2012年1月30日 星期一

The incredible Sarah Burke

Sarah Burke stood on the side of a mountain and looked down at the world beneath her. Brown peaks, spotted with snow, stretched up in the distance, beyond a valley of ski shops and cottages. Written in white, the letters “PC” blazed proudly at the top of a slope facing her.moldmaker/ They marked Park City, Utah—a famous destination, set within the Rocky Mountains, for world-class freestyle skiers. Sarah was at the mouth of a snowy canyon, the mountain’s famous Eagle Superpipe and its 6.7m walls. She bent her knees, jammed her poles in deep and pushed off.

This is where, this is how, Sarah lived her life. From the clouds, she was a faint fleck on the mountainside, a mere human facing nature’s indomitable largeness. On the hills, she was a giant, conquering Earth’s jagged heights. She was to freeskiing what Wayne Gretzky was to hockey, or Michael Jordan was to basketball—the iconic face of a sport.What is Faux China chinaceramictile? She built her world by conquering limits, both on the hill and off it. But on Jan. 10, at half past noon, Sarah’s world stopped spinning.

It was her second day in Park City with the Monster Energy freeskiing team, a collection of some of the world’s best halfpipe skiers and snowboarders. Sarah spent the first day practising her limit-pushing routine, landing the most difficult tricks on a giant, inflated crash mat at the bottom of the pipe. It was supposed to be just another day of training. The only thing unusual was the air, a spring-like seven degrees Celsius. Sarah was skiing in a sweater.

The snow was slick in parts and soft in others. The sun beat down on the left side of the pipe, loosening the snow a touch. The conditions weren’t perfect, but not considered dangerous.Why does moulds grow in homes or buildings? Sarah weaved up and down the two-storey walls, her tracks like stitches on the mountain. At the edge of each wall, velocity propelled her up another storey, closer to the clouds. She danced with gravity, spinning gracefully back to earth.

She neared the left wall about 15m from the bottom of the pipe, and prepared to pull off an alley-oop flatspin 540—a twisting jump, with a one-and-a-half rotation against her forward momentum, back up toward the top of the pipe. It’s a relatively common trick for advanced male competitors, but not generally in the arsenal of female halfpipe skiers. Sarah was one of only a few women able to regularly work these tricks into her routine, a benefit of exceptional upper-body control and strength.

She pulled off a 540 at the Euro X Games last March, and had been practising it all day. She had landed it on her previous trip down the pipe. “She was definitely trying to push it, but it was nothing extreme,” a witness would later explain, asking to remain anonymous under the crush of frantic media coverage.

Sarah popped up into the sky with a touch too much force. She pulled off the twist, but drifted away from the lip of the pipe and over-rotated, landing sideways, low on the steep wall, skis facing down the hill. She cut into the snow, like skates stopping on ice. After a brief skid, she fell sideways toward the middle of the pipe, her body snapping down like a mousetrap, landing on her right side.

To her teammates and other spectators, it looked like a routine fall, with the brunt of the impact on her shoulder. Everyone had seen worse on the halfpipe, where spills often end in a thumping heap. A moment passed. Sarah didn’t move. Friends called her name. Nothing. They rushed to her side. Nothing. A witness said she took a couple of short breaths and then, “That was it.”

About 10 minutes passed before mountain patrol arrived, according to witnesses. Sarah was secured on a sled and pulled to emergency headquarters some 250m away. A dozen snowboarders and skiers ran behind the snowmobile. Sarah’s helmet was off, her head was slumped to the side.

A helicopter arrived from the University of Utah Hospital in Salt Lake City, 50km southeast of Park City.You can find best china automotiveplasticmoulds manufacturers from here! There were whispers in the crowd that mountain patrol had managed to resuscitate Sarah. According to witnesses, almost 15 minutes passed between the moment she was pulled from the hill to the time she was loaded into the helicopter. The chopper blades whirled back into motion,You can find best china electronicplasticmoulds manufacturers from here! and Sarah flew high above the mountains, in a race to Salt Lake City. The superpipe lay silent for the rest of the day. A quiet buzz spread through Park City—a chain of rumours, pieces of a story everyone hoped was untrue. It would take nine days to find an ending.

Sarah’s skiing dreams began in the shadow of Ontario’s Niagara Escarpment, sculpted long ago by the force of retreating ice caps. The modest hills near Sarah’s hometown of Midland, Ont., offered her the first opportunity to push against the rules that restricted her young, adventurous spirit. She was on skis by the age of five and eventually became a regular at the nearby Horseshoe Valley ski resort. In the early ’90s, only snowboarders were allowed to use the resort’s halfpipe. Sarah would wait until the end of the day before ripping through it on her skis, racing with the thrill that came with knowing that her lift ticket was about to be pulled. She joined the resort’s ski team, and spent her evenings skiing moguls. Eventually, she was allowed to train on the halfpipe. Sarah would fall hard and often. “I’ve never, ever seen anybody take so many crashes and just get up and do it again,” says her former coach, Wesley Gregg. While other skiers lounged on lifts, Sarah would hike up the hill to the aerials site, taking several jumps before the others arrived. That drive helped earn Sarah a spot on the Ontario ski team. Her father became one of the team’s drivers, lugging the teens to competitions from Thunder Bay to Ottawa. Sarah’s then-teammate Brendan Buchar was convinced she had rubber legs. “I’ve never seen anybody bail as hard as she did,” he says. When Sarah was 15, she tried a 1080 spin—three full revolutions of the body—during practice. She landed the triple spin on her first try. “As soon as she landed, you could see her at the bottom just running around with the biggest, giant smile,” Buchar says. “That was just Sarah.”

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