Robbins Nest: Clarky leaves a classy legacy

This is not meant as a eulogy. It’s a tribute. An appreciation.
    Clarky, thanks. Double thanks.
    As the Nature Valley U.S. Alpine Championships unrolled at Alyeska Resort outside Anchorage, Kirsten Clark has cast a long shadow over the proceedings. And she’s not even there. She’s resting aching bones from a training crash — her last competitive run — during World Cup Finals two weeks earlier in Switzerland.

THIS IS NOT meant as a eulogy. It’s a tribute. An appreciation.
    Clarky, thanks. Double thanks.
    As the Nature Valley U.S. Alpine Championships unrolled at Alyeska Resort outside Anchorage, Kirsten Clark has cast a long shadow over the proceedings. And she’s not even there. She’s resting aching bones from a training crash — her last competitive run — during World Cup Finals two weeks earlier in Switzerland
    Clarky, the poster child for all things good that the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association trumpets as its core values, announced her retirement last month in Portland, Maine. At the headshed of TD Banknorth, her sponsor for the past 11 years (the deal continues until the end of this year), she said she hoped to race in one last nationals downhill. However, a week later the injuries she suffered in that DH training crash still pained her too much and she said she wouldn’t race one last time.
    As a tribute to her, and her impact, Banknorth’s Bill Ryan — who also is retiring (as bank chairman) — thanked Clarky and held up a check for $100,000 for her alma mater, Carrabassett Valley Academy, which he gave to John Ritzo, chef de mission at CVA. (Asked a short time later if the check was signed, Ritzo said, “You don’t think I’ve still got it, do you?” He looked over his right shoulder at the Cheshire Cat grin from Kate Webber, CVA’s development ringmaster.)
    Chatting later, Clark smiled when someone mentioned she was so much like Hilary Lindh, the 1987 downhill world champion, 1992 Olympic DH silver medalist, 1986 world juniors gold medalist, and the one, among other achievements, who earned the 100th World Cup win for the U.S. Ski Team. Zip-lipped, let your skis do your “talking,” and — and this is important — none of the Madonna Hey-look-at-me/where’s-the-spotlight? syndrome. Yeah, it’s old-fashioned in today’s instant-gratification world, but, it sure works mightily for some of us.
    “When I was growing up in ski racing, I saw Hilary on the World Cup and I definitely admired her for her work ethic, and I strived to follow in the same footsteps. I think we’re the type of athletes who let our work do the talking instead of talking ourselves.” Lindh retired after the ’97 season, just as Clark was moving onto the World Cup stage. Said Clark, “But we had some good quality time.” She tried to copy — on the hill, off the hill — one of the best.
    As always, Clark didn’t kid herself at the end. “I know this is the time to be finished,” she said simply. “Nope, no regrets.” She didn’t want to go out on last winter’s frustrations, having started the season with a staph infection in the midst of the vital last preseason prep period. But this season, as the effort was there but the results weren’t, she resigned herself to pulling it over.
    She’d never shaken the fear of another horrendous crash like she suffered in Haus, Austria, in January 2004, she conceded. Torn ligaments, broken wrist — the first major injury of her career. She was Xena the Warrior Princess before there was Xena. But, in the end, “That crash definitely set me back and made it difficult to get back to that level of throwing my body down the hill without thinking of any sort of consequences. That fear was definitely there,” she said. How many athletes, d’ya think, can look themselves in the mirror and acknowledge fear after so many seemingly fearless runs?
    And what cruel irony for Clark, who got started going fast as she tried to keep up with older brother Sean and his buddies at Maine’s Sugarloaf/USA, that her last run, kissing the safety nets and abbreviating her final season, came on the hill where she won a World Cup downhill. But, as she noted, “I want to be healthy for the rest of my life … and, yeah, exactly — I wanted to walk into and out of my last press conference, not be wheeled in.”
    The kicker in all of this may be that her parents — George, a Delta pilot for 28 years after two tours in Vietnam as a Navy fighter pilot, and Joan — weren’t the proverbial Little League Dad or Stage Mom. Their egos never got intertwined with her success. In World War I, there was a song referring to the still largely agrarian U.S. economy with its farm boys fighting in Europe, and asking “How You Gonna Keep ’Em Down on the Farm After They’ve Seen Pa-reee?” In ski racing, it would be: How do you tell promising racers they can’t keep moving up once they’ve got the U.S. Ski Team or the World Cup in their front windshield of life?
“We didn’t want it. And, to tell you the truth, we didn’t want her to go to the U.S. Ski Team,” dad said. “You’re pretty heartless if you let ’em go all that distance and then you say, ‘No, you have to stop.’ But I told her, ‘If you change, this won’t have been worth it’ … but she didn’t change.”
    Kirsten Clark — silver medal at worlds, gold medal in life. Thanks, Clarky.

Does it bug you when you get hit with a surcharge for buying something? “Sir, those tickets are $26 apiece … and there’s a dollar surcharge for ‘processing.’ ” It would be less insulting if they’d roll the charge into the ticket price and not mention it. What a concept — you pay an extra buck to buy a ticket that helps keep these creeps in business. Wonderful …

    Taz Mannix, the new women’s pursuit national champion in cross-country, has learned a lot from training with the U.S. Ski Team (e.g., how to balance travel with training and racing and recovery time) and she’s learned a lot from training in Alaska with two-time Olympian Kikkan Randall. “She’s my rabbit,” says Mannix, referring to the easy keep-up-with-me tone of their training. “She gets everyone excited when she’s around.”
    Former moguls world champ Hannah Kearney tore her left ACL in a training mishap in early February in France. When she showed up at the Sprint U.S. championships this month at Killington, perhaps an hour from her home in Norwich, Vermont, Kearney was like a predator pacing its cage. Said she: “It’s as tough as you would expect,” she said. “I was pretty emotional when I pulled in and saw the moguls course a couple of days ago. I was not expecting that [the emotional rip], but it takes a toll on you, to watch and not do. I’m used to doing things. I guess, though, I should enjoy it while I can because I plan on being back and never being a spectator again.”
    Speaking of recovery, former nordic combined sprint champ Johnny Spillane is on the mend after more surgery to repair his right shoulder. He injured both shoulders before the 2006 Olymp
ic season, and then — in a bizarre mishap — injured his shoulder this time while playing volleyball as part of dryland training a few days before the World Championships. “I fished every day for the week — mostly in the Provo [River] after we got home from Europe and leading up to the surgery [March 26 at The Orthopedia Surgery Hospital in SLC] because I knew I was gonna be laid up for a while afterward,” he said.
    Bacon Bulletin: New entries in the ever-expanding Best Bacon podium — Since the Olympic Training Center in Lake Placid is off-limit to the public, head for Chair 6 in Lake Placid. And the Bear Mountain base lodge at Killington is another artery-clogging station. Yum! Crispy supreme! [Editor’s note: The last frontier for stellar bacon may indeed be in the Last Frontier State. The main restaurant at the Alyeska Resort’s grand hotel has some of the niftiest bacon anywhere. Maybe good enough that a return trip for a future alpine nationals is a must.]