Wednesday, September 6, 2006

Tamarack gets Grand Prix snowboard races

SBX, superpipe next February


Idaho's Tamarack Resort has been named as the newest venue of the Chevrolet U.S. Snowboard Grand Prix tour.

The 2006-07 tour opens at Breckenridge, Colo., Dec. 14-16, then splashes into Mountain Creek, N.J., Feb. 2-4, before concluding at the venue of Tamarack Resort Feb. 24-25.

NBC and OLN (soon to be called Versus) television will broadcast coverage of the entire series, which is entering its 12th season. The 2006 U.S. Olympic snowboard team, having won a record-setting seven medals at Torino, Italy, will lead the world's best riders into this country's greatest snowboard competition series.

This season, Olympic champions Hannah Teter and Seth Wescott are expected to raise the bar in the three-stop series.

The series features smaller, more competitive fields, a mammoth 22-foot superpipe, the popular snowboardcross (SBX) and the series' first full-field, full-length slopestyle.

Only Tamarack Resort will host a SBX event, expected to field about 100 men and 30 women. "The terrain at Tamarack seems like it was made for a world class SBX event, " said Grand Prix Tour Director Eric Webster.

Tamarack, located south of McCall, will also be the site of the 22-foot superpipe—only the second U.S. venue to host an elite-level competition in a pipe of that size.

The 2007 series will offer one of the largest overall purses for a snowboarding series—prizes totaling more than $300,000—along with the best broadcast package for the sport on NBC.

The Tamarack schedule:

Saturday, Feb. 24: 22-foot Superpipe qualifier/final.

Sunday, Feb. 25: Snowboardcross time trials/heats.

According to U.S. Snowboarding, Tamarack Resort prides itself on its snowboard facilities and is just the fourth resort in the country to build a 22-foot superpipe that will be used for the Grand Prix competition. SBX, which enjoyed extreme popularity at the Torino Games, will speed up the excitement at Tamarack.




 Local Weather 
Search archives:


Copyright © 2024 Express Publishing Inc.   Terms of Use   Privacy Policy
All Rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of Express Publishing Inc. is prohibited. 

The Idaho Mountain Express is distributed free to residents and guests throughout the Sun Valley, Idaho resort area community. Subscribers to the Idaho Mountain Express will read these stories and others in this week's issue.