Coming soon: Crashed Ice
Skaters careen toward event at Fenway Park
LINCOLN, N.H. – Plenty of people would go to extremes for a chance to compete at Fenway Park. Most of those people, however, hope the reward would be to play for the Red Sox. But for Katie Guay and Thomas Missert, their ticket into the ballpark came as a result of skating their way down a winding 600-foot long ice track at Loon Mountain for a wild card spot in next month’s Red Bull Crashed Ice. Ice cross downhill looks like the more established Olympic sports of snowboard cross (or boardercross) and skier cross, with competitors racing four at a time down a steep track with plenty of turns, jumps and rollers on ice skates as opposed to a snowboard or skis. The three Crashed Ice events are the biggest events on the ATSX (All Terrain Skate Cross Federation) Ice Cross Downhill World Championship schedule. The first was held last month in Yokohama, Japan, and will be followed by one in Finland on Feb. 2 before the Fenway event Feb. 8-9. It will be the first time a major ice cross downhill tournament has been held in the United States outside of Minnesota. “I’m from Minnesota so I was a little bummed at first when I heard it wasn’t coming back, but to be inside such an iconic venue like Fenway and have it inside a stadium, that’s going to be a huge improvement and huge gain for Red Bull Crashed Ice to showcase that they can hold it in a stadium,” said Amanda Trunzo, the top-ranked woman in the world. “The fans are going to be incredible there and it’s going to be great to look down into the stadium and see tons of fans.” Trunzo has New England ties, having played college hockey at Dartmouth, averaging better than a point a game during her career from 2007-11. She got involved three years ago with the creation of the woman’s tour when the world’s current top-ranked men’s skater Cam Naasz suggested she give it a try. A wild card was how Naasz got involved with the sport when it first came to the United States in St. Paul, Minn., in 2011. He had a friend who was working with Red Bull at the time and essentially gave him an entry. “Since it was new, they had this thing where they could give out wild card passes. They called them golden tickets,” said Naasz, also a Minnesota native, who played hockey through high school. “My buddy had this golden ticket and was like, ‘I think you’re going to be good at this, you should do it.’ I was just planning on going to watching, but yeah, he convinced me, and I was the best American at that event.” The top four Americans from that event were considered Team USA and he was competing a couple weeks later in the Netherlands and has been hooked since. The 48 competitors that qualified to race at Loon came from an initial pool of about 300 athletes who were part of tryouts in Boston and Buffalo that consisted of an obstacle course on an ice rink. “The whole goal of this Red Bull Crashed Ice athlete search is to find that hidden gem, that hidden athlete,” said tournament director Scott Crowder. “This sport of ice cross downhill is unique and there’s not a lot of access, so I think a lot of people see it and there’s not a lot of opportunities. This athlete search has given more than 300 athletes an opportunity to get that wild card spot at Fenway Park.” While getting access to a course is difficult, Naasz said the next best thing is inline skating at a skate par,k while Trunzo’s regimen involves five to six days a week of CrossFit. Naasz and Trunzo were the winners of the Crashed Ice event in Yokohama. Neither competed at Loon, but they were on hand to test out the course and see the wild card spots handed out. While there will be four racers per heat for the event at Fenway, yesterday’s qualifier was done in a time-trial format with racers taking the best time from their two attempts. Guay, who played hockey at Brown and has been an NCAA official for more than a decade, ripped her way down in a time of 18.02 seconds and finished 99-hundredths of a second ahead of the rest of the field. While the Mansfield resident has been an official at Fenway Park, including the first time ice was put down at the ballpark in 2010, the opportunity to compete there was too good to pass up. “I think a lot of it is a mental game,” Guay said of how she prepared for the transition from the flat ice to skating downhill with obstacles thrown in. “You’ve just got to be a little crazy and the adrenaline is pumping when you’re at the top and you’ve got to let loose and go for it. “My first run, I certainly was a little more cautious. That first jump that they threw up there was a challenge, but I took it conservatively and went around the outside and go for the jump. The second one, go big or go home and I went right for it. It was a bit of a shaky landing, but once I landed that it was a confidence booster and I went all out and tried to grind it out to the end.” Marissa Pari of Yarmouth, a former hockey player at Salem State, was the runnerup in 19.01 and Kelly Rose Conaty of Bridgewater, who played at St. Michael’s College, was third in 19.62. Missert, who hails from Laconia, N.H., was the men’s champion in 15.62 seconds. He edged Michael Romano of Brampton, Ontario, by .037 while Mike Murray of Toronto was third in 16.21. Field preparations at Fenway Park began on Dec. 26 and scaffolding construction got started this past week. The nearly 2,000-foot course will drop 70 feet from the starting line over the bleachers in right-center field, touching all the bases before reaching the finish line at home plate.