Olympic halfpipe training cut

Athletes now will have three days of training instead of five. The men's halfpipe is scheduled for Feb. 17, with the women the following day.

“The main thing is to protect the field of play,” said Tim Gayda, vice president for sport for the Vancouver organizing committee. “We definitely want athletes on the course. But we also want to make sure the field of play is the best it can be for the games.”

And that means keeping athletes away as a helicopter dumps a load of snow every three minutes atop parts of Cypress Mountain.

It also might mean using snow hardeners such as fertilizer come competition day a “last resort” Gayda said.

“The forecast is looking positive this week, and we'll hopefully see some colder temperatures,” he said.

One of the most difficult aspects of getting Cypress ready is building an approximately 500-foot-long halfpipe with 22-foot high walls and decks on each side. Halfpipe builder Chris Gunnarson, whose company made the Winter X Games superpipe in Aspen, Colo., and many others, said some metal and plywood forms can be substituted for snow to shape parts of the halfpipe.

“You can also truck in and helicopter in some snow,” he said. “That serves a good purpose until the snow becomes saturated. If it continues to rain, that's a problem.”

He said the toughest part of building any halfpipe comes once makers start preparing the vertical surface, “the portion that's ungroomable.”

“As you cut it, you use equipment to shape the pipe and when you do it, you're taking snow away, not adding,” Gunnarson said. “It's like you're starting with a piece of marble. You're cutting it away. You can't really add to it at that point.”

Gunnarson said he feels for the halfpipe team but didn't want to talk specifics about the Cypress project because he didn't know all the details.

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