Wescott endorses a freestyle approach

loading...

When 20 of the top male snowboard cross racers in the world head to Sugarloaf/USA for this weekend’s Champion’s Cross event, they won’t find a course (nor an event) that they’ve become accustomed to on the world circuit.

And if those riders are smiling at the end of Saturday’s racing – which their host thinks will be the case – they won’t have to look very far to find the guy to thank.

Seth Wescott – Farmington native, Carrabassett Valley Academy grad, Olympic gold medalist, and host of this fledgling event – will be right there beside them, smiling along with them.

The event marks a departure of sorts for the sport, one Wescott and his agent, Peter Carlisle, brainstormed during last year’s Olympic Games.

Wescott and other riders have some concerns about their sport, you see. And who better than the first-ever snowboard cross gold medalist to serve as an agent for changes some say are needed?

“We wanted to step forward in doing something for boarder cross in North America, and really worldwide, to create another platform for people to be able to compete at,” Wescott said Tuesday.

The result: Champion’s Cross Sugarloaf Open, which Wescott hopes will expand from this year’s one event to three to five yearly events in future seasons.

More than $50,000 in cash and prizes is up for grabs, and the winner will take home at least $10,000 and a new Suzuki Motocross motorcycle.

The event kicks off Friday with time trials from 10 a.m. until 2 p.m. Warmups will be held from 10 a.m. until noon Saturday, and the competition will run from noon until 2 p.m. Awards will be handed out at 4:30 p.m. and an autograph session is scheduled from 5 until 6:30.

Among the riders expected to compete are top Americans Nate Holland and Graham Watanabe and a top field of international athletes..

The Champion’s Cross concept is loosely modeled on a freestyle circuit originated by snowboarding legend Terje Haakonsen, Wescott said.

The basic premise: Give the riders what they want.

“When the International Snowboard Federation, which was kind of a rider conglomerate, used to put on events, we really had a good feeling of how it could work when you had a group of riders that kind of governed all the decisions,” Wescott said.

Nowadays, the Federation Internationale de Ski serves as the governing body for snowboard cross racers for much of the year, putting on World Cup events. The yearly X Games are another outlet for riders.

Wescott hopes to add to the offerings in a way that riders – and spectators – will love.

At the Olympics, for instance, four riders burst from the starting gate together and careen their way down a mountain, racing each other head-to-head through corners and over jumps.

At Champion’s Cross, it’ll be even more hectic: Six riders will vie for position during each heat.

And that’s not all.

“One of the things we’re trying to add here is a freestyle type of element, so that during the race riders will have to spin when they’re going over tabletop [jumps],” Wescott said.

In addition, Wescott wants to design a course that gets away from a trend he has seen too much of lately: nondescript layouts that reward riders for their size, but not necessarily their skills or tactics. While Wescott is a fan of the X Games – he has participated in all but the first competition back in 1997 – he said there’s room for improvement.

“The last five years at the X Games it’s been a ‘weight race,’ more or less,” Wescott said, explaining that unless course designers are careful, skilled riders can just point their boards downhill and let momentum take over.

“For the last few years they just haven’t been designing a lot of features to keep you busy on their courses,” Wescott said. “The ‘busy factor’ is definitely something I want to take on here, so you really have to be working to create speed the whole time. That will give people the opportunity to make passes or fall behind if they’re not doing it effectively.”

Unfortunately for Wescott, two things have conspired against him in his quest to stage the perfect race at Sugarloaf.

First, he won’t be participating on his home hill: He shattered his left wrist during a crash at a World Cup event in Japan in February and has a metal plate and 13 screws holding his limb together.

And second, a recent thaw cost him plenty of the sport’s most treasured currency: snow.

“To be quite honest with you, we’re not going to be able to do exactly what I would like to do because of the meltdown we had in snow before this storm last week,” Wescott said. “If we had been able to keep the base of snow we had, and gotten that [recent] storm on top of it, we’d be all set for having the building materials that we need.”

That’s not the case.

But that doesn’t mean Wescott hasn’t been busy helping to design a course riders and fans will love.

“The master plan would have been to conceptualize some new types of terrain features that we could work into racing, and I still want to work toward that when we do these events next year,” Wescott said. “What I’m really going to try to focus on here is having something that the riders are happy to ride, and to be smart about the course design.”

John Holyoke can be reached at jholyoke@bangordaiynews.net or by calling 990-8214 or 1-800-310-8600.