Jim Holland
Ford Sayre Ski Club
Austin, TX, / Park City, UT
jimh@backcountry.com
In the summer of 1993, we spent some time working in a wind tunnel in Buffalo, New York. Some of our discoveries may seem obvious now, such as the fact that flattening your skis in the air leads to a dramatic improvement in lift. In flight, when ski jumpers cock their ankles with the tips apart, most will experience that the skis are naturally angled (not flat with respect to the oncoming air). This results in less effective surface area which equates to less lift.
There were far fewer regulations at the time, so I began tinkering in my basement workshop, crafting plexiglass wedges with a stone-grinder to mount underneath my bindings. This flattened my skis in flight but made for an awkward feeling in the inrun where my knees came together (note Andreas Goldberger and other top jumpers at the time were knock-kneed in the inrun, I wonder why!).
This led to my next idea: twisting the soles of my boots so that the outer toe turned down. For this I devised “The Bootalater,” involving two thin boards sandwiched together. The top board had jigsaw cut outs for the toes of my boots while a wing-nut on each end of the boards clamped the sandwich together, holding the boots securely about 10 inches apart. When I then tied the laces together at the top and applied some mild heat with a hair dryer, I got the desired effect – a sole with a mild twist.
Fast forward to the pre-Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway at the end of November 1993. The Europeans were dominating the sport as usual. I figured if I couldn’t reach the top on skill alone I was determined to innovate my way up the ranks, Bootalater in hand!
The night before our first official training, I clamped my boots into the contraption and hung them on top of an old-school metal radiant heater. “Perfect,” I thought innocently. “I don’t have a hair dryer, but this should do the trick.” The heater was luke-warm which seemed ideal to impart a mild twist but as I slept peacefully, it cranked up with a vengeance and got scalding hot.
After breakfast the next morning, I returned to find that the soles of my boots were radically twisted. Given only one pair of jumping boots I sensed that was in for an interesting morning. I got dressed, gathered my gear, and with a vague feeling of foreboding, made my way to the top of the hill. I hoped the old adage, “More is better,” would apply.
As I awaited my turn for my first official training jump, the airplane anemometer on the knoll began to spin. The jumper who preceded me, Lasse Ottesen, was ushered on and off the bar as the TD looked for a window where the wind fell below 6 m/s. Eventually there was a lull and Lasse made his jump. (He would go on to win the silver medal on the small hill).
I was up. The northerly Nordic wind only grew stronger. As I waited for conditions to improve, I was conscious of my warped boots causing strange pressure-points on my feet. After an interminable 10-minute hold, with no change in the wind, the stoic starter signaled for me to slide out on the bar. Curiously, the light switched immediately to green! Normally I craved headwind, but this wasn’t one of those times. This was clearly not the time to experiment with jacked-up equipment. But, like a soldier, I dropped my skis into the track and let go of the bar, boots twisted and headwind blasting.
I tried to focus calmly on technique, entering the air smoothly, chest low. But like I’d stepped on a hoe, both skis hammered me in the shoulders, and then in a flash, my left ski rebounded and dove for the dirt. Over the handlebars I went… a textbook perfect freestyle Daffy!
A cracked clavicle and a sprained ankle earned me a six-week hiatus before the Olympic trials, during which I had plenty of time to contemplate the degree to which more is always better! Looking back on this experience with some wisdom of years (and some mountaineering debacles under my belt), the moral of the story jumps out at me: there are times when it’s appropriate to back down, turn around, and live to fight another day.
