If you were looking for one of the nation’s top snowboard cross racers on Thursday or Friday, you were most likely to find them doing some pretty unlikely work.

They weren’t resting up for their Friday time trials or Saturday’s championship heats, nor spending all of their time training on the Sugarloaf/USA course that they’d have to race down.

No, most of the competitors were getting a much more personal look at that bumpy, undulating, serpentine beast.

Farmington’s Seth Wescott, the Olympic gold medalist and Sugarloafer, wanted to provide an event that was rider-driven. He got that … and then some.

“Half the field was out here the last couple of days with shovels, putting their input in,” Nate Holland said after winning Saturday’s final heat and taking home $10,000 and a Suzuki motorcycle. “A couple guys [were] in the [snow] cats with the cat drivers, telling them where to put snow. It was a real rider-inspired course and a lot of us put in five-hour days out here, shoveling and figuring stuff out and manipulating the course so it’s not only safe, but a blast to ride. And challenging.”

Wescott would have been out there, too, except for a couple of problems: First, the left wrist that he shattered last month in Japan probably would have kept him from doing much shoveling. And second, he spent much of the week flat on his back.

“I actually had a really down week,” the Farmington native said. “I got either really bad food poisoning or the flu, so I was kind of on my deathbed for a lot of the week. But I knew stuff was in line, knew stuff would fall in place.”

Wescott said factors working in his favor included a Sugarloaf Competition Center staff that knows how to stage large, high-profile events, and the desire of the snowboard pros to have more input in their sport.

“They’re excited as riders to have a new opportunity for a different type of event to be doing, so it’s really cool,” Wescott said.

That kind of format existed prior to 2002, under the former International Snowboard Federation, Wescott said.

“It was really kind of a rider’s effort a lot of the time,” he said. “So I didn’t have any doubt that they would have come together to put in that effort and it all worked out. So really it was perfect.”

That rider-inspired course was just what the racers wanted … and just what Wescott didn’t get when he shattered his wrist in a race.

“Basically, when I broke my arm in Japan the jump was too small for the amount of speed that we had on the course,” Wescott said the week before the Champion’s Cross. “So [we want to] just be smart about how we’re laying things out and using the [right terrain features] for the appropriate speeds.”

That attitude was apparent throughout race preparations, as riders had the ultimate control over the course they’d have to conquer.

Making perfect approaches and landing ramps for the jumps was one key, as was determining the answer to a key question: How fast is fun … and how fast is foolish?

In all, riders and race organizers decided to move the starting gate four different times in the days before Saturday’s races. Each time it was moved down the mountain in order to bleed off a little bit more speed and keep the riders safe.

The expectation – which turned out being correct – was that Friday night’s weather would be cooler than that on Wednesday or Thursday night, and the course would freeze and become faster for the riders on Saturday.

“The way the original setup was, you would have been hitting that first turn going Mach 10, so we moved it down and it worked for [Friday’s time trials],” said second-place finisher Jonathan Cheever. “If we had four or six people [heading] into that second feature it would have been too much carnage.”

Pat Holland, who finished fourth in the championship final, said all the riders were happy to pitch in to help build a course they wanted to race on.

“A lot of riders jumped in and helped out, grabbed shovels, rakes and we all pitched in and made this course the best we could,” Pat Holland said. “And it turned out to be, I think, the best course I’ve ever ridden on.”

Wescott said he knew the event had a good chance of being successful. After all, he races side-by-side with the riders he invited, and knew they’d provide the crowd with plenty of exciting racing.

“I knew that bringing a great group of riders together like that, they would kind of put on the show, so we just had to have everything in place around them,” Wescott said.

With a bit of help from those very same riders, that’s exactly how it turned out.

“It worked out great,” a beaming Wescott said after the final race.

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