Kickin and Glidin

Lake Placid, N.Y. is a town de­fined com­pletely by the 1980 Olympics, and for most Amer­i­cans, those Olympics are syn­ony­mous with the US-So­viet “Mir­a­cle” hockey game. But for Nordic skiers, Placid, as it’s called, is the site of some of the best-known ski trails in the East — be­cause clearly the 1980 Olympics in­cluded Nordic rac­ing, biathlon and Nordic com­bined (cross-coun­try rac­ing and ski jump­ing) events as well.

So this past week­end, Saint Lawrence Uni­ver­sity hosted the sea­son-open­ing car­ni­val in Lake Placid. All four ski­ing squads — men’s and women’s Nordic and alpine — bused to Placid Thurs­day af­ter­noon in order to pre­pare for races on Fri­day and Sat­ur­day.

We were dis­ap­pointed to re­al­ize that the drive was long enough (about three hours) that we wouldn’t get to pre­view the course on Thurs­day af­ter­noon. Typ­i­cally, we like to spend as much time on the course as pos­si­ble be­fore the race, be­cause know­ing the ter­rain is re­ally im­por­tant to ski­ing ef­fi­ciently. Sim­ple knowl­edge of the way a climb is ta­pered, the way to quickly ski a cor­ner or where the snow might be firmer or softer can shave sec­onds off your race. And while sec­onds may seem in­signif­i­cant over a 10-kilo­me­ter race (which takes about half an hour), they cer­tainly add up. Just ask the guy who loses by 0.4 sec­onds – it hap­pens all the time.

But I di­gress. Blips in the pre-race sched­ule aside, we showed up Fri­day morn­ing well rested from a great sleep in Crowne Plaza beds (and well-fed from their all-you-can-eat pasta bar, which must have been a los­ing propo­si­tion for them this time around).

On a day of clas­sic rac­ing, the first and most im­por­tant task is to fig­ure out which kick wax to use. For non-skiers: When clas­sic ski­ing, you pro­pel your­self for­ward by kick­ing your ski down­ward/back­ward in a run­ning-type mo­tion. For the ski to stick to the snow and give you trac­tion, you apply sticky kick­wax to the sec­tion under your foot, which only touches the snow when you kick down­wards. There are hun­dreds of waxes, each for dif­fer­ent con­di­tions. Find­ing the right one can be dif­fi­cult, to say the least.

Luck­ily for us, fresh snow in Placid meant easy wax­ing con­di­tions, and we could focus in­stead on the race it­self. And it paid off. Dart­mouth men put four guys in the top 10 – Sam Tar­ling ’13 came in sec­ond, Eric Packer ’12 came in fourth, I came in sev­enth (best car­ni­val fin­ish to date!) and Nils Koons ’11 came in eighth. Un­for­tu­nately, spots one, three, six and nine went to our biggest rival, UVM, and they took the race by a score of 131 to 123 (points are awarded to each team’s top three fin­ish­ers).

Women’s Nordic and both alpine teams had tur­bu­lent days, so after Day 1 we were a dis­tant sec­ond to UVM, which had strong show­ings across the board.

Sat­ur­day brought us a 15K skate race on a dif­fer­ent trail, this one flat­ter with more “rolling” ter­rain. Over time, each skier de­vel­ops a keen sense of his fa­vorite con­di­tions. For ex­am­ple, lighter skiers tend to favor loose, pow­dery snow, which gives them an ad­van­tage over heav­ier guys who have more trou­ble push­ing off ef­fec­tively. Smaller skiers also tend to pre­fer courses with lots of climb­ing, though there are cer­tainly ex­cep­tions to this rule too.

Placid’s fresh snow made the skate course soft and flat — chal­leng­ing not be­cause of big climbs or tech­ni­cal de­scents, but be­cause of long un­in­ter­rupted sec­tions with no down­hill for re­cov­ery!

Ap­par­ently this suited our team well. Dart­mouth men snagged spots two through five — Packer, Koons, Scott Lacy ’13 and Tar­ling in that order. It was AWE­SOME to see “DAR” so much at the top of the re­sults page. With UVM tak­ing the win (which comes with bonus points), they kept it close and we took the race 132 to 126.

I think my fa­vorite part about the week­end was that five out of our six car­ni­val skiers scored for the team (i.e. placed in the top three for Dart­mouth), which show­cases our im­pres­sive depth.

After solid per­for­mances from the Nordic women and the alpine team, over­all we ended up an un­com­fort­able sec­ond to UVM. It was our first car­ni­val loss since 2008 — not fun to be a part of, for sure. But men’s Nordic came away proud to have split the two races, and we look for­ward to chal­leng­ing them again next week at Colby Car­ni­val.