear over and over that he's the man who managed to break up communism, when in reality, I think it it's more the blossoming of satellite dishes and the reach of CNN into the eastern block that should be credited for the fall of the soviet regime and it's affiliates. The same is happening today with Tunisia, Egypt, and a host of other nations that are still under the grip of some left-over tyrant.

What is triggering all this is the explosion of on-line access and the free circulation of images and thoughts that come from all parts of the world. It's not just social media like Facebook, Youtube or Twitter. It's the availability of news in real-time, 24/7, it's also and essentially the millions of self-declared “journalists” taking pictures and shooting videos from their small cell phones that are popping off the lids of censorship and are allowing direct and unbearable comparisons between what some of us have or enjoy and others don't have access to.

Sure, like Reagan earlier, some politicians will take credit for that, but the reality is that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, among others, are the true reasons for breaking the shackles of tyranny, not our official leaders who can at best react, but seldom anticipate...

Ski-in gastronomy

My niece Christel is a chef. With her husband Gilles, they run “Les Rhodos,” the family restaurant in which I worked as a young waiter, in the picturesque mountain village of Les Lindarets, France, nestled in the heart of the Portes du Soleil, ski interconnect. That's right, in winter their eatery is ski-in, ski-out, so it's no wonder that when she had to officiate as one of French and Swiss chefs representing the dozen Franco-Swiss ski resorts tethered together, and compete in the “Star-studded Snow Culinary Contest” held in nearby Châtel, she had little choice but ski to where the competition was held, just after serving lunch, while her father in law was bringing her utensils and other implements by road to that little mountain town.

This happened this past Saturday, January 29. The rare, thin and bullet-proof snow made her trek over the mountains her biggest challenge of the day as my niece had to tread very, very carefully on the icy slopes. In spite of the dreary conditions, she made it safely to her stove and had barely the time to take off her skis before starting to cook.

All chefs were asked to prepare a dish using the true fera (coregonus fera), a fish from nearby Lake Geneva and the even more local Abondance cheese. Well, lo and behold, Christel, her ski-propelled appearance and delectable dish won the entire Jury (made of some famous French Chefs and food critics) and went on, as the sole female in the competition, to win the contest. Bravo Christel, now email me a portion of your true fera on a bed of risotto!

Freestyle, alpine and the rest of skiing...

For years, freestyle skiing has struggled to gain a respectable spot in the competitive world, but for some strange reasons, it can't appear to gain ground on its alpine sibling in earning the respect and the support it seems it would deserve. This week, the world skiing freestyle championships are taking place right here, in Deer Valley and Park City and the first events have begun amidst arctic temperatures. Yesterday, a French boy and a Canadian girl won the moguls competition, but I haven't heard much about it, even coming from the French or Canadian media. The sport remains underground in spite of its telegenic appeal.

Already offering aerials, moguls, dual moguls, halfpipe and ski-cross, Freestyle skiing just added slopestyle in an effort to “beef-up” its offering. Yet, will adding more events confer Freestyle the recognition and the support it's been fighting to gain over the past four decades? Worldwide, skiing is a tiny industry, both in size and from a participation standpoint, with seemingly far too many families (alpine, cross-country, ski jumping, freestyle and snowboard) and adding more event in one single family seems to me a sure recipe to dilute even more the impact of the sport on would-be watchers, who a sure to get confused and lose interest. That's my two-cent; what's yours?

Too little, too late

Not to belabor the points I've made during my last blogs about Egypt, that evolving situation shows the danger of incremental decisions that are a day late and a dollar short. Mubarak has been a bad boy for quite sometime and America never really sanctioned his stinky behavior. We may have told him we didn't like the way he held elections or put people away, but have never done anything about it.

We were therefore his silent accomplice and when the situation finally deteriorated last week, we should have caught up with it and taken steps that were “over and beyond” the normal call of duty. Our State Department should have made arrangement for a safe passage to some friendly emirate and forced him to board the plane and have him say that he was doing it on his own volition. Instead we've been siting on our hands, hoping for the best or some miracle to happen and soon, we may very well get the worst, just because we didn't want to cut our losses and finally do what would have been the right thing to do. Will we ever learn?

The Republicans' silence

While American foreign policy has treated us with a full display of hesitation and incompetence over the past few days in the midst of the Egyptian revolution, the GOP's big mouth, that only seems to know how to criticize the Obama Administration has remained incredibly silent.

That party hasn't had much to say, because it's even less capable than its Democrat counterparts in understanding foreign affairs and far less liberal when it comes to individual freedom or progressive ideas.It's still stuck in the eighteenth century when it comes to having any kind of timely vision.

While Bush and Rice made declarations that never were in synch with their thoughts, their party remains the unjustified invader of Iraq and the fear-monger of the post 9-11 era. The Republicans have also been the unconditional allies of Israel and those that have most turned their back on the Palestinians when settlements have exploded in numbers, so no wonder that they feel totally helpless and out of constructive or useful ideas. It's the US political party with its head turned towards the past and stuck deep into the sand...