Tim Burke back in the spotlight

Tim Burke finished third in a World Cup biathlon Sunday in Pokljuka, Slovenia, his first podium finish since the 2010 season, highlighting an extraordinary weekend for American athletes on skis. Burke's third-place in the 15-kilometer mass start marked his fourth career top-three finish.

"I feel like I'm back in the form I had before," Burke said over the phone. "And I'm more confident now."

Comparing Burke's achievement to those of other Americans over the weekend is, of course, something of apples to oranges. After all:

In Alta Badia, Italy, on Sunday, alpine racer Ted Ligety dominated a giant slalom to win by 2.04 seconds over Austria's Marcel Hirscher. It was Ligety's 14th career giant-slalom victory, tying him for fourth on the all-time wins list.

On Saturday, in snowy, foggy Val Gardena, Italy, downhiller Steven Nyman, starting 39th -- won. He missed all of last year with a torn left Achilles' tendon. Nyman's last top-three finish: 2007, at Beaver Creek, Colo.

Also in Val Gardena, Travis Ganong put down a career-best tenth.

In freestyle skiing on Saturday in Ruka, Finland, Heather McPhie -- relying on her back-X and signature D-spin -- notched her first World Cup victory in three seasons; on the men's side, Jeremy Cota took third. Four U.S. women placed in the top 10 and three American men in the top six.

In World Cup snowboard-cross racing Friday at Telluride, Colo., two-time Olympic champion Seth Wescott -- who was out much of last year with a shoulder injury -- won a photo finish in a blizzard to prevail over Australia's Alex Pullin, who had beaten him in the quarterfinals and semifinals.

Wescott and X Games champ Nate Holland won Saturday's team event.

"It feels really good to be back," Wescott said after winning Friday's race, adding, "…When I hole-shotted that first one, I said, 'Here we go, I love doing this.' "

In men's halfpipe Saturday in Breckenridge, Colo., on the Dew Tour, Shaun White and Louie Vito went one-two, White throwing an enormous signature double McTwist 1200 in his first run to score 95.25; Kaitlyn Farrington -- who debuted back-to-back 900s for the first time in her competition run -- won the women's event, Maddy Schaffrick taking third.

"I am excited! After coming off a knee injury this summer I am glad to be on top," White said. "I feel great and am pumped for the season. This is the road to Sochi!"

Also in Breckenridge, in the women's freeski superpipe, Brita Sigourney and Maddie Bowman went 1-2, Sigourney winning in her first competition after suffering a knee injury last February and training hard at the U.S. Ski Team's Park City's Center of Excellence workout facility all summer.

And Jamie Anderson won the slopestyle event, her run featuring spins in all four directions: a half cab 5-0, frontside 720, switch backside 540 and, finally, a huge 540 that she floated to the bottom.

In cross-country skiing, at the World Cup sprints Saturday in Canmore, Canada, Kikkan Randall took second, behind Norway's Maiken Kaspersen Falla. Randall leads the World Cup sprint standings; she moved up to second in the overall standings. The top American man, Andy Newell, finished fifth.

With all that … Tim Burke? And third place?

Yes.

Tim Burke.

Because biathlon, and Burke, are all about context, promise and opportunity.

The U.S. biathlon team has never -- again, never -- won an Olympic medal and Burke is one of its best bets to do so at the Sochi 2014 Games.

Burke also said by phone Sunday about his third-place finish, "This is big for me," and those words hold way more than just the obvious.

Amid his breakout 2010 season, Burke turned up with a painful condition, "compartment syndrome," that's not uncommon to Nordic skiers. The surgery and recovery had kept him out of the spotlight since.

But it was clear as the weekend's events progressed that Burke was on the verge of breaking through. He finished fourth in the 10k sprint and seventh in the 12.5 pursuit.

A biathlon primer: only 30 guys start in the 15k mass start, and those 30 must qualify. Of the 30 in Sunday's race, only two were North Americans -- Burke and Canada's Jean Philippe Leguellec, who would finish 21st.

Only one guy shot clean Sunday, Andreas Birnbacher of Germany. No surprise -- he won.

Jakov Fak of Slovenia, the winner of Thursday's sprint, missed just two shots. He finished just five seconds ahead of Burke.

Burke shot clean in the first two stages, then incurred a single penalty on the each of the last two stages.

He crossed the finish line a mere 3.3 seconds ahead of Martin Fourcade of France, the current World Cup leader. The solid weekend in Pokljuka lifted Burke to sixth in the overall World Cup standings.

What-ifs are usually of no consequence -- but in this instance, it's worth noting that if Burke had shot clean, his skiing is once again sound enough again that he might well have won Sunday's race.

The only reason to bring that up is that finishing third is the kind of thing that makes a guy think he can get to first, and -- just as importantly -- challenge for that top spot consistently.

"It's one thing," Burke said, "to know your training is going well, to think you can do this in a race.

"It's another to do it in a race.

"Now I know."

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.