Best in the world -- believe it

Three weeks ago, in Sochi, Russia, Bode Miller, America's best male Alpine skier, smashed his left knee coming off one of the jumps on what will be the Olympic course at the 2014 Winter Games. He tried to ski through the pain the next weekend at the World Cup stop in Bansko, Bulgaria. But it wasn't good. So Miller flew back to the United States, to have the knee scoped at a clinic in Vail, Colo.

If you know Miller and his ways, you know he could well have called off his season right then and there.

But no.

From the get-go, Miller had purchased a round-trip ticket. He was always intending to go back to Europe, back to the next stop, in Crans Montana, Switzerland -- underscoring the incredible culture that is at the core of everything the U.S. Ski Team does, manifested in its motto, "best in the world."

That slogan was so easy to make fun of when the Americans were anything but. But look now, and understand the success that is across the board, from alpine to cross-country to snowboard to freestyle to ski jumping and Nordic combined, and these are just a few of the many examples:

Lindsey Vonn on Sunday won a super-G at Bansko, her 10th World Cup victory this season, 51st lifetime. The 18th super-G win of her career, she is now the World Cup leader in the discipline. Vonn is way ahead in the World Cup overall points race for the 2012 season.

Cross-country skier Kikkan Randall leads the World Cup sprint standings.

The incomparable Shaun White is, plainly put, the best snowboarder on Planet Earth. Kelly Clark has 15 straight halfpipe wins.

Moguls artist Hannah Kearney won 16 straight World Cup races.

Sarah Hendrickson has six World Cup ski jumping victories.

Tom Wallisch has won every slopestyle contest this season but one.

For every Vonn, by the way, there are many, many others. The Americans have depth.

The U.S. women's alpine team, for instance, currently leads every other country in the world in the downhill standings, including the vaunted Austrians and Swiss. Racing in Sochi earlier this month, for instance, four of six American starters made the top-10: Vonn, Julia Mancuso, Stacey Cook and Alice McKennis. And Laurenne Ross was 18th, Leanne Smith 26th.

Someone ought to do a Harvard Business School case study about the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Assn.

For real.

There are huge corporations that could learn a lot from the U.S. Ski Team. Business-wise. Culture-wise. Success-wise.

All those things are intertwined.

When Bill Marolt took over, USSA had revenues of $8.14 million. That was for the fiscal year ending April 1996.

The fiscal year ending April 2012? Revenues will total $24.75 million.

At the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, the U.S. team won 37 medals, best in the world. The U.S. Ski Team accounted for 21 of those 37 medals.

Miller won three in Vancouver, including gold in the super-combined; Vonn won two, including downhill gold. The breakout story of the 2010 Games: the four medals won by the American Nordic combined team, testament to 14 years of consistent funding, improved coaching and training.

Marolt, USSA's president and chief executive officer, stayed the course with the Nordic combined program.

He also, over his tenure, has directed initiatives that produced the Center of Excellence, the Park City, Utah, facility that opened in May, 2009, that serves as USSA's all-in-one training center and headquarters; the Speed Center at Copper Mountain, Colo., which gives alpine racers early-season training; an ongoing partnership with 2002 Salt Lake City Olympic venues that includes, among other things, roller ski train development at Soldier Hollow; and an overall organizational focus on what's called "sport science," everything from cutting-edge advances to simple stuff like making sure American athletes drink enough water on airplane trips.

Staying hydrated on those long-haul flights, U.S. sport scientists have found, makes a huge difference in keeping the athletes healthy so they can actually make use of those training days when it's winter Down Under but summer in the Northern Hemisphere.

A new initiative: combining sports and school in an academy. If you are, for instance, Mikaela Shiffrin, and you are turning 17 in two weeks, and you have already made a World Cup podium (Dec. 29, bronze, Lienz, Austria, slalom) but you might have designs on college and beyond -- why should you or your parents be put to that either-or?

"We want to send that message to parents," Marolt said. "This is a big commitment, a big family commitment of time and resources. They're thinking, 'If my child gets to the point where they could be an Olympic great, I'm going to have to make a choice: academics or athletics.' We don't want them to have to make that choice. They can be both."

Marolt, along with Luke Bodensteiner, USSA's executive vice president for athletics, are big believers in the vision thing and in the concept of culture driving the mission. Both, it should be noted, are former Olympic athletes -- Marolt in alpine skiing in 1964, Bodensteiner in cross-country in 1992 and 1994.

"We started with the idea of 'best in the world,' and … they thought I was nuts," Marolt said. "But you can't change it unless you put it out there. And we have done that."

Bodensteiner said the brilliance of "best in the world" is that it is one, "super-aspirational," and, two, easy to understand and translate.

He explained: "When Bill came on and said, 'We are the best in the world, or aspiring to be the best in the world,' he has never wavered from that. That is a very visible pronunciation. That goes all the way down to the deepest levels possible, down to a race in a tiny mountain somewhere. It's a simple concept but also so powerful and people feel good about being brought in.

"Part of the evolution of that statement -- and it has been interpreted so many different ways, us saying we are the best when we were not but it is something that a lot of people have aspired to -- is that it has been a filter for every decision we have made for the last 16 years: Is this going to make us better or not?"

Bode Miller, as things turned out, ultimately did have to call off the rest of his season. He got to Crans Montana and the knee just didn't hold up. But it wasn't for lack of trying. Or buy-in.

"I'm still having fun and as long as skiing is enjoyable, I'm going to continue to do it," Miller said in a statement issued by the U.S. Ski Team.

Marolt, in an interview before Miller's season would come to a close, said, "One of our strengths is the idea that we tried to create a team. Not just an athletic team but an entire organizational team where everybody buys in, everybody understands what it is you try to do. Everybody multitasks and does more than is required.

"That is what makes us so good, everybody pulling on the rope at the same time and in the same direction. That is a hard one. It is difficult to achieve, because of the personalities and the profiles of every individual, from the chairman of the board to the person answering the phone in the lobby. But it's a good team, and the team is our strength."

Ross Powers' moment of perfection

Ten years ago today, Ross Powers launched himself into the brilliant blue Utah sky. Ross first slid down into the frozen wall of the halfpipe and then rocketed right out of it, way above its icy lip and hung there, 40 feet up, maybe more. For perhaps a second, he was flying, literally flying, testing the pull of gravity, a black silhouette against the blue, emblematic of humankind's eternal push to be greater than anything that had come before.

It was, for a moment in time, perfect.

The Olympic Games are rich with moments and memories, and over the past few editions, Summer and Winter, there have been so, so many:

Jason Lezak's out-of-body final lap in the pool to save the 400-meter relay for the American team in Beijing. On the track, Usain Bolt's 100- and 200-meter runs at those same Olympics. Cathy Freeman's overwhelming 400 in Sydney.

To compare snowboarding to swimming or track and field is of course apples and oranges. Yet the essence of the Olympics is that instant where everything comes together to produce a transcendent moment, one of lasting memory.

"It's one of my favorite memories, too," Ross was saying the other day on the telephone, laughing, and as it turns out he was taking the call in Park City, Utah, where the 2002 snowboarding events were held. He's now director of snowboarding at the Stratton Mountain (Vt.) School, and was in Park City with a bunch of the school's kids.

Ross came to those 2002 Games as the 1998 Nagano Games halfpipe bronze medalist, among other accomplishments. He was one of a number of 2002 medal favorites.

The day before the 2002 halfpipe was his 23rd birthday. The morning of the event, as the crowd was starting to form at the bottom of the hill, he ran into his mom, Nancy, and his younger brother, Trevor. Ross said to them, just making conversation, "Hey, what are you guys doing tonight?"

Nancy replied, full of confidence, "I'm going to the medals ceremony!"

Ross recalls now, "I just kind of laughed."

The tension broken, Ross just went out there and ripped it. The pipe itself was huge and fast and everyone knew it. The U.S. Ski Team crew, along with the guys at Burton, had Ross' board waxed just so to maximize performance.

The trick that Ross performed to perfection is a basic maneuver in a snowboard pro's repertoire. It's called a method air or, alternatively,a method grab. It's the same trick in skateboarding -- after sailing off the pipe (or skateboard ramp), the rider reaches down his or her hand and grabs the edge of the board, between the feet. When it's done to form, it looks like you're kneeling in mid-air.

Even though it's relatively basic, the advantage of the method grab is that -- when you hit it -- it can produce amazing amplitude, which is snowboard talk for big air. What no one yet knew, until Ross threw it so spectacularly, is that starting with the 2002 Olympics big air was the way to go.

At the Nagano Games, because of the way the rules worked then, it really wasn't that way. In his moment in the sky, Ross forever changed the rules of the game. Shaun White and everyone else -- they would follow Ross.

He felt that morning like he was in on a big secret: "It feels good," he recalls thinking, "to have a big trick."

Especially one he was going to throw first. That would get the crowd into it, big-time.

"I dropped in," Ross recalled, "and let it flow along the right wall … and then went smooth through the flats and definitely did the biggest transition I ever did in the halfpipe," and up, up, up he went.

Most calculations are he went 18 to maybe even 22 feet off the lip of the pipe, at least 40 feet up. "It felt smooth and easy," he said, adding, "When I was in the air it just felt good. I was just confident and had the feeling, no question, I was going to land it."

He landed it, and followed with more complex tricks, ones involving the sorts of gymnastically oriented spins and rotations that are part of the snowboarding landscape.

About three-quarters of the way through the run, he remembers thinking, this could well be a gold-medal run -- don't blow it: "You gotta land, you're almost to the bottom, you have a good run, just keep going and finish."

He did.

The judges gave him a score of 46.1, way ahead of the rest of the field.

Two other Americans rounded out the medals: Danny Kass took second, 3.6 points back of Ross, and J.J. Thomas third.

The 1-2-3 sweep was the first time Americans had swept the medals in an event since 1956. That had been in men's figure skating.

The day before, American Kelly Clark had won gold in the women's halfpipe.

The U.S. team's performance in the halfpipe in 2002 is largely credited with pushing snowboarding from the fringe to the mainstream.

Ross remembers being with Kelly at the Daytona 500, just days later. "These elderly women were meeting us and saying, 'You guys are great! Snowboarding is so great! I want to get my grandkids on those boards!' It was huge for snowboarding."

Beyond his work for the Stratton school, Ross remains actively involved in promoting his own foundation, which he launched in 2001, the year before the Salt Lake Games, to help athletes with the talent but not the support they might need.

Meanwhile, an extension of the Ross Powers Foundation, the Level Field Fund -- launched about 18 months ago -- provides grants covering everything from instruction to entry fees to travel. Michael Phelps, Daron Rahlves and Seth Wescott have helped out; the fund has already awarded more than $220,000 to more than 50 athletes in sports such as snowboarding, swimming, skiing, judo and skeleton racing.

Ross and his wife, Marisa, are by now the parents of two little girls. Meredith is 4. On her snowboard, she is good on heel edges already and, Ross said, "That's really cool to see." Victoria is 8 and, as it turns out, spent the 10th anniversary of her dad's victory out on Bromley Mountain in Vermont -- where Ross himself learned to ride -- racing in her very first boardercross event. Guess who won?

Perfect.

Kelly Clark's season for the ages

The calendar says it's already April. Track and field's outdoor season will soon be here, and swimming's, too, and with world championships coming up in both sports -- this the year before the London Olympics -- it promises to be a summer to remember. But before the likes of Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps dominate the headlines, before the skis and snowboards get put away, it is appropriate indeed to single out the one and only Kelly Clark.

She had a winter for the ages.

It is an amazing thing, really. Snowboarding is hip. Perhaps the teenager in the house could thus readily dish about Kelly Clark, who won nine of 11 halfpipe competitions. If you include the Burton New Zealand Open last Aug. 14, make it 10 of 12.

On top of which -- she became the first woman to land a 1080 (three full revolutions) in competition, at the X Games in Aspen in late January.

The crowds at the X Games were, as is typical at a snowboarding jam, feverish. Yet for all the fun and for all its sizzle, snowboarding -- like all winter sports -- typically remains consigned to the back pages of most newspaper sports sections. It's even buried in web-only full-featured sports sites.

Attention, newspaper editors and internet sports savants. Wake up!

You want a winner?

You want a role model?

You want someone who not only brings it but is thoughtful and articulate and can describe not only why she wins but how she goes about planning her victories and then executing them?

America, once again -- we present Kelly Clark, your 2002 Salt Lake Games halfpipe gold medalist and 2010 Vancouver Games bronze medalist. And, as well, the fourth-place finisher in Torino in 2006 -- fourth because she went for it all in a bid to get back to the podium but crashed, a thing that those who know and appreciate snowboarding appreciated profoundly.

Kelly Clark is now 27. "I know who I am," she said. "My identity isn't wrapped up in my snowboarding. My identity isn't wrapped up in my results. So I am able to enjoy them."

She said, "After these last Olympics," in Vancouver, "some of my competitors came up to me and said, 'I am so glad it's over. I don't have to compete anymore.' I had to go to my coaches and say, 'I want to go compete,' " to finish out the season.

"I was like, 'Is that OK?'

"'They're like, 'OK!'

"I have fun."

That, truly, is the amazing and genuine thing about Kelly Clark, the difference-maker.

She has been competing for roughly 12 years. There is an undeniable glamor to the circuit. But there is a grind to it, too.

For her -- it's still fun.

That mental edge is huge. What pushed her this winter back to the top was the other part of the equation -- the physical part of being a top athlete.

Last summer, she committed herself to being in better shape than she had ever been before. She ran miles. She ran intervals. She did core work, agility work, cardio, weightlifting and more.

The goal, she said, came in two parts:

-- In prior years she might max herself out at 100 percent at a particular competition. She might win but feel exhausted. This season the idea was to raise her baseline fitness level to a solid 80 or 90 percent. That way she could run solid and tough from December through March without feeling worn out.

-- She also wanted each and every weekend, moreover, to be in such good shape that her last run of the day in the halfpipe not only could but would be her best run of the day.

That 1080 in Aspen, for instance? That  came on what snowboarders call the "victory lap," a final run. She had already won the competition.

"From the beginning of the season, I decided to be intentional," she said, meaning to approach each competition with deliberate intent -- a plan and purpose.

"That was one of my core values. Whether it was an Olympic year or not, whether it was a big contest or not, I had goals and tricks and things I wanted to accomplish.

"That's why you saw at events if I had first place -- then on the victory lap you saw tricks. I had things I wanted to accomplish. I did things because I wanted to. It simplifies things a lot."

Kelly turns 28 this summer. You bet she's planning to be at the Winter Games in Sochi.

In February of 2014 she would be 30. Laughing, she said of the entertainment value of being a 30-year-old halfpipe icon, "I am aware."

Someone, however, has to be the first. And in her career, that has typically been Kelly Clark.

First and, often, best.

This 2011 season -- for sure the best.

"I want to inspire people and show them what's possible on a snowboard. I want to bridge that gap between the possible and the impossible. I want," she said, "to lead the way."