Franklin from Swix wax and Bud Keene

The halfpipe venue from the top of the stadium.

Today the pipe was a little more challenging for the riders mainly due to a super icy backside wall (for regular foters).

Highlights for the men:

Shaun busts out his wetcat.

Shaun White continues to ride better than all other riders and threw down practice runs of a method, back to back tens, frontside 9 to backside ten. Perhaps Shaun is setting a new bar for halfpipe here in Italy. All of his runs were big and clean and he is one of the only riders throwing the backside ten.

Shaun gets interviewed by Tom Green for the Tonight Show on NBC.

Danny Kass turned up the amplitude a few notches and was riding super good in practice today. One of the keys for the riders is to pace themselves. Normally riders will get 2-3 days to practice before a big event. Here they have a whole week- so pacing yourself seems to be a key thing for the riders. Danny is on track to push a little harder each day and ultimately land on the podium.

Mason was riding really well too and it was super cool to see Shaun, Danny and Mason ride one after the other down the pipe.

Things are not going as well for Finch who busted up his foot really good at the X-games. He had an MRI on his foot today and is going to an IOC medical hearing to determine if they will let him shoot Cortizone into his injured foot. I feel pretty bad for Andy as he has been riding so well this season and this could have been his Olympics.

Outside of the US- Giacomo worked on his backside spins all day. He is recovering from an injury but has been riding very well. Matheau Crepel rode super well today. Even though we do not see him very often Stateside, he is a definate contender here at the Olympics, plus as defending FIS World Cup HP champ, the judges are farmiliar with his riding. The Finns did very well today and Antti and Risto both worked on getting some new tricks down. Unfortunately Markku Koski is nursing an injury that has him in the same boat as many of the other HP athletes- riding hurt.

Also the japanese riders seemed to turn it up a few notches with all three men throwing down crazy inverted tens in their practice runs. Right now it is looking like they could get a podium or two!

The mens rider list.
On the womens side:

Kelly Clark is for real. Check out the size of this frontside air. Todd actually mistook Kelly for Finch when we arrived at the HP yesterday.

Things seemed to cool downn a bit on the ladies side with the sketchy backside wall.Gretchen stepped up her game today working on the frontside 9, pulling of some solid, lofty tricks. It seems that there is really only two riders in the contest who could put the kybosh on a US women's sweep- Torah Bright- who rode well all practice and Hanah Teter who is going through a similar deal as Finch, only her injury is to her knee. If she gets to do the Cortizone, the US should have a very good shot at sweeping the women's event. Many of the other foriegn contenders also came to Italy nursing injuries including 2002 silver medalist Dorian Vidal who was a predicted favorite coming into the games. Should be interesting too watch how things progress during the week. More to come a little later today.

The women's start list.

John Stouffer's dailey BLOG

Wednesday, February 08, 2006

Torino Olympics Day 4
Current mood: accomplished

Pipes and Powder

Torino 2006 Day 4

Okay, it’s a good headline, but don’t take it the wrong way.

Just to recap for those of you who haven’t been following along, I have the great opportunity to work for NBC at the Winter Olympics in Torino. Thanks FUEL TV for giving me the time off!

I’m actually working the snowboard events that are going to take place in the town of Bardonecchia, about an hour away from Torino. We’re staying in a town 20 minutes from there called Sauze d’Oulx. It’s actually hosting the moguls and freestyle skiing events. It’s a cool mid-sized mountain village, located about halfway up the side of a mountain. Ski runs go right up the hill from the town. It’s cool.

To pick up from my last blog entry, it was day three and we wanted to keep it mellow, so we went out to a nice mellow family style Italian dinner. There were like 9 of us and we all just ordered 4 pastas, which they brought to us in big pots that fed at least three people each. And it was good, rich pasta. Wine was also served at the dinner, and everyone started to loosen up just a little. We were mainly with the snowboard announcers Todd Richards, Pat Parnell, and Tina Dixon, but a couple of the NBC producers. Needless to say, Todd had us rolling with his endless hilarious stories and running commentary.

After dinner, we were feeling a little better and headed out to a bar. Todd headed back and skipped the drinking session, and Tina hung around for one beer at one bar.

But the rest of us kept going from one to another. Of course, we’ve gotten to know all the bartenders at the different bars, and they love pouring shots for you. Plus, we tip well, and most people in Europe don’t tip at all in bars. So they really like us. One bartender calls us “Team America, Fuck Yeah,” from the Team America movie.

So after that bar, we hit another. This one has a bartender who has a tip jar that says the tips are going to pay for her new breasts. She has nice little ones, and doesn’t need more, but maybe she’d get more tips if she had bigger boobs. I think she’s in a catch 22, but I donated to the cause. It made her happy.

That turned into another bar, more people, and you can imagine. We went from a mellow bar called The Cotton Club to another called Vagabon, which had a live band. It was a pretty good band. Then we ended up late night in the disco club that was supposed to have a male and female stripper perform sometime around 2 in the morning. Needless to say, we missed that and just end up dancing and drinking champagne that Shaun ordered for us. Shaun’s one of the NBC producers and he’s like 6 foot 10. And he’s hilarious as well. I left sometime around 4:30, and the place was still going strong. But I remembered that we were supposed to have a car picking us up at the hotel at 8 in the morning to get to halfpipe practice. We didn’t make it.

Todd and Tina did, but I woke up around 8:30 and called Mark Sullivan’s room. Woke him up. We met in the lobby of the hotel around 8:50 and learned that another car was showing up at 9 to take our producer Billy Matthews to the pipe. Billy’s the big boss for NBC with our crew doing the snowboarding and freestyle skiing events. I’m not sure what he thought about us jumping in the car with him, but didn’t give us a hard time about it. Oh yeah, we had to wake up Pat Parnell as well, and he was in great shape.

We got to the venue, passed through security and headed straight to the slope to watch practice and talk to everyone. It was about 10 and practice had just started and was running until 1pm.

It was a beautiful sunny blue-sky day about 50 degrees out, and the pipe looked better than yesterday. Todd had scored a bib and lift ticket, and headed up to take runs! He was ripping. We talked to one of the judges for a while to figure out what they are looking for from the riders, and see if they had been doing their homework. They had. And were definitely watching the riders and scoring them. It was encouraging.

We talked to some more riders about the pipe, how they felt, and just to see what they’re thinking about. It was mellow jam session and the vibe was great. Security was there, but with our credentials nobody gave us a hard time about anything.

Then Pat and I got our boards and headed up the slopes to check out everything from the top of the pipe. It was cool because the wax techs were there, as were all the coaches and some of the technical directors. One guy’s job is to make sure there are no logos on riders clothing or helmets that are too big. They actually have rules that state how big the logos can be (or how small they should be.)

After a while, we headed back down to the bottom and hung out there some more. Saw some more friends from Burton snowboards and some of the US Snowboarding staff.

After practice, there were a number of camera crews doing interviews. Tom Green, that crazy guy from MTV, was there working for NBC I think, and interviewed Shaun White and Danny Kass. It looked pretty funny from what I could tell.

We headed back to the NBC compound just behind the bleachers and had a nice lunch, which was the first real food of the day. It was good. Then Pat and I decided to head up the mountain and take some runs. We went up two chair lifts to almost the top, and there was no one on the hill at all, and lots of untracked powder up there. We had a blast, and took like three runs. One of the coolest and funniest things was one chairlift they had. It was a fixed double, moving fast. But instead of slowing it down for you when you get on, the actually have you get on a conveyor belt that speeds you up close to the speed of the chair, and then the chair just swoops you up. Pat almost fell over the first time on the belt because it’s such a weird feeling to be moving, but not sliding on your board!

Anyway, the powder was really great on the top, but we realized we were late for our ride back to the hotel, and bolted down.

When we got to the NBC trailer, there was no ride, but luckily a runner showed up in about 10 minutes and gave us a ride back to the hotel to call it an day! Now I sit here in my hotel, posting photos on AOL to hopefully share with you if you want to see them, and posting my new blog. If anyone’s interested in checking out my other entries, check out: http://blog.myspace.com/johnstouffer

More reports from Italy tomorrow. Looks like a storm is rolling in, which might make things interesting. And the opening ceremonies are coming up.

-John