On Sunday morning, on a cold, dark mountain 80 miles above the Arctic Circle, Colby Granstrom will take the next step.
Check that. He’ll make a pretty significant leap.
Granstrom, an alpine ski racer from Lake Stevens, will make his first appearance on the World Cup circuit — the highest level of ski racing in the world — skiing in a slalom in Levi, Finland. At 20, coming off a strong season on the U.S. Ski Team’s development team, Granstrom is on the cusp of taking his career to the next level, which in this sport, is happening at the perfect time.
You see, ski racing, like so many other sports, is a fickle and impatient creature.
Potential at a young age is great, but without enough progress, you’ll eventually be left behind, oftentimes before you’re even old enough to legally drown your sorrows with an adult beverage.
“Our development team and younger guys are really strong, and that pushed me,” Granstrom said in a phone interview from Colorado before leaving for Finland. “The peak for skiing is late 20s, so I felt like it was kind of now or never. You either go to college now and ski in college, or you stay with the ski team. It was like, ‘I’ve got to give it my all now or else this dream might get pushed to the side. It might never happen.’”
So it was last season that a 19-year-old Granstrom realized it was time to step up his game before another generation of racers passed him by.
And step up he did.
Granstrom, who by his own admission wasn’t having a very good year, had a breakthrough in February at the Junior World Championships in France, winning the combined (a race that combines a skier’s time in downhill and slalom). He followed that with a string of strong results through the spring and summer, earning a promotion to the U.S. C team.
There are only 20 men on the U.S. Ski Team’s A, B and C teams, putting Granstrom in extremely elite company. As a young and still developing skier, Granstrom figured this year would mostly be spent on the Nor-Am and Europa Cup circuits, ski racing’s minor leagues in North America and Europe.
But a strong summer in New Zealand with the national team put him in position to ski in a time trail with seven other racers for a spot in Sunday’s race, the first slalom on the 2010-2011 World Cup schedule.
On Sunday, he’ll be one of six U.S. men in the race, a group that includes Olympic gold medalists Bode Miller and Ted Ligety. And while Granstrom obviously wants to ski well, he’s viewing this weekend as more of a bonus than a pressure-packed race.
“I don’t think there’s a lot of pressure just because it is my first World Cup and I’ll be the youngest guy for the U.S. competing,” he said. “I’ve been skiing really well in training and I feel really confident about my skiing, so I’m ready to go and hopefully I’ll race how I’ve been training and race to my potential. I’ll be happy if I can do that.”
The laid-back Granstrom is able to take a relaxed attitude to Finland because he knows this weekend can only help him, but can’t set him back.
If he makes it to the second run — the top 30 skiers after one run move on to run No. 2 — it will be a big boost.
If Granstrom doesn’t do well, he’ll spend most of this season skiing Nor-Am and Europa Cup races, which was the plan for this season anyway.
“If I ski really well, they might give me another World Cup spot,” he said. “If I get top-30 and get a second run, I’ll for sure get to race the next World Cup. Most of the World Cup selection is based off Nor-Am circuit and Europa Cup circuit, and that was the main focus going into this year. This is just a huge, huge bonus. I’m going to run with it, but it’s not like I need to do well here.”
Slalom, the most technical of the ski racing disciplines, has been Granstrom’s best event, though he strives to be strong in all of the alpine events: downhill, super-G, giant slalom, slalom and combined. He is the latest Washingtonian to make the U.S. Ski Team along with former Olympians Scott Macartney of Redmond and Libby Ludlow of Bellevue, who both recently retired. Will Brandenburg of Spokane will also race in Levi this weekend.
While no definitive records were available, Granstrom is believed to be the first person from Snohomish County to ski in a World Cup alpine race.
Like almost everyone else who gets this far in the sport, Granstrom’s racing career began early. Kris Granstrom, Colby’s father, recalls that his son showed potential in the sport at a very young age.
When he was 4 years old, Granstrom was too young to enter a race at Mount Bachelor in Oregon, but was allowed to forerun (run the course before the start of the race). Granstrom’s time would have placed him 24th in a field of 10-year-olds. When he was 6, Granstrom won a race featuring top racers age 12 and younger from Idaho, Oregon and Washington.
Yet the rise from promising young racer to the U.S. Team wasn’t easy.
Granstrom made the U.S. development team when he was 16, then missed most of his first year after suffering a concussion in a training run in Italy. He came back from that injury and spent the next two seasons with the development team, hoping for the breakthrough that finally came last season.
Now, after wondering if his ski-racing dreams would continue, Granstrom is preparing to take the next big step in his career.
“It’s different than I expected,” he said. “When you’re a little kid and you see the Olympics on TV. You just see that and say, ‘I want to be there, I want to be up on the podium there.’ Then you get into it, and it’s a lot harder than you think.
“This summer I made some big improvements, so I was really hoping to get a World Cup start this year or for sure next year. I was hoping for it, but skiing is so unpredictable, you never know what’s going to happen. So for it to come together this early in the season and actually be happening is pretty crazy.”
John Boyle: jboyle@heraldnet.com.
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