Cle Elum’s Deneen moves on to mogul finals

Published 4:26 pm Sunday, February 14, 2010

I’m up here at Cypress Mountain in West Vancouver, home of a little bit of snow and a whole lot of dirt. Other than being a little slushy, however, the mogul course looks great, and the skiers are tearing down it like everything’s OK.

On a personal note, I’ve very happy that I came up for men’s moguls, and not the women’s competition yesterday. Today it’s clear and a little chilly. Yesterday it was pouring rain and windy. I’ve got to say it’s nice after a few days of warm and rainy weather to actually feel a bit cold. It’s like I’m at the Winter Olympics or something.

Anyway, about the first round of today’s competition.

Cle Elum’s Patrick Deneen, who is skiing in his first Olympics, was first out of the gate, and started things off with a solid run. His score of 23.97 was good for 10th place out of 30 skiers, and easily qualified him for the finals, which start at 5:30.

Guilbaut Colas of France led qualifying with a score of 25.93, followed by Canada’s Alexandre Bilodeau, then American Bryon Wilson.

Dale Begg-Smith, the top ranked mogul skier in the world, is in fourth. Begg-Smith, for those who don’t know (and why should you) has quite an interesting story. Begg-Smith, the 2006 gold medalist, was born and raised in Vancouver, but moved as a teenager to Australia and skis for that country. He also happens to be a millionaire who got rich by starting up an internet advertising company. He’s not a popular guy in Canada, and hasn’t been completely embraced by Australia either. Should he win tonight, it might not go over well with Canadians, who are still waiting to see the first gold medal ever won by a Canadian athlete on Canadian soil.

Getting back to Deneen, he seemed pleased with his first run, though he explained that it’s not ideal to go first in a judged sport.

“It’s pretty cool, but you never really want to go first because the judges don’t really have a feel on how to score you,” he said. “It’s pretty weird to be the first one out, I haven’t been first in a long time. It’s cool to be first one out, and it made it so I was able to keep a really good rhythm going from training right into my run right there.”

Results are based off of the final run score only, so those first runs scores will only determine the starting order, with the top qualifiers going last.

I’ll check back in after the finals to let you know how Deneen and the rest of the field do.