Skiing to the extreme, broken
neck and all
A dream reawakened for Brett Deuter, who overcomes adversity
By JEFF CORDES
Express Staff Writer
Ketchum’s Brett Deuter has plenty to be thankful about this
Thanksgiving, nearly one year after breaking his neck skiing on Baldy.
He is thankful for Drs. Frank Batcha and Tim Floyd, who put Humpty
back together again. He is thankful that his father Bob Deuter was around to help him make
the difficult decision about surgery.
And he’s thankful that his dream—the dream to be a
champion skier—has been reawakened in what has been an unforgettable year of 1999.
Deuter broke his neck skiing on Baldy Dec. 6, 1998. The next day
he underwent seven hours of surgery. Recovery time in the hospital: Five days.
Two weeks later, Deuter was back doing office work at his Magic
Painting & Restoration business. By late January, Deuter was cleared to go free skiing
on groomed runs.
It was no joke on April Fool’s Day, when they told him he
could ski hard. They didn’t have to tell Brett Deuter twice. He’d been training
hard with the weights all winter and had improved his muscle mass.
His objective? Get back in the saddle and resume his quest to
become world free skiing champion for the first time. He traveled to Whistler/Blackcomb
April 13 for his first post-injury competition.
It went poorly.
Deuter said, "I fell off a 40-foot cliff and landed on my
head, thoroughly testing my rebuild. I left there with some peace of mind, however,
because it was one of the worst crashes I’ve ever had—and I had the feeling that
I wasn’t too fragile after all."
Full speed ahead, turn the clock ahead to September 1999. At Las
Lenas, Argentina, the man patched together with titanium rods and screws—the skier
with a bionic neck—scored an incredible victory.
Deuter won the South American Extreme Skiing Championships.
He said, "I was totally elated. I knew it wasn’t an
impossibility, but I tried not to have too many expectations. I’d never won any
extreme free skiing event before."
The appetite for winning never goes away.
Deuter, who grew up ski racing in Washington State but became
disillusioned with its regimen, wants to become world free skiing champion in the new
Millennium.
"Growing up as a ski racer, my dream was to become Olympic
slalom champion," he said. "Becoming a free skiing champion would have been the
farthest thing from my mind.
"The greatest thing about free skiing is I have another
opportunity to make the dream come true. That’s a real rarity. I had set it down
once. Now the dream is reawakened."
Ski racing background
These days, 6-2, 190-pound Deuter is free skiing at the upper
level. The 31-year-old has big plans to shoulder his way into the free ride contest of
NBC’s Gravity Games and make ski film appearances.
He enjoys the freedom of inspecting a challenging course and
noting its landmarks, and then carving an original path down the slope. And he likes the
camaraderie.
"Free skiing is almost a revolt to the regimented discipline
of ski racing. It’s looser and less structured and the competitors are more
friendly," he said. "I’m at the point where if I can’t say I had a
good time skiing, I shouldn’t be here."
It wasn’t always that way.
Raised in Olympia, Wash., Deuter started competing as a teenager
on the Alpental Ski Team at Alpental Ski Area east of Seattle. He didn’t have a ski
racing background, although his mom and dad had been ski instructors at Snoqualmie.
Brett made quick progress in slalom and earned a spot in the
Western Region J1 (ages 17-19) Junior Olympics. He attended Whitman College as a skier and
became team captain his junior year, in 1991. But he didn’t have the drive to
continue and finish up there.
"I had a lot of potential in ski racing and I look back with
a few regrets," said Deuter. He said the lack of ski racing tradition in his family
and less-than-adequate coaching contributed to the end of his ski racing days.
He moved to Sun Valley and taught skiing for a year, joining
father Bob on Baldy. Bob has taught for the Sun Valley Ski School since 1984 and currently
works in Ketchum for Monroc Concrete in customer service/quality control.
Still bouncing around, Brett spent a long winter coaching the ski
team at Buck Hill, Minn. then returned to the valley and became an assistant Hailey Ski
Team coach for two years. He still had the painting business he had started in 1992, but
he wanted to change what he was doing with skiing.
Deuter said, "Skiing as a job—as a ski instructor or
coach—had become difficult. I started not wanting to go skiing. I saw the writing on
the wall and decided to quit as a professional service-type skier.
"I didn’t know if I could make it work financially. I
knew skiing had been an important part of my life and a big part of my identity. I decided
running the painting company and being a ski bum was where I wanted to be."
To make money in skiing, however, you have to be noticed with
exposure at competitions and in magazines. And when you’re noticed, you start to have
incentive contracts and ski gear and victory schedules and photo incentive deals.
For instance, Brett Deuter has various sponsors at the turn of the
century—Smith Sport Optics, Rossignol, Scott USA, Schoffel, Adidas Adventure and Sun
Valley Underground. He’s hoping his cliff jumps and park jibbing will land him in ski
films.
But he was just a raw beginner when he competed at the U.S.
Extreme Skiing Championships in Crested Butte, Colo. five years ago.
"I had no idea what I was doing at Crested Butte," he
said. "I think I was 70th the first day and didn’t qualify. The course was
really long, a fitness test, and I wasn’t in shape. But it was really fun."
Since finding his niche, Deuter has sampled other competitions,
hunted down sponsors and built his confidence in skiing tough terrain.
He’s had his share of injuries, including a broken tailbone
and fractured vertebrae in his lower back.
But Deuter’s toughest run was last Dec. 6, the day after the
Bowls opened on Baldy.
Not surprisingly, it was the last run of the day.
The accident
"Because the Bowls had just opened, I was all charged up and
skiing so hard that I was really sore and spent. I decided to take one last run down Bowl
75. I was skiing slow and getting the wind in my hair.
"There was a downed tree with plenty of snow on it. A branch
caught my buckle. My foot stayed in place and my upper body went forward and javelined
into the snow.
"I must have fallen that same way 100 times, but because it
was early season, there wasn’t any base—just two-and-a-half feet of snow on top
of the dirt. My head hit the ground and I broke my neck."
Actually, Deuter didn’t know he had broken his neck.
"My legs were okay and I was conscious, but I knew I had
pretty serious whiplash and was in a lot of pain," he said. "My gear was spread
all over the hill. Virtually no one skis Bowl 75 so there was no one there to help. I
slowly collected my gear, skied off the mountain, went home, iced it and took some
Advil."
Deuter canceled an evening appointment with the Rossignol rep at
the Pioneer and went to bed instead. The next day, he visited Dr. Frank Batcha "for
my peace of mind."
"Frank’s eyes got as big as silver dollars when he
checked me out. He said, you’ve hurt yourself this time, and put a brace on my
neck," said Deuter. "He took me to specialist Tim Floyd, who said I had crushed
the seventh vertebrae—meaning there was no skeletal attachment between my head and my
body."
Brett’s father Bob was in the middle of a ski lesson on
Baldy. They found him and brought him to the hospital. Father and son made the decision on
surgery (Brett’s mom passed away five years ago).
The surgery took seven hours and was very successful. Brett said,
"They removed the seventh vertebrae, which was crushed, and pulled a bone graft out
of my hip. They plated it together and screwed the graft. Since the surgery, the bones
have calcified and fused together well.
"Thanks to Dr. Tim Floyd, there’s been virtually no
impact on my life."
At Las Lenas
If Brett Deuter thought breaking his neck was a different
experience, going to Argentina for September’s South American Extreme Skiing
Championships was a real culture shock.
"Las Lenas was a crazy place," he said.
"People’s attitudes were just different and the event was very poorly organized.
I went down a week early and sat for four days with nothing to do because of the blowing
snow."
When the weather cleared, Deuter and the other competitors found
tough venues.
"Exposed, rocky and steep, with a lot of pitfalls for a
skier," he said. "We went 1,800 vertical feet the first day, 2,200 the second
and 1,700 the third. The runs absolutely put to shame the longest runs at Crested Butte.
"It was more of a technical skier’s event—good for
me because my strength is technical exposed skiing and my weakness is landing big
air."
The first day put Deuter on the road to victory. "I had a
really good day," he said. "Winning that first run was virtually impossible for
me, but I did it and just decided to go out and have fun skiing.
"I took an extended exposed line and skied well, despite
being subject to a small slide. I skied the hardest line just about as well as it could
have been skied. The five judges gave me 46.7 points out of a potential 50, which put me
in first by a couple of points."
He added, "Of course the second day I was cocky and crashed,
but I had taken a hard line prior to the crash and still scored well, fifth place that
day, and was tied for first going into the finals."
The third day, Deuter didn’t ski the hardest line. He said,
"I skied a moderately hard line and made a couple of mistakes, but still came up with
the best score of the day, 49.6, and won by over two points."
Deuter won "a bunch of ski gear" and bragging rights for
his effort. Since, he’s been working on putting together a promotional video and
looking ahead to the competing on the 2000 World Free Skiing Tour.
"This is my first year really pursuing the title of world
free skiing champion," he said. "There are five events, starting in January at
Whistler, and also at Snowbird, in France, Switzerland and Alaska."
