Mammoth has characters

(Editor's Note: This story first appeared in the 2007-08 Ski and Snowboard Special issue of Mammoth Monthly magazine.

There is a YouTube movie that shows Stacey Cook above Shotover Canyon in New Zealand. She is about to be sent over a cliff on a 360-foot, freefall drop, advertised by the Canyon Swing proprietors as "the world's highest swing."

In the video, Cook giggles a bit, but it not a nervous laugh. In fact, the twenty-three-year-old Olympic and World Cup downhill racer actually seems to relish the opportunity to make the drop and swing. Her auburn hair is tied back so as to not get in the way of the elaborate harness, which is fastened to thick, elastic cords. Once at the bottom of the fall, the cords will stop her downward momentum and swing her out over the river, in impossibly wide arcs, before the attendants winch her back to the edge of the cliff.

As she is buckled in and swung out over the canyon by the attendants, she leans back in the harness, throws out her arms, looks toward the sky, smiles broadly, then disappears.

Thwip!

Cook instantly is gone from the range of the camera lens. She falls at an alarming speed, reaching just over eighty-six miles an hour before her fall is broken by the elastic cords.

This is Stacey's world. Her freefall that day from a platform over the Shotover River is just about the same speed at which she skis the undulating, perilous downhill slopes on the World Cup circuit.

"When I was young," she said, "all I wanted was to go fast."

Cook, who is from Truckee and learned skiing at Northstar-at-Tahoe, arrived in Mammoth during her senior year of high school. She had met and befriended several of the coaches from the Mammoth Mountain Ski Team, and she was eager to take her skills to Mammoth's wide-open terrain.

"My passion was about speed," she said, "and up in Tahoe, the mountain doesn't give you the hill space to train, and Mammoth does. So coming here was about the coaching and the chance for speed."

She moved in with Ski Team director Mark Brownlee and his wife. Two years later Cook skied her way into the Olympics with the U.S. Ski Team, where she remains as one of the top up-and-coming ski racers in the world.

"Stacey is a committed and driven individual," Brownlee said. "She likes to have fun and she has a heart of gold -- a very solid human being."

She also is a very solid skier.

She finished nineteenth in the 2006 Olympic downhill and sixteenth in last season's World Championships. Also a giant slalom skier and a Super G specialist, Cook was the 2006 U.S. Super G champion and took the silver medal in the event last season.

But if there was one race that represented a breakout performance, it was one year ago, at Lake Louise, where Cook won her first World Cup points and surprised the world by taking fourth in the first downhill race of the season, behind Germany's Maria Riesch, the United States' Lindsey Kildow and Italian racer Nadia Fanchini.

"At the very beginning of the season we had a training camp in Colorado," she said, "and just going through that camp I was consistently skiing the fastest. It was the first time I'd been in that position and had been consistently in that position. For that whole three-week camp I was really excited to start the season, and the first race in Lake Louise went the same way."

It didn't stay that way.

From Lake Louise until the end of the season, Cook fell so fast that she might have been jumping off a cliff in New Zealand.

"I think I expected the season to stay like that, to have it keep going on that same path and it went totally the other way," she said.

"Things started falling apart. Instead of going for the podium, I was going for top thirty. It was hard mentally because I'd never prepared myself for bad races."

Nothing was wrong with her physically, and there was a modest uptick in her season when she surprised her coaches by skiing well in the new Super Combined event, pairing slalom with either downhill or Super G.

What was wrong, both Cook and Brownlee said, was that she was twenty-two.

"When you're such a driven individual and you're also relatively young and experiencing success as a young athlete, you really want to achieve it the next race," Brownlee said. "It's easy to burden yourself with performance pressures. Now she's learning how to relax and trust her skill set and her abilities and talents. If you don't relax, you tend to overcome those with tension, and it's hard to let things flow."

Said Cook:

"Physically, I'm right up there with the best. Technically, I'm still young and still learning but I have moments where I'm unstoppable, and then moments were everything falls apart. It takes experience and time, and it's hard for me because I want everything right now.

"I have to give it patience. A lot of it is knowing the race hills, also, so it's tactical. In the last two years, almost every race is on a new hill for me, where the girls who have been there ten years have raced it twenty times. It's hard to complete with that. They know the terrain; it's all in the back of their heads. For me, I don't know how the terrain is going to react or how to approach things. It's a matter of being a first-timer rather than being a veteran."

Over the summer, Cook arrived back in Mammoth after training in Hawaii. She was tanned, fit and, other than battling a summer cough, she was upbeat and eager to get to New Zealand, then Chile, to get back on the snow.

Her training in Hawaii was both unusual and thrilling. By concentrating on standup surf paddling in Maui, she gained stamina and balance.

"I know it sounds funny, but it's the closes thing to ski racing that I've ever found. You stand on a twelve-foot board, with a canoe paddle. You go in the waves and do wind runs. The sport requires so much balance and so much complex movements with your body, it's really similar to skiing, which is not something you can easily simulate off snow. Being in the water, you never know what's coming up or what you're going to get. It's an advantage to have that involved in your training."

Mostly, though, Cook said she had time to reflect on her time here last spring, after the World Cup season, when she rejoined the Mammoth Ski Team during a week of divisional junior races.

There, she found a kind of salvation by skiing with and teaching young racers here at home.

"I think from a personal, as well from a ski team point of view, the amount of energy she put back into the team was really heartwarming," Brownlee said.

Cook said it wasn't only about good will, but that she also learned a little bit about herself from an unlikely source.

"I got to ski with the juniors, and I saw the fire in their eyes, no matter what was going on. If they were first or last, they felt so proud of themselves and I thought, that's what I need to do. It's funny that I can learn from the seven-year-olds on the Mammoth Ski Team, but it's really no different. I have to be able to be proud of how far I've gone and what I'm doing and still look toward the future and still have goals."

Plenty of other people are rooting for Cook.

"We're hoping for some great things this coming season," Brownlee said. "She's going to take the success she had from last year, like Lake Louise, and with that, we'd be looking for her on the podium."