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(Published January 12, 2002)
The Lake Tahoe area has long been famous for its scenic beauty, but in this Olympic season, local sports names are stealing many of the headlines. When the Winter Games commence on February 8th, the Tahoe basin could provide up to eight athletes. For each of the five alpine and two freestyle ski events, no more than four competitors will be named to each national team. Those alpine events are downhill, super giant slalom (super-G), giant slalom (GS), slalom (SL) and the combined (downhill and SL). Olympic freestyle competition consists of either aerials or moguls; freestylists generally specialize in one category or the other.
Leading the local alpine squad is Heavenly alumna, Jonna Mendes, who races in the speed events of downhill and super-G. Joining her are two products from the Squaw Valley race program, Julia Mancuso and Marco Sullivan. Julia is an all-event skier, while Marco focuses on speed events. A little to the north lives Truckee's speed guy, Daron Rahlves, who already boasts the title of Super-G World Champion.
On the freestyle side, Sierra-at-Tahoe sponsors two mogulists, Travis Cabral and Travis Ramos. Their longtime friend and teammate is Heavenly's Chris Hernandez, while Shannon Bahrke, another graduate of the Squaw Valley ski team, represents the north shore.
All these athletes are members of the US Ski Team (USST); this is the pool from which our Olympic team will be selected. Simply making the ski team is no easy feat, and their competition level is the world's highest.
Just how do athletes get to this point? In alpine racing, for example, young racers grow up competing within age groups at a local level - for Lake Tahoe, this is the Far West division. Those doing well will be invited to race at a season-end regional championship, before hopefully moving onto a national championship. In a highly convoluted scoring system, racers start with 999 points, and each race lowers this point level. In the early teens, racers with "good points" are eligible to qualify for the development level of the US Ski Team.
Eventually, these racers move from divisional competition to national races, called FIS races. Those all-important points could bump a racer up to the C or B levels of USST, when they will start racing in the various Continental Cups. These are basically the minor leagues of ski racing. There is a race series on each continent, such as our "Nor-Ams" or the Far East Cup and South America Cup. With Europe's many skiing nations, the Europa Cup carries the most clout.
With good results on the Europa Cup, these racers (USST-A or B team members by now) graduate to the majors - the elite World Cup circuit. Points won throughout this winter's World Cup will decide our Olympic Team, which won't even be named until the end of January.
With a packed World Cup schedule, scoring the right alpine race points is spread a bit further; however the freestyle mogul squad has only three meets before the Olympics. While the USST has several pages of selection criteria and tiebreakers, the boiled-down version states for freestyle:
#1- a Gold Cup win (USA based Olympic-only selection event)
#2 - one top-3 World Cup finish
#3 - two top-5 World Cup finishes
#4 - three top-12 World Cup finishes
The four pages of alpine race criteria require:
#1 - a Gold Cup win
#2 - one or more top-10 World Cup finishes
#3 - two or more top-20 World Cup finishes
#4 - three or more top-30 World Cup finishes
To date, Shannon Bahrke has clinched a trip to her first Olympics by winning the Gold Cup moguls event and Travis Ramos has twice placed 3rd in a World Cup. For the alpine team, both Jonna Mendes and Daron Rahlves have claimed top-10 places at World Cup races. With two more weeks of World Cup competition, only Bahrke can surely start packing her bags.
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