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Downhill momentum
Longtime Bend resident Adam Smith is confident as he begins his second bid to make the U.S. Olympic snowboard team
By Mark Morical / The Bulletin
Last modified: November 28. 2009 8:47AM PST
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Bend’s Adam Smith is trying to reach the Winter Olympics as an alpine snowboarder. Right now, Smith is one of the favorites to make the United States’ team for the Vancouver Games.
Sky Pinnick / Rage Films
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Editor’s Note: This is the third installment in a series of stories on 2010 Winter Olympic hopefuls from Central Oregon. The stories will appear on Fridays leading up to the Vancouver Games, which are set for Feb. 12-28, 2010.
With a recently repaired right knee and a couple of strong early-season results, Bend’s Adam Smith appears to be a front-runner to make the U.S. Alpine Snowboard Team as he embarks on his second run at a berth in the Winter Olympics.
Now, if he can just clear his mind.
In 2006, Smith seemed to a have a solid chance of making the U.S. Team for the Winter Games in Turin, Italy.
“And then the qualifiers started, and the mental part of my game wasn’t as good as it should have been,” Smith recalls. “I had a good first two (qualifying races), but then I bombed a couple races, and then you really start thinking about it. Like, I need to get here to get this spot, and you can’t do that. You need to just focus on the snowboarding and the results will come.
“Hopefully this year, I have it under wraps. And I think it’s all gonna be just fine.”
It must be a strange feeling as part of a tightknit squad to know that making your lifetime dream come true likely means crushing a teammate’s same dream.
Smith and other members of the U.S. Alpine Snowboard Team know that only a selected few of them will be chosen for the 2010 Winter Olympics — just one U.S. male alpine snowboarder was sent to the 2006 Games.
With the recent success of Americans in the halfpipe and in snowboardcross, American alpine snowboarders are typically fewer in number for the Olympics. Only a certain total number of snowboarders can represent the U.S. team, meaning that if more are selected to compete in halfpipe and snowboardcross, fewer spots remain for alpine boarders.
“We’re all very competitive, whether it’s playing tennis for dry-land training or working out,” Smith says of the U.S. alpine team. “We’re always trying to beat each other. As much as people say you don’t, every person on the team, you’re trying to beat them. That’s the goal.”
Smith, 29, skipped training this summer to rehabilitate his right knee after undergoing orthoscopic surgery in March to repair what he calls a “wear and tear” injury. Doctors “took out a lot of material,” according to Smith, and repaired a meniscus.
After missing the last four World Cup races last season because of his injury, Smith returned this year with a 10th-place finish at an indoor parallel slalom event in the Netherlands in October. He placed third Nov. 12 at The Race to the Cup parallel giant slalom in Copper, Colo.
Now Smith is gearing up for five World Cup events that will serve as Olympic qualifiers for parallel giant slalom. The first is Dec. 6 in Limone Piemonte, Italy. Four will follow at venues in Colorado, Europe and Canada. A top-four finish in any of the qualifiers would give a U.S. rider an automatic spot on the Olympic team. If nobody qualifies automatically, Olympic selection will be based on a points system.
“Any one person could go,” Smith says. “It just depends on how you do in those five races.”
Smith is one of four boarders who remain on the U.S. alpine team after budget reductions forced the team to cut the squad in half last spring.
“I lost a lot of good friends to train with and help push on the hill,” Smith says of the cuts. “But I’ve got a great coach, and the guys who are on the team really help push me a long way.”
When not training or racing, Smith has worked as a lab technician for the last 2½ years at Bend Research, which specializes in pharmaceutical and health science technologies. Before joining Bend Research, Smith spent several summers as a grass-seed farmer in Tangent, near Albany. He also worked at Home Depot in Bend to supplement his snowboarding career.
The support Smith has received from Bend Research — and from Rebound Physical Therapy in Bend, where he rehabilitated his knee — is not lost on the snowboarder, who knows firsthand the difficulties of finding sponsorship and financial backing.
“Bend Research and Rebound really support their athletes and people in the community,” Smith says. “I think we need more companies like that.”
Smith has lived nearly his entire life in Bend. His parents, Wayne and Valerie, were ski bums who grew up in the Lake Tahoe area and took Adam skiing at Mount Bachelor when he was just 2 years old. He began snowboarding when he was 9, and he started racing with the Mt. Bachelor Sports Education Foundation just a couple years later.
The avid surfer and mountain biker graduated from Bend High in 1998, and soon thereafter he was traveling and racing on the World Cup snowboard circuit. Back then, alpine snowboarding was the only Olympic snowboarding discipline and held the limelight that has since been taken over by halfpipe and snowboardcross.
Now, it is not quite as easy for alpine snowboarders to make ends meet.
“I really wish I was in my prime back then, when the sponsors were around and everybody was making money left and right,” Smith says.
But he has persevered through two breaks in his back, a sometimes bruised ego, a stint in snowboardcross, and his most recent knee injury after nearly 10 years on the World Cup circuit. Now he finds himself in good position to reach the pinnacle event of winter sports.
Experience, no doubt, will play a significant role in Smith’s bid for Vancouver.
“I think I’m just a little smarter about how I approach my season and races, and preparing for everything,” he says. “Just focus on how you ride. You know you can snowboard. You’ve beaten all these guys before; you can do it again.”
Recent advancements in alpine snowboard technology — and now the widespread availability of that technology — have helped to level the playing field in alpine snowboarding. For years, the Swiss dominated the sport because they had access to plate systems that made their boards faster. But now most riders have that same technology on their board, Smith explains.
“There’s been big board changes with plate systems underneath the bindings that allow the board to move in different ways,” Smith says. “The Swiss helped develop what I’m riding now. They were the first ones to have it, and it was really hard to get. You had to know the right people.”
Now, Smith says, other countries have caught up and no longer do the Swiss dominate the podium (top three) in parallel giant slalom. So, could we see an American on the Olympic podium sometime soon?
“Oh, yeah, absolutely,” Smith says. “I plan on being there.”
Mark Morical can be reached at 541-383-0318 or at mmorical@bendbulletin.com.
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