South Pomfret -- The number eight is sometimes linked to the concept of infinity, which may be why Stacey Gerrish so desires to make her eights infinitely perfect.
It's what she and her skiing partner, Ginny Creak, will be trying to do this at Suicide Six this week. They'll be easy to spot: Look for the two of them skiing front to back in matching uniforms -- blue, gray and pink -- with the words “Babes of Prey” on their skiwear.
Oh, and the perfectly linked turns that, when done correctly, will leave a series of cascading eights in the snow behind them.
“We spend our days as instructors out on the hill, working with other people to improve their skiing,” the Woodstock-raised Gerrish said this week from Colorado, where she is a ski instructor at Beaver Creek Resort. “When you have an opportunity to train for yourself and work on your skiing and exude your passion for the sport through competition, it's more exciting.
“I'm out on the hill, giving every day, sharing my love of my sport. This gives me a chance to enjoy the sport on my level.”
Today and tomorrow, that level will be the New England Powder Eight Championships, which Brownsville's Doc Tulin hopes will bring greater light to one of the two primary forms of synchronized skiing available to high-level ski teachers.
Tulin created the Powder Eights when he moved east from Colorado a decade ago. The competition pairs two skiers, front and back, skiing downhill in tandem, graded on everything technical in the ideal ski turn. The meet begins with preliminaries today; up to eight successful tandems will advance to head-to-head knockout stages tomorrow.
“The way we approach it is it's open to anyone who wants to pony up the $100 entry fee for a team, sign the waivers and they're in,” Tulin said this week. “That's the beauty of it. Joe Blow from off the street can ski head-to-head with a friend against someone who is, say, an examiner from a mountain like Stowe. It’s a great way, if you're interested, in moving into the ski teaching industry, to look at what we have to offer.”
When you're the person teaching someone else to ski, how do you go about skiing better yourself? One way is through synchronized skiing, a sport with little presence in the eastern United States.
Synchro skiing -- be it the two-person variety or the six-to-eight-person version known as demonstration skiing -- is more prevalent in the Rockies and is huge in Europe largely because of the culture of skiing, according to Gregor Neal, one of Tulin's teaching colleagues from Colorado. Being a ski instructor isn't a requirement of competition, but about 95 percent of the people who compete are teachers.
“In Europe, skiing is a way of life; in the United States, it's a business,” said Neal, a private lesson instructor at Beaver Creek. “So many countries, and they all have ski industries. They have synchro carving, powder eights, six-man teams, eight-man teams. They'll have competitions with 30 or 40 teams coming from all over Europe.
“I've been involved in the ski industry all my life. This is a good way to further yourself, along with your skill patterns. I like the camaraderie and the competitive part of it. It could be synchro skiing, football, basketball; it's the same as for any team sport.”
The powder skiing of the West is also conducive to synchronized skiing. It's certainly easier to assess performance in such conditions, Tulin said, when the trails of the teams stay behind them as evidence.
“With untracked powder on every run, we can examine the shape (of the turn) by looking up the hill and evaluating and counting,” said Tulin, who will be one of two judges for this week's event.
At Suicide Six, tandems will be scored in four areas: turn shape, synchronization, turn symmetry and technical ability, everything from the placement of hands to the bounce of the knees. Shape is graded on a 1-to-20 scale, the others on a 1-to-10 scale. Speed isn't a factor in powder eights until teams are lined up against each other, wherein bonus points can be earned for completing a run faster than the opposition.
Teams will hold qualifying runs today, after which the top 16 pairs will enter head-to-head, round-robin competition this afternoon. Seeded into four pools, the group winners and next four highest-scoring teams will advance to tomorrow's knockout rounds to determine a champion. (Several sponsors -- Karbon, High Gear, Giro, Transpack, Chaos Hats, Rocky Ridge Golf Course, Henderson Ski Shops in Quechee, Boot Pro in Ludlow, Vt. -- are providing product as prizes for the completion.)
“You're going to see a lot of good skiing, that's for sure,” said Neal, who has helped Tulin judge the New England Powder Eights in past years. “There will be a lot of really, really good skiers, which gives guests a good idea of what good skiing is all about.”
That Suicide Six is serving as home for Tulin's event is a matter of circumstance.
Born in 2003, the event was held at Jay Peak -- arguably the snowiest site in the Northeast -- before moving to Stowe last winter. The New England Powder Eights were to return to Stowe again this winter before economic issues forced Tulin to seek an alternate site. Suicide Six was close, and event has received a warm welcome, Tulin said.
Synchro skiing has no national governing body, and the few competitions that exist are run by enthusiasts. A national championship for powder eight pairs is set for Aspen, Colo., in March, while larger teams will congregate for their meet in April. A world championship used to be held at a heli-skiing facility in British Columbia, but that was abandoned last winter because of the costs involved, Tulin said.
Tulin hopes to recruit squads from Killington, Mad River Glen, Stowe and other Vermont resorts for New Englands, while he has assurances that a handful of Western tandems will make the trip east.
“This highlights what we mean about Western skiers going a lot further to be in this,” he noted. “Eastern skiers need more experience to the whole concept.”
Gerrish has grasped the concept and enjoys it.
Educated in Woodstock schools before graduating from Northfield-Mount Hermon School in Massachusetts, Gerrish cut her skiing teeth at Suicide Six and once taught there before settling at Beaver Creek 20 years ago. She formed Babes of Prey both as a competitive synchro team and as a means to raise money and awareness for cancer prevention.
“I think all the ski schools out here (in Colorado) give the sport support; there's a lot of excitement around it,” Gerrish said. “We go up and train every morning before the lifts open to the public. It's a pretty big deal.”
The weekend will be extra special for Gerrish, who is returning in time to help her grandmother celebrate a birthday. She might have tried the New England Powder Eights had they still been at Stowe or Jay, but the late move to Suicide Six made the trip a no-brainer.
“It's my home mountain and my hometown, and I can stay with family,” she pointed out. “My grandmother hasn't seen me ski since I moved out to Colorado 20 years ago. I'm excited for her to see me.”
It'll make the New England Powder Eights infinitely more delightful.
NOTE: THIS IS A REPRINT OF THE ARTICLE WRITTEN BY GREG FENNELL FOR THE VALLEY NEWS (HTTP://VNEWS.COM) IN APPRECIATION OF THE SUPPORT THEY HAVE SHOWN THE NEW ENGLAND POWDER 8 CHAMPIONSHIPS THROUGH THEIR COVERAGE OF THE EVENT
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