Leaps of Faith

I am genetically predisposed to leaving the ground in ways that are not always advisable.

My first recollection of the pursuit of "getting air" (as it was called in the late '60s and early '70s, a term which has been replaced with other descriptors, including the current "hucking," "going big," and "amplitude"), takes me back to Steamboat Springs, Colorado, circa 1968. When I was eight years old my father packed up the family and took us from our warm southern California home to the snowy Rocky Mountains to visit his Olympic ski coach, Sven Wiik. Sven, a Swede who had coached the 1956 U.S. Nordic Team at Cortina, Italy, had returned to the states to found and operate the Scandanavian Lodge and Mt. Werner Training Center. At the time, Steamboat had one of the few Nordic jumping hills in the United States, and my father wanted me to witness the sport he had participated in during the Olympics and, if I was game enough, to give the "development hill" a try myself.

I had been alpine skiing since I could walk but had never been off of a Nordic jump, and before I really knew what I was doing I had ridden the rope tow to the top of the jump and stood there nervously, watching future Olympic jumpers hurl themselves down the inrun in a bent-knee crouch, arms and legs coiled, then, at the exact moment of take off, spring and launch themselves into the swirling white abyss below, disappearing over the knoll and beyond, to the outrun. I could see them ski safely over to the rope tow at the bottom, but that did not make the first launching, that commitment to the unknown, any easier.

I hadn't the proper Nordic jumping equipment, but at my father's urgings and assurances I loosened the top buckles of my alpine boots to allow some forward lean and waited my turn at the top with a huddle of other jumpers, shifting nervously on my edges in a whirl of light snow. I studied (quickly and gulpingly, for my turn was coming) the technique of the other kids, and to my relief there didn't seem to be much to it: from a position parallel to the tracks, one simply had to hop sideways into the two ski slots plunging straight down the mountain's fall line, bend into a crouch, and ride headlong toward the lip—then, one exploded upward and outward, leaping from the crouch and into the air. From midway down the inrun, as one careened with gaining speed toward the edge of the jump, the knoll and the outrun vanished from view, so that the landing was blind. It was, quite literally, a leap of faith.

It was my turn. I could see my father waving anxiously from the bottom. Other jumpers shuffled their skis beneath their feet. I exhaled, pulled my goggles down over my eyes, squinted down the track, and hopped in.

Anyone who remembers the old lead into ABC's Wide World of Sports will recall with cathartic fascination the "Thrill of Victory, the Agony of Defeat" narrated by Jim McKay, in which Slovene Nordic ski jumper Vinko Bagataj loses his balance just before the take off of a jump and cartwheels like a rag doll thrown from a train, flaying into oblivion, his catastrophic crash ingloriously cemented into the collective consciousness of the sports-viewing American public. A precursor of that image rattled my confidence in the first few moments of my first ski jump, but I didn't have much time to think about potential disaster as the icy snow whined underfoot and I plunged toward take-off in an awkward, unsteady squat. Falling snow slashed my face and icy air whistled past my head and into my open mouth and then I was in the low swale before the rim. All I could see was a flat horizon of white and then nothing, a gaping maw of space, and then the jump was upon me and I popped into a stand, my hands dropping to my...