SKIING’S TALLEST TALE
Lake Tahoe’s Bennett is 6-foot-7, yet has emerged as America’s top speed racer
ALPINE MEADOWS » They dismissed him as too tall.
They said his size 15 feet were too big an obstacle. They told his parents it just couldn’t be done.
But 6-foot-7 Bryce Bennett dreamed of growing into a top downhill ski racer anyway.
“There’s a first time for everything,” he once told his father.
Now the Lake Tahoe skier is the tallest of the 242U.S. athletes competing at the Winter Olympics in South Korea. Bennett, 25, has emerged as America’s top alpine speed skier by whooshing past the doubters and forging his own track in an unusual journey to Mount Olympus.
“This guy is stepping up in a big way, and it’s very cool to witness,” said team leader Steven Nyman, who recently withdrew fromthe Olympics because of a knee injury.
It has been an ordeal for Bennett to develop into the country’s most consistent speed racer heading into the men’s downhill — one of the most daunting and exciting events of the Winter Games — Sunday (6 p.m. Saturday, Pacific).
“It was hard for coaches to understand my mechanics of skiing because it looks so different than so many athletes,” Bennett said late last month from Garmisch, Germany. “There were a lot of people who doubted how far I could take this sport. It was tough to overcome that.”
To be clear, Bennett credits his coaches along the way, starting with those at Squaw Valley but also the U. S. staff. He blames himself for not being able to articulate how faulty equipment held him back at the start of his career.
It was most apparent six years ago when a pair of newly developed boots he wore didn’t work.
“Whatever they did to that boot was horrendous,” Bennett said. “Boots usually are designed off a smaller- size foot. On the computer program, they just make them bigger but they don’t add the correct amount of plastic to the molding process, which I had no idea about. That was the level I had to go to figure out a solution.”
But none of the coaches believed Bennett had a boot problem. They blamed it on height because it doesn’t take a NASA scientist to understand a big body creates time-sucking drag when barrelling down an icy run.
“I knew then and there I was onmy own in the sport and it was going to be that way,” the skier said. “That was a big wake-up call. If coaches don’t believeme on this, what else don’t they believe me that I feel?”
Bennett, though, also realizes he failed to communicate effectively with all concerned.
“I could only feel what was going on,” he said of the equipment issues. “I didn’t know how to verbalize that. You had to over communicate it to everyone.”
But no one debates how difficult it is for a skier with a 7-foot wingspan.
“When his arms come out it creates a parachute unlike any other on the World Cup,” an NBC Sports analyst said during a broadcast lastmonth as Bennett descended the famed course at Kitzbuhel, Austria.
Watching the event in the early-morning hours at his split-level home in Alpine Meadows, Stan Bennett said, “When his arms go out …”
“It’s like a sailboat,” wife Mary completed the thought.
Stan and Mary met in 1979 while working in the parking lot at the Squaw Valley Ski Resort after migrating to the Sierra from Southern California. Four decades later, their son graduated from the same mountain that held the 1960 Winter Games to continue Tahoe’s impressive tradition of Olympic skiers. Bennett joins the ranks of Jimmie Heuga, Andrea Mead Lawrence, Tamara McKinney, Julia Mancuso, Eric and Sandra Paulsen, Daron Rahlves and so many others who started on Tahoe’s sweet slopes.
A former motorcycle racer, Stan became a master telemark skier. Mary, a Long Beach State rower, took to skiing from her first runs at the Kirkwood resort. The parents wanted their only child to embrace the outdoors as much as they did.
They put him in a backpack and cross- country skied as he napped. Bryce was skiing on Edgie-Wedgies at 2 years old, not bothering with a harness.
Bennett joined the famed Squaw Valley Mighty Mites program at 4½ because he was as big as older kids.
“Skiing was his life,” said Konrad Rickenbach, who started coaching Bennett at age 8. “There were times when I wouldn’t see him for a week. At Squaw, you can ski for yourself and get a lot of mileage in.”
It was Rickenbach who imparted valuable lessons that Bennett employs today.
“It had little to do with skiing,” Bennett said of learning to think for himself.
For the past few years, his parents have traveled to Beaver Creek, Colo., to watch their son race in the World Cup. But they don’t get to the European events. Instead, Stan, 59, rises in the middle of the night to watch his son on TV.
Two years ago, he was screaming and rolling on the living room carpet after Bennett finished sixth at a World Cup race in Val Gardena, Italy, despite starting in the 57th position.
“That was the most thrilling moment of my life,” said Stan, who was a successful Tahoe homebuilder.
He’d like nothing more than to be at the finish line at the Jeongseon Alpine Center for Bennett’s two Olympic races— the downhill and the combined.
The Bennetts decided against traveling to South Korea because of Stan’s lingering head condition that began three years ago after a construction job injury. The father has had to undergo brain and neck surgeries. His head often feels like it is about to explode with piercing headaches that have left him on disability but with no real answers for long-term relief.
“I don’t think I can physically do it,” he said last month at the home he built in the shadow of the Squaw resort. “I amsad I don’t get to see my son race. It feels kind of empty. I want to be there working on his skis but I can’t.”
Bennett tried to minimize the situation, but it has been difficult for the skier who was racing in Europe last season when his dad underwent surgery. Mary Bennett had to get her husband to the hospital in a snowstorm.
Stan told his son, “You’re not coming home.”
Bennett knew his dad would be watching alone in his comfy recliner in the wee hours every time he raced. In the starting chute, Bennett told himself, “If I ski fast it will make my dad feel better. I might as well ski fast.”
After graduating from high school, Bennett wasn’t sure what the ski future held. Stan talked to his son one early morning before heading to work.
“It’s either you get on the team or go to work every day,” he told him.
Bennett made the U. S. ski team after getting invited to a spring camp in 2011. Two years later he was competing in Europe.
Although Bennett was in the throes of figuring out his equipment issues, Coach Peter Korfiatis saw potential as the U.S. coach on the Europa Cup circuit.
“This is when I knew he was a smart kid,” said Korfiatis, now Mammoth’s director of athletics. “‘Oh, wow, if I don’t get this together, I’m out of here.’ That’s when he became a student of the sport.”
It still took a few years before Bennett solved the equipment problem with Fischer skis and boots. The Austrian manufacturer makes customized boots for Bennett and supplies himwith skis that can withstand his body force.
Since then, Bennett has four top-10 World Cup finishes in the past two years.
It takes years to master World Cup courses, so Bennett has a ways to go even though he regularly finishes in the top 30 now.
“You find out that Europe has an incredibly dominant system and learn you’re not that good,” Bennett said. “You make it to the World Cup and you come down five or six seconds out and you feel you’ve skied the best race of your life.”
Stan and Mary will tune in during the alpine events in Pyeongchang. Their son’s dog Wiley likely will station himself on an empty sofa not quite sure what the fuss is about when Bennett flies across the flatscreen.
The son plans to march today in the Opening Ceremony, take a deep breath of the frozen Pyeongchang air and pay a silent tribute to all those North Lake Tahoe residents who supported his stubborn dream.
Bennett recently got an email from Rickenbach, the coach he still turns to for help.
“Be in the here and now,” it read. “Anything is possible at the Olympic Games.”
No matter how tall the tale.