PARK CITY — After weeks of pushing shovels and piling up snow, Deer Valley has its "bumps and jumps" — just in time for Utah, as a future Olympic host, to stage its first World Cup freestyle skiing competition.
For the moguls, there's something like an open egg carton to the left, evenly packed with giant-size car tops sitting end to end. To the right are sculptured spires with evenly placed launch ramps, waiting for aerial liftoffs.
On Friday, the world's best "bumper pounders" and aerialists lined up — often a dozen deep — to sample what some are calling the best bumps and jumps in the world. Fresh versions of the two courses will be in place in the same spots for the Winter Games in 2002.
Freestyle is skiing at its most challenging and spectacular. In the moguls, competitors slide and leap down a steep yet lumpy course and must do so with speed and grace. In aerial events, athletes soar off the jumps, acrobatically twisting, spreading and flipping in midair.
The first real test of the Deer Valley courses will come this weekend. Scheduled to compete in the World Cup mogul skiing and aerial flips are the nobility of the two events — Olympians and future Olympians from the United States and countries around the world. Also kicking off this weekend at Park City-area venues are the U.S. Sliding Championships, in bobsled, luge and skeleton, at the Utah Winter Sports Park, and the U.S. Cross Country Championships at Soldier Hollow.
The groundwork for the freestyle events involved far more than simply having snow and a hill. Crews spent weeks preparing for the World Cup, often working way past the time when the lifts closed and skiers were snug in their beds.
Take, for example, the mogul course.
According to Tim Meagher, course designer and chief of race, snowmaking crews worked for two weeks piling up enough snow to make a perfectly level base.
Then a Snowcat, held on the steep face by a steel cable hooked to a tree and lowered inches at a time, meticulously cut three-foot bumps every 6 1/2 feet.
And then? "We walked 30 volunteers down and built every left-hand turn. Once we got to the bottom, we started back at the top, cut the distance in half and built every right-hand turn. You do that by making every high spot a low spot and every low spot a high spot," Meagher said.
This also involved adding some personality to the course. You do that by making some bumps taller and some shorter; some bumps were built closer together and others were stretched out.
"We call it putting in the 'bluffs.' What you want to do is keep a skier on edge and never able to get into that perfect rhythm. That's what makes a course interesting," he explained.
In all, there are around 450 3-foot-high bumps crammed into an area half the width of a football field on a hill steep enough to be considered a cliff.
In half the time it takes to cook a 1-minute egg, a skier will make 84 turns at a very high speed and, to make it more interesting, catch big air off two 4-foot jumps. Then, while in the air, they will do some unbelievable stunts such as a triple-twister spread, a Daffy double-twister spread or a helicopter (360 degree spin), to name a few, to further dazzle the judge.
This is the longest course on the World Cup circuit, so by the time racers cross the finish, their leg muscles will be burning, their lungs should be ready to burst and their backs will ache from all the pounding.
As for the course itself, Meagher rates it as the best in the world. It has a perfect fall-line down the hill and perfect pitch — steep at the top, steeper in the middle and not quite as steep at the bottom "to allow skiers to land after the second jump and carry their speed. They won't hold back."
Where the mogul course was built from the top down, the aerial course, said Spero Chumas, jump designer and chief of aerials, went in reverse.
"First you establish a landing hill with a 37-degree pitch, with a 20-meter runout," he said, "then a 24-meter table to construct the jumps with a 70-meter in-run. Once you have all that you have the profile of a perfect jump hill. That's what we have here, a perfect jump hill."
The jumps themselves, the big ones anyway, rise up off the ground 14 feet and at the apex are only a few degrees shy of being perfectly perpendicular.
With a 35-mile-per-hour in-run and a straight-up launch, the world-class aerialists are expected to reach heights of 50 feet (about level with a five-story building), and then twist and turn and spin before landing. He expects jumpers will be in the air for up to 31/2 seconds from lift-off to landing.
The Deer Valley jump site, Chumas said, "is the accumulation of 18 years of knowledge that has come from building jumps. The dimensions we used were the very best available. There was no compromise. This is as close to a perfect jump hill as you can get."
What this means, he added, is that the hill will not only be safe, but it will allow the athletes to execute their acrobatic maneuvers to the highest level.
"I think you're going to see some of the very best jumps to ever come out of a World Cup. And the best part is this site is as spectator friendly as a jump hill can be," he said.
The mogul event will take place Saturday and the aerials on Sunday.
The next step up from here is the Olympics.