Snowboard March Update
Paralympic Update!
This update is coming to you from Cortina, Italy, at the Paralympics! Both Coach Adi and I are here with the US Team, working to bring home some hardware.
We completed Boardercross the other day on a pretty rough course that saw a lot of serious injuries in training. After extensive changes to the design, we were left with a course that was a lot safer, but unfortunately, it removed a lot of what makes Boardercross so exciting to watch. However, it did make for some intense racing – without the bigger jumps, it was a sprint to the finish and in many races it came down to the final section of course and through the finish, which made for some pretty spectacular crashes in the final turn.
In her first games, Kate Delson had an amazing race, trying to catch and pass into first place, but couldn’t quite get it done, bringing home the silver medal. Kate has been on fire all year, and it was good to see her mixing it up with the more seasoned racers. Veteran Brenna Huckaby was making her way through the field when the competitor in front of her fell off a jump, and Brenna narrowly avoided her but lost speed in the process and ended up in the small final, ultimately taking 6th place. Jackie Hamwey, also in her first games, brought home 7th place. And Joe Pleban brought home an 8th place along with a broken wrist sustained in a crash in his final heat. 
Then, after some very warm weather that was threatening the event, the Banked Slalom race was moved up a day to happen on the best day in the forecast. On the absolute best course the Paralympics has ever had (and perhaps the best course we have ever seen in the World Cup) our riders put in some pretty amazing racing. In this race, its the best of two runs, and after the first run, we were looking awesome with Kate in first place and Brenna in second place. They did some coursework and heavily salted the course, which increased the speeds considerably and we started seeing times creeping faster and faster, ultimately bumping Kate and Brenna down a spot. But then each of them improved their times, with Kate taking the Gold Medal and Brenna bringing home Bronze. Jackie Hamwey finished in 9th, and Joe Pleban just outside the top 10 in 11th place.
It’s been a crazy season for our athletes leading into these games. We had several athletes battling to gain a spot on the US Paralympic Team – fighting against their own teammates for limited spots. But the outcome of this internal competition is that all of our athletes have improved and are looking stronger than ever going into next season. This will be especially important for the women, as next season they will separate two categories that have been combined for the past several years. The LL1 category, containing riders who are more disadvantaged, will not be competing with the less disadvantaged LL2 category, so next season we should see some especially strong results from our athletes – a lot to look forward to.
For anyone who hasn’t watched the Paralympics, I would encourage you to check it out – not just to see our own athletes but because it’s really good racing.
Big Mtn Snowboard:
This last month, the team and I entered the bulk of our competition season. Everyone has managed to find themselves on a podium at least once or twice. More important than the results have been the scores and the lessons learned. Everyone on the team is finding their competitive strengths, working on their weaknesses, and hungry for more. I’d like to say that competing in these conditions has been challenging, but anyone who competes in IFSA events religiously knows that the conditions are rarely good. As of now, five of our riders are above the qualification cut line for Junior Freeride Championships.