Extreme athletes risk their lives to defy gravity

Author: Canem Ozyildirim

After a conversation on extreme sports over dinner, Andrew Wagner '09 and I walked out of Freeman International Center. Billy, as his friends call him, looked around and said to himself, "Huh, I don't remember walking here ... Oh, because my friend drove me." He then turned to me and explained: "After having too many head traumas you start blanking out every once in a while," launching into a long and elaborate story about his last concussion. (Apparently, extreme athletes are also extremely talented storytellers who can shape "I jumped over a cliff" into a series of hilarious anecdotes that certainly made me grimace and scream more than a couple of times during the course of our dialogue.)

Wagner is one of the top skiers on the Middlebury alpine ski team, but we mostly talked about climbing, ice climbing and kayaking. However, before I started questioning the risk-taking aspect of these extreme sports, I asked Billy how he got into them and whether being an athlete encouraged him or not. He explained that although most of the time skiiers are at low risk, the possibility of injury has helped him expand his comfort zone.

"It started with my dad taking me on adventures that were somewhat scary, and I've experimented with testing my limits by overcoming challenges in situations that have certain consequences," he said. "I find that exhilarating, and I think it improves your confidence in lots of aspects of life."

One thing that most extreme athletes at Middlebury have in common is the fact that they all started practicing their activity of choice long before they came to college.

Will Hardie '10.5 started freestyle skiing through his club team at high school. Hardie said he tried to start a freestyle skiing club at Middlebury with a couple of his friends, but they faced stupendous obstacles.

"There are not that many people who are good at freestyle skiing at Middlebury," he explained. "It is not a sport that is easy to teach so you need to come in with those skills."

Nevertheless, Hardie and his friends did set up a short-lived club at Middlebury through the Center for Campus Activities and Leadership. "We had problems getting active participants and it was very difficult to get school funding," Hardie explained. "[Freeline skiing] here is not conducive to having a club." When I asked Hardie what was different about his high school club, he pointed out that they had three coaches who were all ex-Olympic athletes.

Tripp Burwell '09 is an elite whitewater kayaker who also started as a kid in North Carolina, where he lives. He and I talked the day after a racing event was canceled due to weather conditions. When I asked him how he started kayaking at Middlebury, Burwell said he "basically looked around for cars with kayaks on top and waited at rivers for people."

Burwell is able to juggle being on the swim team, his academics and going to Montreal once, if not twice, every week with his kayaking partner Christian. "There are two kinds of whitewater kayaking," Burwell and Woodard '11 explained, "playboating and creeking. We are lucky because we have two good rivers for creeking within 20 minutes. Anytime it rains or there is snowmelt, we leave campus, do a run and we are back in two hours. Plus, there is world class playboating in Montreal, so we are very lucky in terms of our location."

Unfortunately, the freestyle skiers are not as lucky, because the nearby Middlebury College Snow Bowl has a policy against any inverted maneuvers, back flips, front flips and other risky movements, which hinders the practice of freestyle skiing. "We are not allowed to build terrain parks at the Snow Bowl due to reasons regarding accident insurance, even though Vermont implements the Skier Safety Act," Hardie lamented. (Under the terms of the act, individuals are responsible for accidents as long as the mountains follow certain regulations.)

The question I could not resist asking these daredevils, of course, was , what if you did have an accident?

Wagner, who pointed out that climbing can be relatively safer than other sports "depending on how you do it," explained the mentality behind extreme sports.

"I would not call myself reckless because I don't do something unless I am confident that I am not going to mess it up," Wagner said. "While doing extreme sports, you can only focus on what you are doing and everything else disappears. You cannot think about failure - you have to be in a positive state of mind. There is no room for negative thoughts."

Burwell, for his part, called kayaking a major risk management experiment. "You usually know what the risks are and you never go down the river not knowing the risks," he said. "I love kayaking because the sport depends on your ability to solve the challenges presented by the river solely by hand. But I have reached a point where I'm content with the level of risk I am taking [relative to] the level of enjoyment." Burwell added that he follows all safety regulations, including wearing helmets and Personal Flotation Devices (PFDs), and noted that he never kayaks alone because it is not safe. "All the kayaking I do is with Christian," he said. "We constantly look out for each other's livelihood and well-being."

Still, Burwell did exhibit a bit of his flair for danger when he spoke of the time that he and his partner had an accident on the water. "Christian split open his chin so we pulled it together and super-glued the skin," he said with admirable nonchalance. "He's got a girlfriend, so I guess it should be fine now."