Black Mountain – Defending the Classic Tradition

Tue, Mar  9, 2010 - By Ken Dawson

The Black Mountain race on Saturday was typical of a classic race that pushes the envelope for maintaining the classic technique in a temperature range that would be challenging for the even the best international wax technicians. For myself using a hard wax mixture worked great in the beginning of the day but an hour later in the melting sun it was hard to get any kick. Sometimes when kick becomes impossible the classic skier may have the temptation to push off rather than kick or labor on the double pole.

The same situation applies when we have very icy conditions and it was at Black Mountain several years where some skiers were called out for skating but no one disqualified themselves. There was a brief moment at Black Mountain on Saturday where I too took the liberty to get a little over zealous in my classic technique and someone brought it to my attention.

Although I feel this incident would not have any effect on the my place or time it is impossible for anyone to know if this was continued or just a brief violation of the rules.  I am sure that the skier who skied with me the last 10k would vouch for my classic only technique, however, no matter how incidental, it was a violation of the rules and because this is a self assessing race series I am going to disqualify myself for the Black Mountain race.  I have too much integrity as a person and love of the sport to compromise the core values of the Michigan Cup family. 

Ken Dawson