California Kings
MAMMOTH WINDS ALTER SCHEDULE AS WEST
DOMINATES REGIONS CUP By Hank McKee
Nicholas Veth
SUSAN MORNING
The Marriott J2 National Championships
at Mammoth Mountain, Calif., had some weather
difficulties, mostly wind, that shuffled some races
around, caused a little confusion at FIS headquar-
ters and made for some memorable lift rides, but
they got all the races in and then some.
“We had a great day of downhill training,” said Ter-
ry DelliQuadri, the Rocky/Central regional director.
“But the winds overnight were 140 miles per hour.”
It was impossible to race speed events, and offi-
cials decided to switch to slaloms that could be held
at the better-protected bottom of the mountain. It
was still windy, but conditions were good.
Surface conditions, in fact, were good throughout
the championships with racers wearing bibs 51, 38
and 3 topping the men’s downhill finish, a solid indi-
cator the surface held up well down the start order.
DelliQuadri said the men’s GS got bumpy, but they
were channeling 70 racers down the hill.
There were three double winners for the whole
event, but Julia Bjorkman of Sugar Bowl Academy
was the only one to score them in individual races,
winning both the super G and GS. Squaw Valley’s
Erik Arvidsson tallied the top spot in the slalom and
the combined, and Mount Mansfield’s Kelsey Che-
noweth had a great close of the competition win-
ning the combined and the most enthusiastically
embraced event of the meet, the final parallel sla-
lom.
