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As Kermit said, it’s hard being green

By G.D. Maxwell Ski jumping is to skiing what rocketing over the Grand Canyon on two wheels is to motorcycling… spectacle. Yeah, yeah, it takes skill; it takes talent; it’s a sport, whatever that means.

By G.D. Maxwell

Ski jumping is to skiing what rocketing over the Grand Canyon on two wheels is to motorcycling… spectacle.

Yeah, yeah, it takes skill; it takes talent; it’s a sport, whatever that means. And, most important of all, it’s an Olympic ™ sport.

But the sad fact is, if it wasn’t an Olympic™ sport, it would probably have been relegated to its rightful place in the pantheon of outdated sports.

Ski jumping, like so many other Olympic™ sports, are simply historical anachronisms, woefully out of place in any modern concept of sport and, one suspects, retained only as make-work projects for the two or three companies in the world licensed to build the overpriced facilities needed to carry them out. I suspect if some industrious investigative reporter scratched deeply enough she might find a member or two of the Olympic™ Family™ involved in the firms that make the things.

All of this is important, of course, in light of the startling, night-follows-day announcement recently that the Calgary Olympic™ Development Association has decided to pull the plug on the formerly world-class, Olympic™ ski jumping facilities built for the 1988 – wow, talk about your ancient history – Calgary Olympics™.

The announcement from CODA came hard on the heels of the 2010™ Vancouver Organizing Committee musing about weaseling out of its everlasting legacy to build and fund permanent ski jumping facilities in the Callaghan valley.

There are at least several conclusions one might draw from these developments.

One may conclude Olympic™ organizing committees, development associations and other bodies bearing august-sounding names and having something to do with the fatuous five-ring circus have serious difficulties with the meaning of simple English words. Or, one may conclude they simply lie through their teeth. Or both.

One may, equally easily, conclude the permanence of a legacy, at least in Olympic™ speak, is transitory. A temporary or vapourous legacy, if you will.

Or, one may simply conclude ski jumping is a ridiculous, expensive, facility-intensive sport that is of little interest to anyone other than the dozen or so athletes who want to pursue it – and the several dozen people making at least part of their living administering it – and ought to be re-examined in light of today’s reality, that is, in light of what people in the 21 st century actually do when they strap skis onto their feet.

Either way, it makes a mockery of the International Olympic™ Committee’s and, closer to home, VANOC’s marketing noises about holding greener, more eco-friendly, yea, even more sustainable Olympics™.

But if we were to take a serious look at the most anti-green aspects of the games – not to mention "sports" we could do without – we would have to look no further than the dinosaur sports of luge, bobsleigh and skeleton.

In the beginning, as is the case with so many other sports that have become overblown in both price and infrastructure through the mindless application of technology, luge was simply an outgrowth of tobogganing, a simple, fun, yes, even childish delight. Having been founded long before mechanical refrigeration was invented, luge, and later bobsleigh, were races run on manmade courses carved into glacial ice or constructed on mountainous terrain once freezing weather set in.

The last existing natural bobsleigh track in the world celebrated its centenary a year ago on New Year’s day. Built every year in St. Moritz, the Olympia Bob Run is created by a dozen or so craftsmen from South Tyrol in Italy. They pack up their tools, kiss their families goodbye and trundle off to Switzerland where they craft the course in about three weeks time out of 5,000 cubic metres of snow. Seventeen hundred metres long, the track is one of the fastest in the world. It still hosts World Cup events. It is the bob equivalent of a wooden rollercoaster in a steel world.

When spring rolls around, it melts.

Talk about your sustainability.

By comparison, construction will begin this year on the 2010™ bobsleigh track on the side of Blackcomb Mountain. No one knows for sure what the 1,400 metre long track will cost. Best guesses are upwards of C$50,000,000. It will not be constructed out of 5,000 cubic metres of snow.

It will be constructed of steel, concrete, miles and miles and miles of refrigeration tubes – don’t worry, the ammonia never leaks – designed to cool the concrete surface to minus 11°C, cold enough for two inches of ice to be formed when water is sprayed over the surface. There will also be a twisting, blacktopped road constructed alongside the course so that sleds and drivers can be shuttled from the bottom to the top.

Aside from its nosebleed cost, if the track is anything like the Salt Lake Olympic™ track, it’ll suck down about 4.5 megawatts of electricity during peak load, which is to say, when it’s making ice. Given the relative mean temperatures of Park City and Whistler, it seems safe to say the track at Blackcomb will be at least as energy hungry.

By comparison, the peak energy demands of both Whistler and Blackcomb mountains when everything’s running full tilt, is about 6 megawatts. In other words, this simple open-air frozen food trench will gobble better than two-thirds the energy it takes to run everything else on both mountains.

Like Kermit said, it’s hard being green.

Imagine, for a moment, the marketing coup for Whistler, VANOC and the IOC – itself always in need of positive image repair in the absence of any true reform – if enlightened minds decided to construct a temporary bobsleigh track back on Blackcomb Glacier. Instead of three or so years to build, we could invite the Italians over and let them build it in three weeks. Instead of a bazillion dollars, it’d cost pocket change. Instead of sucking enough energy to power a small town, it’d take nothing to keep it icy other than avoiding a couple of weeks of rain to the top. What are the chances, eh? Forget last week.

And instead of being an eyesore in perpetuity, a legacy waiting to be abandoned, a development that might jeopardize a real green project – a run-of-river power project in Fitz Creek – it’d melt gently into the glacier sometime in August. Or not, in which case it’d be one helluva terrain feature in 2011.

With the money saved, we could ferry the sleds and drivers back to the start line by helicopter and still be multimillions ahead. That is, we could choose that fuel-intensive method if we didn’t choose to build a temporary rope tow to accomplish the same thing.

Of course, that still doesn’t address the question of why we cling to these sanitized non-sports instead of replacing them with something that doesn’t require an $80,000 toy to compete in and/or a multimillion dollar track to compete on. Losing ski jumping and luge/bobsleigh/skeleton would do more to rehabilitate the image of the Olympics™ than just about anything short of banning professional athletes, conspiring judges, cheating coaches, bribes to IOC members and performance-enhancing drugs.

What could they be replaced with? Something that has currency and meaning in today’s mountain sport reality. Gelandesprung, for example. Or big air. Or skier-boarder jousting.

Or snowshoe volleyball. All the thrills, 10 per cent of the costume.