A Ski Fan is Made
The GRP skiers watch the nail-biting finish of the 2012 women's NCAA classic race.
One of the many cool experiences of working at the Center office comes around on race days. Despite our best efforts at remaining purely diligent, sooner or later, someone will find the live results, or better still a live video stream of one of our athlete colleagues charging hard in some corner of the world. It's a blast to watch as people we know, have had lunch with, worked with on a variety of projects, or even skied or trained with, kill it in some corner of the globe - an experience made all the more exotic if the feed we're watching is not in English. We wait to hear the foreign pronunciation of our skier or sculler's name as they zip past the camera.
A really great side effect of the above is how living and working here can open new worlds for officemates who aren't themselves competitors. While there are quite a few jocks of various stripes filling roles at the Center, more than a few staff members at the Center may not have known freestyle from classical skiing, standing from prone, or a double from a pair until well after they'd worked at Craftsbury for some time.
Andrea, timing at the finish of the Women's 30k at Long Distance Nationals.
A great example of this is our co-worker Andrea Carpentier. Andrea capably fills a number of roles for us at the Center: Human Resources, making sure we're all paid - and so are the bills, plus lots more. This winter she also took an increasing role in the timing of our ski races, including the SuperTour.
While Andrea was a lot of things prior to this winter, there was one thing she was not: a knowledgeable ski racing fan. Not to say that she didn't like it, or held something against the sport, rather it just didn't really enter into her consciousness for whatever reason. However, after a winter full of timing races at the Center and in Jericho, of listening to British Eurosport commentators talk of "Eeda Sargent", hearing "Craftsbury" in a stream of Russian as Susan shoots, of learning the rules of racing and its nuances in person at Eastern Cups, SuperTours, etc - whatever the thing is that makes one a fan of skiing and biathlon, Andrea now has. She hasn't replaced the pictures of Dale Jr. on her office wall with Kikkan Randall...yet. But she's on her way, and is ready to weigh in during office banter about the last World Cup, make jokes about Morilov getting punked at the line by Kershaw and his own inattentiveness, or marvel at the latest exploit of Kikkan. The only downside to this story? A winter of watching the athletes on TV seems to have made Andrea a little star struck when it was time to hand out checks to her new heroes/heroines at the SuperTour/Long Distance Nationals.
Very neat. You want to see competitive skiing from the inside out yourself? We'll have plenty of volunteer opportunities next winter!