Canadians crush it at Crashed Ice event

By Daniel Vazzoler

The sport of ice-cross downhill skating had a spectacular Ottawa debut in early March as thousands of fans crowded around the Rideau Canal headlocks to watch the world’s top male and female competitors battle for the 2017 Red Bull Crashed Ice championship.

Canadians came close to sweeping the men’s and women’s championships.

Canadian Jacqueline Legere won her second consecutive women’s worlds with her triumph in Ottawa, while Mississauga native Scott Croxall ended the 2016-17 season in second place overall, just behind American Cameron Naasz — now a two-time world champion with back-to-back titles.

Each of the victorious athletes became the first to win multiple world championships in the sport.

Ice cross is relatively unknown compared to other sports, but many athletes who compete at the elite level – including American Reed Whiting – say once they glimpsed the action they were hooked and wanted to find a way onto the circuit.

Minnesota-born Whiting, 36, a former high-level hockey player, said he was unaware of the sport until a friend of his competed in Crashed Ice five years ago. After seeing the video from the event, Whiting decided to try out for the race held in St. Paul, Minn., but didn’t qualify for a race until a spur of the moment trip to Switzerland in 2012.

Whiting said he’s always been a bit of adventure-seeker. In the 10 years between the end of his junior and college hockey career and his debut as a Crashed Ice racer, he had tried a variety of extreme sports: kite surfing, speed gliding — even bull riding.

His work experience is about as random as his sporting life. When he began Crashed Ice, Whiting was an insurance adjuster. Over the years, he became a turtle farmer and he currently works Red Bull broadcasts of Crashed Ice as one of its commentators.

“I’d just see something and I’d want to do that, just kind of like Crashed Ice. I always had the means to do it and the time with my job,” said Whiting. “I was just always jumping on something new.”

Whiting said the sport’s wow factor was irresistible and drew him into the scene.

“People see videos online. A lot of people, I think, would love to try it, but are intimidated by it, especially when you look at these big Red Bull tracks.”

The introduction of Riders Cup events — which take place on less challenging tracks – was aimed at giving athletes interested in the sport an easier entry point.

“So then there’s a progression,” Whiting said. “You earn points here (at Riders Cup) and then you qualify here (to Crashed Ice) …here’s a track, prove yourself, do well and then you can move up.”

Crashed Ice – the championship series sponsored by Red Bull – and ice-cross downhill in general have undergone extensive changes since its first event back in 2001, according to Claudio Caluori, an expert in the sport who works alongside Red Bull for these events.

He previously gained experience creating dirt tracks for the cycling version of downhill racing.

The first ice-cross race was held in Sweden, in a Stockholm fish market. The fish market was used because of the ice available to make the track, said Caluori. He also said the event gets its name from that, as well – using a play on words, going from “crushed ice” to “crashed ice”.

The crushed ice was mixed with some snow and water in the inaugural competition to create the smooth surface for competitors to race on.

The first world championship was in 2010 and the number of races has increased over the years, with nine different events – four Crashed Ice and five Riders Cup competitions – in the 2016-17 season, with the Ottawa event as the grand finale.

There was noteworthy local sub-plot unfolding in the season climax, with one Ottawa-born racer in the event, Daniel Guolla, finishing 34th out of 87 men who competed.

Caluori said big changes in the sport have been with the training of the athletes and the equipment they wear in order to cut down on weight and to streamline their downhill runs.

Many of those who compete, like Whiting, are former hockey players who tested their skating abilities in a new sport. They stuck with was familiar to them equipment-wise — intially wearing bulky hockey pants, helmets and cages that don’t protect the face from the wind generated by the nearly 70km/h speeds the skaters reach, as well as hockey gloves designed to protect from swinging sticks more than anything.

Ice-cross athletes and their gear have evolved considerably since then.

“The riders are actually really training for this — it’s not just that you show up here and see how it is,” he said. “The guys who are in the top 20 are seriously training all summer long for this and equipment has changed. The guys are not just using normal hockey gear anymore. They’re trying to optimize everything.

“At the beginning, it was hockey players going down and … a hockey player does not necessarily have the mindset of a racer,” Caluori continued. “A hockey player never plays those games in his head, where he thinks, ‘How can I optimize all my gear to be faster out of the gate?’”

Having retired from racing last year, Whiting now serves as a vice-president of the All-Terrain Skate Cross Federation (ATSX), the governing body of the sport that formed in 2015. He said one of the goals of the international federation is for each country to have its own ice-cross federation, with the hopes of eventually becoming an Olympic sport.

“The Olympic Committee is really motivated, speaking with people at Red Bull and at ATSX —  they want to have it involved” in a future Winter Games.