Workers bring in snow to ready Olympic ski course

VANCOUVER - If the United States Olympic moguls team is worried about the conditions at Cypress Mountain, it doesn't show.

Trucks and helicopters were still dumping snow onto Cypress Mountain Monday in an effort to get the Olympic venues ready for the Vancouver Games, which open Friday.

The first event scheduled is women's moguls qualifying on Saturday, with the finals to be raced later that day.

"I've skied on rocks, I've skied on ice, I've skied in the rain. This is nothing," World Cup champion Hannah Kearney said yesterday ahead of her first pre-Olympic practice run. "It's unfortunate for the beauty of the surrounding mountains . . . but I don't think it is going to be a problem for us skiing."

Only athletes and their coaches were allowed at training yesterday afternoon, when they were to get their first look at the conditions.

"For safety reasons and our desire not to have any of the course preparation work impacted, we decided just to let on the people that are absolutely necessary for the training," said Dave Cobb, the executive vice president of the Vancouver organizing committee.

The weather in and around Vancouver has created some problems for Olympic organizers. Although the venues at Whistler - where the Alpine and Nordic events will be held - are fine, the Cypress Mountain venues closer to the city have been affected by the unseasonably warm weather.

"There's still a lot of snow being trucked and flown in to ensure we have enough contingency snow if the warm weather continues," Cobb said. "There's a lot of activity going on."

World champion Patrick Deneen is confident events will go ahead on Cypress Mountain. The men's moguls are Sunday.

"If there's snow, we will ski for sure," he said. "I've seen pictures, and it looks like there's a lot of snow on that course right now. They've been trucking it in and really making it happen."

John Furlong, the CEO of VANOC, said the organizing committee briefed the International Olympic Committee on the state of the mountain Saturday.

"They didn't raise any concern about Cypress," Furlong said. "They've been up on Cypress with our team all along, and I think they're very happy with the level of commitment and work that's taken place up there."

The Americans said skiing on courses built on otherwise snow-free slopes is a fact of life on the moguls World Cup circuit.

"In Italy, we were on a dirt hill that was dirt on both sides of us and a run in the middle," Michelle Roark said.

In order to get the venues prepared, organizers have canceled two days of half-pipe training and pushed back parallel giant slalom training by two days.

Building the half-pipe is the organizers' biggest challenge. Once competition begins, they'll also need to reconfigure the snowboardcross course into a parallel giant slalom course in a limited amount of time.

At the half-pipe, Cobb said organizers were considering using chemicals to harden the snow on the course. The half-pipe competition starts Feb. 17.

Freestyle skier Shannon Bahrke said a bit of warm weather will not put off athletes who have trained for years for a shot at the Olympics.

"We've worked our whole lives for this," she said. If the conditions are not perfect, "it's not going to be, 'Nope, I'm not going to do it.' "