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Unlike most of his World Class peers, U.S. National Ski Team member and Olympian hopeful Scott Macartney never attended a ski academy, high schools where classes are canceled for powder. He graduated from Redmond High School before matriculating at Dartmouth College. But, like thousands of Seattle area kids today, the Redmond native spent his winter weekends skiing at a Puget Sound ski area, specifically Crystal Mountain.

“I think I had less ski time than most people who have reached the national level because I was a weekend skier who went to a traditional high school," he says. "I just loved the sport and possessed the internal desire to be a racer.”
As a teenager, Macartney would also head to Snoqualmie Summit a couple of times a week for night skiing, but not to socialize with the hundreds of kids for whom Summit ski exploits will one day evolve into legendary reminiscences of their youth. The two-time Olympian would meet his Crystal Ski Team pals in Issaquah and carpool to the Snoqualmie, where they would train until it was time to head home.

“Crystal produced five or six national team members during my time racing there,” he says. “We were a pretty focused group with an intense coach who had just come off the World Cup circuit.”

If Crystal is his home mountain, Macartney considers Whistler’s Dave Murray Downhill, site of the 2010 Olympic alpine events, his backyard World Cup course. “We used to go there occasionally as a family when I was really young, and then I would go for races as a teenager,” recalls Macartney, who finished 7th in the Super G at the Turin Olympics. “It’s obviously the only World Cup venue that I can easily drive to from Seattle.”

Macartney believes the downhill times will be exceptionally tight at the Games, as the course favors both the speed demons, who throw themselves down the course and fall almost as often as they finish, and the technicians who break each course down to its minutia for maximum efficiency. (Macartney falls into the latter category.)

“It’s certainly not the most difficult downhill on the circuit, but far from the easiest either,” the eight-year national ski team veteran says. “There are good steeps and gliding, you really have to link it together, so it’ll be really fun to watch with high speeds on great terrain.”
Macartney knows something about high speeds, the victim of one of the sport’s most dramatic spills in 2007, when a gust of wind pushed his body sideways while twelve feet in the air and traveling at 90 miles per hour at the circuit’s most challenging race in Kitzbuhl, Austria.

“I was a little bit hesitant the first couple of months back, but you can’t really ease back into world cup downhill,” explains Macartney, whose helmet cracked, leaving his head exposed to bounce against the icy snow as he skidded unconscious across the finish line.

“Ski racing is so fast yet so subtle, to win really requires total concentration, especially when you can’t see any texture in the snow due to flat light and the skier before just got choppered off.  You just have to take some chances.’ Those chances are exactly why this Washington native and his peers provide the most exciting two minutes in the Olympics, if not all of sport.

Follow Scott as he skis for the podium at www.scottmacartney.com.

Going to the Olympics? Be sure to stay up to date on all of the information you need to know at www.AAAwa.com/Vancouver2010.