BOARDER WAR
If there’s a smirk behind the smiles of Canada’s alpine snowboarders during their frequent appearances on World Cup podiums this winter, it has much to do with their curiously decorated Kessler boards. Under all that fake wood-grain MACtac is a racing plate elevated above the board, and crafted from laminated carbon composite instead of the usual aluminum. “What it looks like is a skateboard sitting on top of a snowboard,” says co-designer Gerry Kavanaugh, president of Apex Composites Inc., a Canadian outfit that normally works in the aerospace and defence sector.
The plate is the 14th iteration of a concept by veteran rider Jasey-Jay Anderson. During a camp in Whistler last year, the design was tweaked daily. Kavanaugh would take athlete feedback to a condo with head coach Mark Fawcett to craft new prototypes in a makeshift workshop on the balcony. “We were baking the stuff on the barbecue,” says Kavanaugh. In the past, boarders’ feet were mounted directly to the board, bouncing and tilting with every turn and bump. “Now, largely the board flexes underneath their feet,” says Kavanaugh, “and their feet stay put.”
Those feet are often on the podium, but with so much team depth it’s hard to know what impact the plates have. “The system is definitely working, technically or mentally or both,” says Joncas, the high-performance manager. Rider Matt Morison gave a discreet nod to his camouflaged equipment after a World Cup win in Telluride, Colo. “My equipment is getting better and better all the time,” he said. “I knew everything under my feet was super fast.”
Next up are the new super-fast bases, already on some snowboard cross equipment. The Olympic courses are on West Vancouver’s Cypress Mountain, known for its volatile coastal weather. “Cypress,” says Joncas, “could be -15° C, it could be +15° C.” Each athlete has boards for both cold and warm conditions. If the snow is wet and sticky, warm-weather boards with the UBC’s hydrophobic (water-repellant) base should cut the friction.
MIND GAMES
It was a bit unsettling at first, admits freestyle aerialist Kyle Nissen, to be wired with electrodes and see your various brainwaves, alpha, beta, theta, dancing on a computer screen; and watching it track every shift in respiration, heart rate, body temperature, sweat levels and muscle tension. “I was a little bit skeptical,” says the 10-year member of the national team. It helped that he had a long, trusting relationship with the woman at the controls, University of Ottawa sports psychologist Penny Werthner.
It’s one thing to tell your sports shrink you are mentally focused and physically loose, quite another to prove it through Werthner’s bio (physical) and neuro (mental) feedback machines. “Sport psychology is about what we’re thinking and what we’re feeling and you can’t really see those things,” Werthner says. “I find it a really intriguing and useful tool to make things a bit more concrete.”
The process of “self discovery,” as she puts it, began three years ago, and includes both the aerial ski team and top mogulists Alex Bilodeau and Jennifer Heil. Discovery is only the first step: the aim is to control one’s physical and mental response, to gear up in the moments before a performance, and as importantly, to learn to mellow out afterwards. “The season can be a real grind, so it’s important to stay fresh out there,” says veteran boarder Warren Shouldice. “It obviously stresses you out to think, ‘I’ve got to go off this four-metre-tall jump at 70 km/h.’ So if I can not think about that, it’s a good thing,” he says. “Yes, I want to think about it, but that’s for the 30 seconds before my jump.”
He and Nissen have learned to take mini-mental holidays on the lift up to their next jump and to put a higher premium on recovery time. They once spent down time blazing away at video games like Call of Duty or Guitar Hero until they wired up the feedback machines and discovered that what they thought was mindless fun was leaving them highly stressed. “We’re competitive people,” says Nissen. Now, they spend maybe 15 minutes listening to audio of slow human breathing: “You could almost call it meditation.”
