A tumultuous two-month Olympic run for the Wood River Valley's Graham Watanabe culminated Thursday in Bardonecchia, Italy, with the first ever men's Olympic snowboardcross race (SBX) at the 2006 Torino Winter Games.
Here in the valley, television sets were flickering blue in the pre-dawn darkness as various friends and family members set early alarm clocks to catch a glimpse of Watanabe's chance to bring home a medal.
Snowboardcross is a group race down a fast, alpine-style course that includes moguls, banks and jumps.
After qualifying in the bracket of 32 finalists, Watanabe was ousted in his first finals heat when he finished third (the top two finishers, of five total, advance in SBX) behind Canada's Jasey Jay Anderson and Italy's Tagliaferri Tammaso.
In the end, American Seth Wescott won the gold medal over Slovakia's Radoslav Zidek and France's Paul-Henri Delerue.
After the race, Watanabe had no regrets with his performance.
"The riding was good," he said Thursday from Italy.
"He came out of the gate hard," said John Koth, Watanabe's Ketchum-based physical therapist and one of several friends watching the race early Thursday morning. "He rode smooth. He rode well."
Indeed, as the first finals heat got underway, Watanabe held a comfortable second-place position at the top of the course.
In the end, though, it came down to negotiating traffic. "I can't control other riders," Watanabe said, noting that, for many, the difference between gold and an early knockout comes down to the inherent chaos of snowboardcross, a sort of downhill roller derby.
"I held my shot and had good speed and was in control of everything," he said of the early goings. After soaring off the first jump, Watanabe was back on the snow earlier than Anderson, who was trailing in third.
"He (Anderson) came down on my head and shoulders—I stiff-armed him, but he landed on my tail and it slowed us both down and allowed the riders behind to catch up," Watanabe said.
Though he concedes that the contact was incidental, it was not the first time that Watanabe and Anderson tussled this season. On a Dec. 4 Jeep King of the Mountain Race in Crested Butte, Colo., Watanabe edged out Anderson for the win, despite the Canadian's near-constant jostling and blocking during the final heat.
"I've never been in a race with him without a tangle ... it's some sort of weird evil magnetism," Watanabe said.
After the initial contact, Watanabe was forced back into the middle of the pack. After the second jump, he was bumped again and knocked into third.
Out of contention, but determined to make the most of the situation, Watanabe spiced up the television coverage by throwing in a trick on the course's final jump, wowing commentators as the only racer in the field to grab his board edge during a race.
"It was already over for me, so I had some fun ... you gotta make the best out of it when you are out there," he said.
Here in Idaho, Koth saw the natural athlete he has known for years; his favorite trick is Watanabe's standing backflip.
"Watching him grab his edge on a boardercross course means he's having fun," Koth said. "It was Graham being Graham."
Clearly, even the scope of the Olympics, an opportunity that has been looming for months, didn't phase the former Sun Valley Snowboard Team alpine racer.
Watanabe's path to the pinnacle of his sport has been fraught with as many ups and downs as the man-made courses of the Olympics' newest competition.
Right up until Bardonecchia, it was a wild ride. Watanabe learned that he would be an Olympian less than 48 hours before yesterday's race when U.S. teammate Jayson Hale tore his anterior cruciate ligament in a practice run Tuesday morning.
Traveling as a waxing assistant to Curtis Bacca—15-year head wax technician for the U.S. Snowboard Team and owner of the Wax Room in Ketchum—Watanabe had only brought one training board with him to Italy.
Longtime friend, teammate and fellow racer Nate Galpin spoke with Watanabe the night before he left for Italy.
"I told him he was crazy if he didn't bring his equipment. I said, 'Dude, take your stuff!'"
Watanabe had relinquished any hopes of competing, though, and was focused instead on his job as a wax tech.
"He was of a single frame of mind, not interested in parties or anything ... he was going to make his friends and teammates as fast as he could," Galpin said.
After Hale's crash, and without his proper racing gear, Watanabe called his father, Scott Watanabe of Hailey, seeking advice on how to retrieve some personal belongings from his Park City, Utah, apartment. Graham did not tell his father the reason why.
"I didn't want to freak everybody out," the racer said of the secrecy.
Scott Watanabe, who was coincidentally on business in Switzerland with Scott USA this week, discovered the news within hours, however, and was soon in a car headed south through the Italian Alps to see his son's Olympic performance.
As for the snowboards, Graham Watanabe learned that Howard Peterson, of the United States Snowboarding Association, was traveling to Torino on Wednesday. Watanabe called the superintendent of his Park City apartment building, told him to let Peterson grab the gear, and rider and board were reunited Thursday morning, just in time for the first qualifying run.
"It was amazing how seamless it went," Watanabe said afterwards.
This week's drama was par for the course for Watanabe's Olympic year, though. The 2005-2006 season began on down note when Watanabe barely missed qualifying as a U.S. World Cup starter. Traveling as an alternate for the early season, he trained, but did not compete until an early December hot streak opened doors of opportunity, flaming his Olympic fever.
Two weeks after the Jeep win, Watanabe won the National Boardercross Championships on Dec. 16 at Mt. Hood, Ore. The win put him in the starting gate at three European World Cups leading to Torino. The best Watanabe would finish, though, was 11th at Austria's Bad Gastein. His hopes seem dashed.
Watanabe could have expected the unexpected, though. In 2003, just nine months after suffering a possible career-ending trauma—four pelvic fractures in a "motorcycle-crash bad injury," according to Koth—he became the first American man to win a World Cup boardercross in Valle Nevado, Chile, in September 2004.
The January 2004 crash—landing flat on his back from 35 feet in the air at a Mammoth Mountain, Calif., SBX race—would have made some athletes re-evaluate their career choices. For Watanabe, it was the final, necessary catalyst to his snowboardcross experiment.
And it wasn't his first serious snowboarding injury. In a 2002 race, Watanabe nearly ruined his knee: torn patellar tendon, torn ACL, two meniscus cartilage tears. Needless to say, resilience has been a constant in Watanabe's still-young career.
This season, Watanabe's upcoming schedule proves that, to elite snowboarders and skiers, the Olympics are but a blip on the competition radar. Ironically, with upcoming events at Squaw Valley, Calif., and Lake Placid, N.Y., Watanabe's itinerary should keep him in an Olympic frame of mind.
Graham Watanabe
