The sprint adds excitement, attracts crowds, goes global
By Polly Mikula
“We’re the ones who started the sprint series which is now an Olympic event,” Mike Miller said of the cross-county race he developed.
“It started at Mountain Meadows, that was the first one. The next year we traveled all over the country — Alaska, Idaho, California, Minnesota,” he continued.
It all started with snowmaking.
“That first winter we made so much snow, we had piles that were 20 feet high on the trails,” Mike said. “There were times when you’d walk out onto our ski trail and you’d have to use a little ladder to get on the trail. So we got into late April and we had all this snow. Mike Galliger, who was an Olympian, worked for us then and we were like, what are we going to do? I was like, let’s have a race! … The only problem with Nordic skiing is that it’s so boring to watch. I told him, every time I watch your races you guys say ’Go’ and all the parents come inside hang out with me and they don’t go back outside until the kids finish — that sucks! (And they stagger them so they finish one at at time, so you have no idea how they placed.) So I came up with this idea… and I drew it all out for Mike and said. ‘This is what I want to try to do’,” Mike said. “Then he got Middlebury, UVM, Dartmouth, and the U.S. Ski Team to show up —all in T-shirts and shorts — and we gave away some fun prizes at the end. It was all for fun. They were just ripping through slush!”
Six racers started together for a
1-kilometer race. “It was a full sprint with athletes diving across the finish line!” Mike said. Three people of each heat moved on to a winner’s bracket with the other three going to a loser’s bracket, Mike explained. “Every three minutes there was a group diving across the line. You didn’t wanna leave ‘cause it was ‘ready-go!’… It was constant!”
“It was just so cool ‘cause you could see it all,” Diane Miller said.
In addition to Mountain Meadows, Mike hosted two races at Killington Resort. “One went through Snowshed; one at KBL [Killington Base Lodge] all under the lights,” he said.
The events drew top Nordic racers from around the state, then country, then the world.
It started with collegiate and U.S. Ski and Snowboard (USSA) —the national governing body for Olympic skiing and snowboarding— athletes. Then after one race Mike got up and “I just yelled out, I have a question: if I can raise money and pay you guys for this event would you come? Because at that point we were completely controlled by USSA,” Mike explained. “Everyone screamed ‘this is the most fun’ and they just went crazy and said ‘you know, we would support this’.”
But he initially faced strong opposition from USSA.
“I got Toyota to sponsor it, I had all the venues in place, it was Vermont-only that first year, called the Toyota Pro Tour. Then USSA comes in and said, ‘You can’t do this, you can’t have our athletes racing for money’ and I’m like, ‘Ok, Luke [Bodensteiner, president of the USSA] I’m doing it and I really don’t care what you say, I’m not controlled by USSA and the whole race series is my rules, it’s my format,” Mike recalled.
“So we did the first year and the only race that didn’t work was Stratton (when only like six people showed up) but after that every race was great. We had Mountain Meadows, Trapp’s, Craftsbury, Stratton and we came back to Killington at night. It was a big success,” he said. “So the next year, I said I wanted to go nationwide. Toyota said it’s too big for us called Lexus… So I flew out to see Lexus in California, met with them, they gave us a bigger pile of money and we went nationwide.”
The race at California’s Royal Rorge, the biggest Nordic center in the United States at the time, was among the most memorable events, Mike recalled.
“We always teamed up with the big tour that was going on (USSA) and we’d race the next day or the day before. Theirs was always on the weekend,” he said.
John Slouber, the founder of Royal Gorge, said they had a big race on Sunday, “so we could race Saturday. He really sort of poo-pooed it,” Mike remembered. But on race day, “There were 10-15 people deep around the whole 1-kilometer loop.
“I was doing all the announcing, I was always the emcee, ‘cause I knew all the athletes, they became personal friends,” Mike said. The crowds were not disappointed that day. “The athletes were breaking poles out of the start and it was a horse race and the people went crazy, and I’m yelling to Brett Williamson (he was my race director), I’m like, Brett can you believe this? Who would’ve thought?! And John’s like, ‘Next year you guys get prime time Sunday, we want you back!’
“That’s kind of the way it went for two years,” Mike said.
An end, a beginning
Mike’s involvement with the sprint tour ended as abruptly as it started, but the sport would continue on, eventually making it to the World Cup and then to the Olympics.
“Snowboarding was coming onto the scenes then, heavy, and it was an Olympic event,” Mike said. “I remember them interviewing this kid and the kid gets up and says, ‘I trained all winter for this,” and I’m like you little piss-ass, these Nordic skiers have trained their lives, it didn’t just start ‘cause you picked up a snowboard and can do a flip and then you win $60,000,” Mike recounted. “At this point when we were in Idaho athletes were coming from Germany, Liechtenstein, we had racers from all over the world in our sprint series… But at the end of the day, I told the athletes in our team meeting, if I can get more money, because you guys deserve it, if I can’t bring more money to the table, then I’m done. Lexus was willing to stay in at the same price, but we walked away from it.”
But two years prior, USSA’s Luke Bonenstein was under so much pressure that “he jumped on board and said we’ll support this anyway you want,” Mike said. “I think after he heard about the tour and maybe the crowds in California or Idaho, he was forced to say this is this is an event that we’re going to have to recognize.”
“When we walked away, they put it in BKL [Bill Koch Youth Ski League, the largest, cross-country ski program for youth in the U.S.], high schools started doing it and then it worked its way up to World Cup — and they kept format the same, our format,” Mike said.
Years later Mike was watching a sprint series race hosted in Italy on television.
“They do it downtown in this little village and a famous writer, who does all the the announcing for USSA Nordic, named Peter Graves, was announcing and … we got recognition on national television,” Mike said, tearful at the memory. “The Italians were taking credit for it and he goes, ‘ugh, I beg your pardon, but this was started in Vermont by a guy named Mike Miller’.”
“Not many people know that,” said Diane. Mike’s sprint event “definitely solved the problems with Nordic ski racing, especially for viewership.”
