Whistler’s Rozsa rules at Rossland wins slalom title as birthday present A cream pie in the face and a gold medal on the podium: you can’t have more thrills than that when you’re Edith Rozsa, it’s your birthday and you’ve just captured the national senior women’s slalom, Wednesday, at Rossland. The pie came from the boyfriend, but Rozsa earned the gold with a 1.42.42 time, edging Jennifer Mickelson of Collingwood, Ont., out of the gold by a mere .13 seconds. The Red Mountain event saw Marie Joelle Clement, of Montreal, take third. Defending champion Melanie Turgeon ,of Quebec City, was third after the morning’s first run, but skied out of the course with the finish line in sight on her second run. "Talk about having your cake and eating it, too!" Rozsa said after the race. The course was extremely difficult where several days of virtually non-stop rain tested the race organizing committee to get the Face of Red run in shape. "Conditions were difficult but I’m glad they got the race off even with the fog and rain," Rozsa said. The course workers did a good job of preparing the track. The difficulty was seeing the terrain. "In fact , you couldn’t see much, you just had to feel the course under you and negotiate it that way," Rozsa said. Mickelson was happy with her second-place finish considering that most of her season was lost due to a knee injury she got while preparing for the season-opening World Cup downhill in Lake Louise. "Everybody thinks of me as a downhiller, but I ski all events," Mickelson said. At 18, she still races as a junior. "If you improve in one discipline, it seems you improve in them all. I made the national team this year on the strength of my slalom," Mickelson said. Other Red Mountain race events were washed out of their mid-week slots. The Mopar men’s and women’s downhills will be this weekend, no thanks to the weather.
