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</script><p>If Daron Rahlves were designing next month's Skiercross race at Squaw Valley, it would go like this: </p> <p>Four skiers stand buckle to buckle at the top of the Palisades cornice. The gate opens and they drop 15 feet off the cornice, then fight for the straightest line through the narrow chutes to Siberia Bowl. Helmet cameras could track them with a live feed to big screens on the plaza, as they come hurtling down and down to the Mountain Run and a long tuck to the bottom. They'd round the corner of the Olympic House doing 50 mph, and schuss to a stop, spraying snow on the fans waiting on the sun deck of Le Chamois.</p> <p>Now that would be a race - 3 miles in three minutes - and it would favor America's most decorated downhiller. Even at 34 and two seasons into retirement from the World Cup, Rahlves is confident there isn't a skier alive who can beat him top to bottom at Squaw. </p> <p>But Skiercross is not a three-minute vertical. It is a 50-second chariot race and it takes four runs to win the event. The course dips and weaves over terrain that has been carved by a snowcat to shift from skyscraper steep to a flat rumpled carpet. Unlike the Olympic Downhill shown on the cover, in Skiercross the clock means nothing after the qualifying rounds. You can fall three times and win so long as every other racer falls four times. A racer must finish first or second in each of three increasingly combative rounds to reach the final. </p> <p>"The ski world hasn't seen anything like this in the United States," says Rahlves, who offers his own experiences in last year's inaugural Ski Tour as an example, while sitting at an upstairs table in the Chamois. He crashed in Sun Valley, he crashed in Breckenridge and he crashed in Aspen, launching 70 feet, landing wrong and screwing up his hip.</p> <p> Nicked up and knocked out before last season's finale at Squaw, the Skiercross rookie still finished the tour in eighth place out of 30, most of them pro racers who have been doing this for years in Europe and at the X Games. He won $7,750, and he's already topped that this year. At the season opener in Telluride last month he sliced his way to second, taking home $10,000. He could have won it if he'd gotten a better start. But the left arm he'd broken in November - in a motocross crash that split open his Bell helmet - was a hindrance to his ability to yank out of the gate. Still, he had the fastest qualifying time and won all three of his preliminary heats. In the final, he tried to take the lead on a jump, straddled the skis of winner Lars Lewin and nearly took them both out of the money. </p> <p> Now the arm brace is off and Rahlves has been freeskiing at Sugar Bowl. He doesn't train for this discipline. He'll just show up and race at Deer Valley on Saturday when ski cross makes its American World Cup debut. He'll be at Squaw Valley on Feb. 8-10 and, who knows, he might be on the U.S. Ski Team again when ski cross becomes a medal sport at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. </p> <p>The event is so new that they haven't yet parsed out whether to call it ski cross (the Olympic term) or Skiercross, (the tour promoter's term.) By either name, the format is the same as for snowboard cross, which got inordinate TV time at the last Olympics. The wreckage is what makes it TV-friendly, and Skiercross has the added viewer satisfaction in being able to watch two world-class racers lose control, get their legs tangled together, spin out and go into an embarrassing four-legged reverse-snowplow backward slide off the run and into the safety netting, just like recreational skiers do. (The Squaw Skiercross race is scheduled to air Feb. 23 on CBS.) </p> <p> <strong>"</strong>Ski cross is probably the most injury-laden event in skiing today," says the tour physician, Dr. Kevin Stone of the Stone Clinic in San Francisco. This year a women's race has been added and the Squaw Valley Ski Patrol had better double the order of toboggans. "At Telluride, there were more female injuries than male injuries," Stone says.</p> <p> The mountain events are free with a lift ticket. The BaseCamp Music Experience, a tent with requisite laminates and ultra-VIP areas, subsidizes the ski racing. The weekend, called the Ski Tour last year, was recently renamed 48Straight as fair warning of the consecutive hours without sleep required for audience participation. Rahlves summed up last year's finale as "the biggest thing that's ever happened in Tahoe, hands down." The legendary 1960 Olympic Winter Games at Squaw either do not register or are disqualified for lack of a party tent. "Nothing has ever come close as far as caliber of skiers and the events and the music going on." </p> <p> <strong>The name Daron Rahlves </strong>was not always authoritative. It was largely unheard of until Jan. 30, 2001, the day he was the surprise winner of the super giant slalom at the World Championships at St. Anton, Austria. The American team had been in a long slump until the gold medalist with the gold hair was suddenly atop the podium, his Austrian heroes Hermann Maier and Stephan Eberharter on lower steps. </p> <p>"We knew he was coming," Maier said at the time. "We just didn't known he was coming this fast."</p> <p> The Super G is akin to the Downhill, which has been the glamour event going back to Robert Redford's portrayal in "Downhill Racer," the 1969 feature film that capitalized on the heroics of Jean-Claude Killy in the 1968 Olympics. The cinematographer outfitted a stunt skier with a movie camera, showing for the first time how fast those chattering skis go, which is about half as fast as they go now. </p> <p> </p> <p>Four years ago, Rahlves found himself seated with Redford in first class on a United flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco.<strong> </strong>It must have been a sight when they passed in the aisle, both still magically blond, both about the same size, 5 feet 9, though Rahlves is stockier at 180 pounds. </p> <p>Luckily, he had finally gotten around to seeing "Downhill Racer" on video a few years before and it was still fresh. Fresh with Redford, too, 35 years later. They discussed the location shoots. The skiers are still staying in the hotels depicted, racing on the same ominous mountains - the Hahnenkamm, toughest course on the World Cup circuit, at Kitzbuhel, Austria; the Lauberhorn, the longest downhill, in Wengen, Switzerland. Rahlves is the only American to have won the Hahnenkamm since the World Cup era started, in 1967, and the only American to have won both.</p> <p> </p> <p> "It was my life," he says.</p> <p>Not quite. The Rahlves story is less believable than the movie. The Redford character in the film grew up in a Colorado ski village, the Rockies out his door. Rahlves spent his formative ski years at Seven Hills School in Walnut Creek. He came up through NASTAR (National Standard Race) the amateur weekend event that allows anyone to put on a bib and run some gates, which is as unlikely a start as an Olympic swimmer representing a YMCA pool.</p> <p>Rahlves' first day on skis came when he was 3, at Squaw Valley. He rode the Emigrant chair to the summit. He wasn't scared. By then he'd already been water skiing on the shoulders of his dad, Dennis, who set a world record in that sport. His first age-group race was at Aspen. He was 4. He took the bronze medal. That gave him a taste for the podium and by seventh grade he'd convinced his mother to move him up to Squaw for school so he could ski more than just on weekends. His dad stayed behind to run Rahlves & Rahlves, a real estate firm now in its third generation.</p> <p>By high school, he'd progressed enough to be sent to Green Mountain Valley School in Vermont. He was the only kid in class who had never seen a ski race on TV. "Never watched the Olympics, nothing" he says. "I was more into doing it myself. I don't even remember watching (Downhill champion) Bill Johnson ski in '84, and I was 11 years old." </p> <p>At 20, he made the U.S. team, and by his third Olympics, Torino, in 2006, he'd announced his retirement. He ripped off the best time in the first training run of the first event, the Downhill, and decided to skip the second training run. "I thought I had this in the bag. I'm going to crush this thing," he recalls thinking. </p> <p>Then his coaches over-thought it. After Bode Miller delivered his typically disappointing run, he radioed up to the top that his skis and wax weren't right, and that set off a frenzy of analysis as to what the equipment should be. </p> <p>"It was the decision of my ski tech, because of Bode," Rahlves says. "My skis were switched, which was the wrong thing to do." </p> <p>He skidded wide on a turn up high and ended the Downhill in 10th. Six days later he moved up to ninth in the Super G, his best event. Two days after that, he failed to finish the giant slalom. He made no excuses. "It just wasn't clean skiing," he told the TV commentator.</p> <p>What was clean was his getaway, the next morning, down the mountain road in his bus, with his wife, Michelle, and their husky, Chevy, dog press credentials still jangling on his collar. Rahlves had bought a house in Truckee in 2001, but had yet to experience the pleasure of shoveling snow. "I was living this life since I was 14, eight months out of the year," he says. "I was not tired of racing. I was tired of everything else."</p> <p> His last competition was the Super G at the U.S. Alpine Championships at Sugarloaf, Maine, in March 2006. He told the skiers at the top, "last slide down," gave some high fives and won it. It was his seventh U.S title to go with nine World Cup Downhill victories, the most by any American man, and three in the Super G. Most impressive of all, he never blew out a knee in 13 years on the World Cup tour.</p> <p>"He's probably the greatest athlete I've had the pleasure of working with," said Phil McNichol, head coach of the U.S. team. </p> <p><strong>But he never won </strong>Olympic gold, or any other color, and that is the only decoration a skier can capitalize on. World Cup racers don't earn prize money to speak of. They get by on endorsements, and when your racing career is over, the next step is usually shaking hands for some destination resort. Rahlves saw this coming even before his last season, and over dinner at PlumpJack Cafe he discussed retirement options with Kipp Nelson, a trustee of the U.S. Ski Team.</p> <p>Aware that every American pro racing tour had failed, their concept was "more like a skiing festival, a movement," Rahlves says. "Not like just one event but something that captivates a whole weekend. I was part of the ray of light that first started shining." </p> <p>The Ski Tour was formed in Sun Valley but its roots are in Lake Tahoe, back in the 1970s, when it was no big deal for kids from the Bay Area to transfer to Truckee High, live on their own and hitchhike to school, then from school to Squaw every day. That is what Steve Brown of Portola Valley was doing when he met Nelson, of Hillsborough, who was doing the same thing.</p> <p>They both went to the University of Colorado, where they were roommates and racers on the Buffaloes' B team. Nelson went off to make his mark as an investment banker in London and Hong Kong. Brown went home to Palo Alto to work his way up the family construction firm, Vance Brown and Sons.</p> <p>Brown had been skiing in Sun Valley since he was a kid. When he burned out on Bay Area development, in 2001, he moved to Ketchum, Idaho, where Nelson had already moved. Ketchum is full of Bay Area transplants who have retired young to Sun Valley, and Nelson and Brown are two of them. They formulated the Ski Tour during rides on the chairlift, and "the loudest show on snow," debuted a year ago as two events - men's Skiercross and skier halfpipe. </p> <p>The musical acts, like the skiers, signed on for the tour.<strong> </strong> Last year, the party tent sold out both nights at Squaw, 2,700 people each, for the Wailers, Bob Marley's old outfit, and G. Love & Special Sauce. It would take a cultural anthropologist to figure out how the cold European sport of snow skiing became allied with the reggae music of Jamaica, but there it is. One of George Clinton's funkateers had the right idea, dressed in a diaper in the steaming Olympic Village Lounge.</p> <p>This year's draws are The Roots and Rock Kills Kid on Friday night and Dinosaur Jr. on Saturday night. When the tent closes, the bands are still in the bars. "For those who want to keep going, we keep it going," says Nelson, who has adopted the look of a '70s ski bum along for the ride. </p> <p> Nelson, 48, and Brown, 51, are striving to make their tour the Olympic qualifier for 2010, and last summer they bought the competing Jeep King of the Mountain Tour, which has been around for 15 years. The merger encompasses men's and women's snowboard halfpipe and snowboard cross. It is always a good idea to keep skiers and snowboarders and their respective cultures separated, and at Squaw, Skiercross is on Feb. 9 and snowboard cross Feb. 8. (If you've been waiting to catcall Lindsey Jacobellis for showboating her way out of sure Olympic gold in Torino, now is your chance.) </p> <p><strong>Even without women</strong> racers or snowboarders, last year's Squaw event still managed to live up to Rahlves' hyperbole. The ski world hadn't seen anything like it at the moment the logo-ed archway over the course unexpectedly deflated with four racers coming down Siberia and hurtling straight for it in an elimination heat. </p> <p>The lead skier got through cleanly but the next two got clipped and were thus eliminated. The fourth racer hit the deflated balloon head on, taking him from 50 mph down to zero.</p> <p> "It was one of those freak accidents," says Rahlves, who was watching. He tallied the wounds as "one blown-out knee, a broken arm and a busted sternum." The sleds came out to haul away the wounded. The balloon was dragged off the course and the race went on.</p> <p>That lowlight didn't make the TV special on the Squaw event that aired a few weeks later on ABC. But there were other stack-ups. "They're getting all catawampus," proclaimed the commentator during one high-speed entanglement. In the championship race, two skiers collided at the top and the other two collided at the bottom. The winner staggered across the line. The runner-up arrived minus a ski and third place came down in a ball of snow. Canadian Stanley Hayer won the overall tour, worth $70,000 and a Honda Element. "The money's great, but I wanted the car," Hayer said afterward. "The car has been a big thing for me since I drive a crappy '95 van with about 400,000 miles, no windows and the tranny doesn't work."</p> <p><strong>Rahlves has his boots</strong> on more solid snow. In addition to the home in Truckee, he owns a beach condo in Encinatas, which got dusted with ash in the big fire. He's also partnered with his sister, Shannon, in a south Reno office complex called Thomas Creek. "She runs it," he says, "I just put money into the pot." That's where the ski tour comes in. It allows him to keep being paid for wearing his uniform of Red Bull hat and Spyder suit anytime he goes outside. "Wake up, put that stuff on and go to the hill, whether I'm skiing or not skiing," he says. </p> <p>Rahlves met his wife, Michelle, 10 years ago at Bear Bones physical therapy in Truckee. She was working there<strong> </strong>when he went in to rehab a hip. They were married at a Tahoe lakefront home five years ago. The twins, a boy named Dreyson and Miley, a girl, came along in July. </p> <p>Fatherhood has not made him cautious, and neither have all those years on the downhill. Antoine Deneriaz, the reigning Olympic Downhill champion, abruptly retired last month at 31, because he could not get a handle on his fear following a crash. This isn't a problem for Rahlves. He doesn't want to get a handle on his fear. "It's nice getting scared," he says. "I want to get scared every day."</p> <p>That takes some work, once you've been a downhill racer. Rahlves has been clocked doing 92 mph on a steep pitch of solid ice on a World Cup course. "I've always liked speed," he says. "Freeskiing to me is a new area where I get scared a lot." Fear is fine. Patience is what Rahlves struggles with. He doesn't like to wait until the strategic moment to pass comes along in a Skiercross race. He'd rather pass early on the theory that nobody will be passing him back. "That's why I was crashing all the time last year," he says. Having kids has not made him patient. It's been six months and he's good and ready to get those twins moving. </p> <p>"We're still waiting for them to try and sit up," he says. "We're going to put them on sleds this winter and shoot them down the mountain." </p> <p> </p> <p> </p> <p> </p> <p><i>E-mail Sam Whiting at swhiting@sfchronicle.com</i> </span> </div> <p id="pageno">This article appeared on page <strong>P - 10</strong> of the San Francisco Chronicle</p> <div class="articletools"><div class="toolset"> <div class="print"><a href="/web/20080409135640/http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2008/01/27/CM72OJSVF.DTL&type=printable">Printable Version</a></div> <div class="email"><a href="/web/20080409135640/http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2008/01/27/CM72OJSVF.DTL&type=friend&emailcolor=%237F0E95&origin=http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi%3Ff%3D%2Fc%2Fa%2F2008%2F01%2F27%2FCM72OJSVF.DTL%26type%3Dski">Email This Article</a></div> <div class="shareprefs"> <div id="sharepop2mask" onmouseover=" document.getElementById('sharepop2').style.display='none'; document.getElementById('sharepop2mask').style.display='none';"></div> <div id="sharepop2"> <div class="tabmask" onmouseover=" document.getElementById('sharepop2').style.display='none'; 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