(me having fun at Bogus Basin as a little person.)
It seems to be coming up a lot recently. How to make ski
racing more fun. Let me first establish that I have a lot of fun at what I do.
I enjoy ski racing and I find that the sport, at its best, gives me a blissful
joy that cannot be matched doing anything else. However, ski racing is not
always fun and fun is not why I do it. We as a society teach our kids that life
is not always fun. I haven’t heard people trying to solve the problem of high
school dropouts by trying to make school more fun. We don’t try to make the
workplace more fun. But athletics, well if you’re not having fun at all times
then suddenly there are big problems.
It seems interesting to me that we put athletics up on this
pedestal, a seeming utopia where there only exists fun and joy, and we participate
under this cloud where we don’t even realize we are working. I can’t speak for
everyone else but I know I am working when I am working and most of the time it
is not fun. When I am doing circuits until I literally can’t see straight in
the summer I am not having fun. When I am packed like a sardine in the back of
an airplane surrounded by people I am not having fun. When it’s twenty below
and I am in full strip at the top of a course where the wind is blowing
sideways and now we have a course hold because you can’t see down there but my
clothes are at the bottom I am not
having fun.
Last year I went to Europe. I spent approximately 57600
seconds flying to Europe and back. I added up all of my times from my races
last year in Europe and the total number of seconds came to… wait for it…
520.66 seconds (about 8 and a half minutes). The ratio: 110/1. I spend 110
seconds cramping in the back of an airplane for every one second on a racecourse.
And that doesn’t count time spent in the van on two lane roads winding through
the back woods of central Europe. At a race in Spital I spent approximately
four hours at the start waiting for a fog hold that never ended. They counted
the race but I was listed as a DNS1. This means that I spent 14400 seconds waiting
for a fog hold for 0 seconds of racing. I think you can do that ratio.
I am not saying that ski racing is never fun but as far as sports
go it has many aspects that make it an unlikely candidate for “most fun sport
in the world.” I mean you are talking about a sport where you literally throw
yourself down a mountain in who-knows-what-weather in spandex and boots that
don’t fit. People used to ask me “are those suits warm?” No, they are not warm
-- do they look warm? Furthermore we have endless amounts of equipment and we
have to tune it for one to two hours a day. If I had a dollar for every time
someone said “why can’t we just be swimmers” in the tuning room I could pay for
my ski career.
Everyone talks about all of the life lessons people get out
of ski racing but people still think about fun when they think of keeping kids
in the sport. I am not sure we can make it this sport fun enough for all the
kids out there who are only looking for fun to continue to do it. I believe
that we should focus on the principles kids learn: hard work, responsibility,
time management, self-respect, and focus. Kids learn to buckle down for what is
important, they learn to live with other people, they learn to push their
limits. I believe that if we help focus on these things kids will stay in the
sport not because it is fun but because it helps shape their identity and they
believe that ski racing is critical to who they are.
excellent.
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