Deer Valley Freestyle World Cup

Every year since I moved to Utah I have looked forward to the Deer Valley Freestyle World Cup. It is the one time of year I am guaranteed to be able to see some of our athletes compete in town. This year the event was an Olympic qualifier so they had two mogul events (one on Thursday afternoon and one Saturday evening) and one aerial event. The event on Thursday is always great because we can go ski for our lunch and then stick around to cheer on the athletes. You can't ask for a better way to spend your afternoon. Of course the night events are fun too. Watching the athletes under the lights is always a blast.

This year started out with a bang for our female mogul athletes. Heather McPhie tied for 1st place with Jennifer Heil (defending Olympic Champion) and in third place was Shannon Bahrke (2002 Silver medalist).

Friday night was aerials. It is always fun to watch this because I am convinced they are nuts. (Actually, I think most of the skiers and snowboarders have to be nuts to do what they do.) This year Jeret "Speedy" Peterson pulled the Hurricane out of his bag of tricks. This is the hardest one performed in competition and is amazing to see. He looked like it was going to be perfect and then as he landed his skis popped off and as Speedy put it, he ate snow. Hopefully things will go better in Vancouver.

Saturday night I got to hang out with the Bryon Wilson fan club for the night mogul event. This time around Jennifer Heil won the event for the women but our girls went 2nd- Heather McPhie, 3rd- Michelle Roark, 4th- Hannah Kearney, 5th- Shannon Bahrke. It was a great night for the women. Unfortunately none of our guys ended up on the podium that weekend. The Wilson family had good news though when they found out that Bryon had made the Olympic team based on his results earlier in the season. Since Bryon was one of my rookies three years ago and he is from Butte, MT (where I also have family) I was very excited for him to make his first Olympic team.

I wanted to include some pictures from the mogul night event. Unfortunately, they have gotten all out of order somehow so I'm not completely sure who is who. But enjoy the crazy tricks that these athletes perform. (I'll upload some video from aerials later.)

Member of the Bryon Wilson fan club