Friday, May 19

Alison Gannett

I am hauling so fast that tears are streaming down my face. To the left of me, someone vanishes in a tumbling pile of equipment and snow, they're down. Ahead of me, Alison Gannett vanishes over a drop and leaves us in the dust. We're skiing at Alta, and the unfortunate victim is Steve Beneski, on skis for the first time in eight years. Alison is cool; she waits for us.

Alison Gannett exploded onto the freeskiing scene this past season. Today, she's in Alta as an unofficial ambassador for FREEZE, and we're skiing with a bunch of industry bigwigs, shop owners, and assorted freeloaders. Alison is demonstrating the state of the art as it exists today for these people, and they're not sure whether to be scared sh*tless or stoked.

There's a lot that they don't know about Alison Gannett.

They don't know, for example, that Alison is the eldest of a brat pack of four, whose folks owned Crotched Mountain, a small New Hampshire ski area. For most it would be an auspicious beginning. But although Alison could hold her own on a racecourse, she was, as she says, "kind of dorky."

"In high school I was really teased because I was fat. I was always a good skier, but I was semi-athletic," she says. "I just felt like I never fit in."

Dorky isn't the word that comes to mind the night before we ski Alta, as Alison and a hundred other ski-industry VIPs hang out in the Cliff Lodge's Aries bar high above Little Cottonwood Canyon. The crowd oozes cool as Alison wanders around the bar. She brushes shoulders with executives from ski companies, resort VPs, and other top professional skiers like Jeremy Nobis and Brant Moles. Nobis seems quite taken with Alison's slinky black dress and blue nail polish, but then the crowd swirls around them and swallows them up.

The concrete-and-glass ambiance of the Cliff is a long way away from Gannett's home in Crested Butte, which is where she landed after giving up on the New England race scene. She has since built a house, career, and life in the Butte. It is where Alison got her big break back in 1994 when, during a routine morning on the Headwall, she met Rob and Eric Deslauriers. They saw her ski and asked her to be in a Warren Miller film. That was the start of it all.

The momentum from her work with Miller, led Alison to consider the growing sport of competitive freeskiing, despite a history of disappointments with racing. "Racing just wasn't for me, never was for me. I just never learned how to compete. They always say that 50 percent of the game is mental. When it came down to the big event, I was the person that always choked," she says. However, while her debut at the '94 U.S. Extremes in the Butte wasn't a resounding victory, she did well enough to qualify for the World Extreme Skiing Championships in Valdez.

In the highly competitive world of freeskiing, anyone who wants to make a name must first prove themselves on the faces of the Chugach, and that is exactly what Alison decided to do: "I basically quit my job coaching racing and went to Alaska on my Visa card. I was like "I'm going to make this work."" She was successful enough to land sponsors and consistent work with photographers and film crews. She also gained a renewed determination as a competitor. Alaska set Alison on a path which would lead to Whistler/Blackcomb and the '98 Canadian Extremes, where she blew away the field with an 11-point win over World Champion Wendy Fisher. It was a victory that she calls "the hugest highlight of my life."

Whistler is the defining moment of Alison Gannett's career to date. The truth of the matter is, until then she still considered herself to be something of a choker. Her frustration was backed by her record--a record that was littered with second-place finishes in the big ones, a record that reflects the professional athlete's greatest nightmare: Second place is in reality the first loser. "My whole life was not knowing how to compete, and figuring it out was incredible," she says of the Canadian Extremes.

In Whistler, Gannett charged. And charging, shell tell you, is what skiing is all about. At Whistler, she shot the definition of a "girl line" to hell. "I used to watch someone like Gordy [Peifer] ski and think, Gordy just skied that; I can't do it. Now, I look at those lines and think, I can ski this." And in Alaska, where she shot with Teton Gravity Research and Matchstick Productions during this spring's big-mountain feeding frenzy, she blew minds, epitomizing the saying, "go big or go home."

"She was ruling it!" says photographer Lee Cohen who shot Gannet while on assignment with TGR. "She did two runs, the most gnarly stuff I've ever seen a girl do. It was the kind of line I'd expect to see Gordy do.

That's high praise from the Zen master of Alta, praise that some might feel is overrated. But the fact remains that there is a good chance that Gannett will be the one to beat on the World Cup of Extreme Freeskiing this year. FREEZE can't guarantee that she'll win every event. But if you decide you want to bet against her, we'll take even odds that she'll come out on top and, as she says, "show the world that girls can really ski."