Suey shapes Schweitzer after Olympics
When you watched Jeret “Speedy” Peterson pull off his amazing “hurricane” during the men’s Olympic freestyle aerials on TV, you could hardly tell the wintry setting was a manmade illusion.
Brad Suey, a 45-year-old freestyle veteran from Saco, Maine, managed to create a world-class venue on a mountain that had no snow. After a month building and maintaining the Olympic site at Cypress Mountain near Vancouver, British Columbia, he traveled directly to Schweitzer Mountain Resort to create the stage for Yoke’s Outrageous Air Show tonight and Saturday.
The extravaganza of aerial acrobatics and fireworks starts at 6 p.m. in the village with a torchlight parade on the slope. Jumping starts at 6:30.
Suey, a former freestyler on the Canadian national team, flies off his own jumps in the show. He’s performed all over the world and works as “Chief of Course” at Canadian World Cup freestyle competitions. He said the 2010 Olympics were the most challenging assignment of his career.
“Nothing else comes close,” he said “That was the granddaddy of them all. There was no snow on the mountain and the resort was closed. All transport and cat access on a mountain depends on snow. It was the first time ever I had sky crane helicopters dropping snow on the course and mining trucks dumping snow in the finish area.”
Suey said helicopters flew in snow from a big stockpile stored on the shady side of the mountain. Trucks hauled in snow from Mount Washington about 200 kilometers away. He arrived at Cypress on Feb. 1. The site went from dirt to gleaming snow sculpture in two weeks, just in time for Olympians to start training.
“Typically at a World Cup you get three days of training at the site, plus a few days of competition,” he said. “We doubled that at the Olympics. The ladies trained at 10 in the morning and they guys trained at 6 at night. Our course took the worst beating of any of the sites there at Cypress.”
Suey used some clever innovations to maintain the integrity of the freestyle course. His crew designed a built-in refrigeration system that helped offset unseasonably warm temperatures.
“We shaped the jumps around 4-inch tubes, four per kicker,” he said. “Then we loaded the tubes with dry ice before capping the jump. We built test jumps about half size, putting the tubes in at different depths to see what happened. If they were too close to the surface, they would create too much ice. If they were too deep, they wouldn’t help, so we found a balance.”
For on-the-spot repairs during training and competitions, Suey discovered a handy accessory: fire extinguishers.
“I remembered watching an outdoor hockey game at Fenway Park in Boston and I saw them patching the ice with fire extinguishers,” he said. “I thought that might work, and it actually helped.”
Suey’s jump site at Schweitzer is about half the width and half the length of the Olympic freestyle course.
“The snow here is awesome,” he said. “I wish I would have had this snow for the Olympics.”