Telemark skiing showcased this weekend

Three very different types of people converge on the ski hill each day to play: skiers, snowboarders and telemarkers.

Of the three, most would agree that telemark skiing is the “red-headed stepchild.” It is the minority on the hill, it has yet to be recognized as an Olympic sport, and there’s a World Cup telemark event happening here this weekend with nary an ESPN camera anywhere.

Regardless, the sport seems to be growing rapidly. Sports shops report that telemark gear is the fastest growing segment of their equipment sales. I wonder why skiers and snowboarders are choosing to be beginners on the hill all over again so they can learn to telemark? It’s so much harder to do both technically and physically.

For one, freeing your heel really is liberating, and even though the mantra “free the heel, free the mind” sounds corny, there might be a ring of truth to it. Secondly, the learning curve is much shorter now with the stiffer, plastic boots and shape skis.

Most importantly, everyone has different preferences and this gives us more choice. I watched my friend switch from alpine skiing, which he had been doing most of his life, to telemark skiing and within two years, he was a much better telemarker than alpine skier. Another friend, a snowboarder, and the last person I thought would do it, is learning to telemark. It’s fascinating to watch the lines being to blur of these different sports along their subsequent stereotypes.

World Cup telemark racing will take place at Schweitzer today and through the weekend. The best telemark racers in the world are here representing 12 countries.

Telemark racing truly elevates the profile of the sport with a race course that combines the skills of alpine, freestyle and nordic racing. The Classic and the Sprint Classic courses start with a series of gates, followed by a jump, a reipelykkje (pronounced rap-uh-LOOSH-uh), which is a gate with a banked turn around which racers make a 360-degree turn to enter the cross-country skate section, typically 50 to 200 meters long.

I was swept up in the excitement of racing when I entered the U.S. Telemark Nationals last year. I know nothing about running gates let alone going off a jump, but I liked the complexity of the course. As for the jump, I just closed my eyes and hoped for the best.

So why isn’t it an Olympic event?

Paul Lamb, vice president of racing with the United States Telemark Ski Association (USTSA), attributes that to a lack of standards on an international level. “These are very advanced athletes, but organizationally, we need more rigid standards for entrance to national teams and for gate judging,” explained Lamb. “There are so many variables in the elements of the race and we need to be able to offer these standards before we will gain acceptance.”

Until then, for all you Olympic hopefuls out there, practice those jumps and running gates in clinics offered at all our local areas. And remember the old saying, “If it were easy it would be called snowboarding.”