'Not just anybody can do aerials'

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By JOHN ROMANO, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published February 19, 2002

[AP photo] Eric Bergoust of the U.S. performs Saturday in the qualifying round of the Olympic freestyle aerial competition.

Those poor, luckless souls who had to raise their children on the corner of reckless and panic. Picture what life would have been like if your precious offspring happened to get friendly with that Bergoust kid next door.

Just because Eric does flips off the second-floor chimney onto mattresses doesn't mean you have to do it too.

I don't care if Eric uses a trampoline to jump over the side of a bridge. Now eat your lima beans.

You want to break your collarbone like Eric? Do you? Do you?

Little Eric Bergoust wanted to grow up to be a stuntman. Unfortunately, he found a more radical calling.

Bergoust, 32, is a freestyle aerial skier.

Or, in layman's terms, he's a nut.

Aerialists ski down a short slope onto a ramp and then perform an assortment of twists and flips 50 feet in the air before landing back on the slope.

"Anybody can ski. Even crazier sports like skeleton or bobsled or moguls, you can try it once," Bergoust said. "Not just anybody can do aerials. That's one of the things that drew me to the sport."

Now the kid who grew up in Missoula, Mont., idolizing Evel Knievel is one of the best aerial skiers in the world. He won the gold medal in Nagano in 1998 and is the No. 2 qualifier going into this afternoon's finals.

For his first jump today, Bergoust plans a full, double-full, full. Which means in the time it takes your heart to reach your throat, he will have done four 360-degree twists and flips and hit the ground standing.

"I think the world goes through different cycles," Bergoust said. "There was a time when it was trendy, cool, popular to be super conservative. Now, we're hitting a cycle where it's cool to be an individual. To be different."

If this is true, no one is more cool than Bergoust.

He fell in love with aerials when he saw it on ESPN in the mid 1980s and immediately grasped the sport's essence.

"I figured the hardest part of doing aerials was overcoming the fear involved," Bergoust said. "The best way to do that was to scare myself as much as I could until I no longer feared anything.

"That's why I did all those crazy things."

Thus, the flips off the chimney. And the trampoline/bridge stunts he and his brothers would do to freak out passing motorists.

In time, he would grow more serious about learning the technical aspects of aerials. One Christmas, his parents bought Bergoust a collapsible shovel so he could build his own jumping ramps at ski resorts.

"I'd wear a big, green, Army parka and hide the shovel under that," Bergoust said. "I'd go out of bounds where the ski patrols couldn't see us and I'd spend all day building a jump. You let it harden overnight and then hit it the next day. I made sure there was lots of powder so it was fairly safe, but I still made some mistakes.

"I got up to double back flips and double front flips without any coaching. I was young and dumb and definitely taking risks I wouldn't advise anybody else to take."

There still was one risk left for Bergoust to take. Although aerials would soon be added to the Olympics, there were few training centers for the sport in the late 1980s. So, at 18, Bergoust bought a Toyota for $500 and set off from Montana for the U.S. training site in Lake Placid, N.Y.

When he reached New York, Bergoust had enough money to buy peanut butter and jelly, powdered milk and cereal. That's how he survived for a week until he got his first paycheck as a waiter.

Yet through these crude and reckless beginnings, a meticulous and passionate athlete emerged. U.S. coaches say Bergoust has risen to the top, not because he is more daring than the rest, but because he's more dedicated.

He trains relentlessly to maintain the strength and flexibility needed for his stunts. Bergoust describes his workouts as the sort of thing a cat might do if it wanted to be the fittest feline in the neighborhood.

Then there were the lessons in physics to figure out ways to speed up or slow down tricks by stretching or tucking various limbs.

Where he used to practice tricks by going off a roof and landing on a pile of sleeping bags and mattresses, Bergoust now uses the plastic ramps and swimming pools common to the sport.

There still are accidents. He missed an entire season after the anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee was torn completely away from the bone. He fractured his back a couple of years later and won a silver medal at the 1997 World Championships despite competing with a broken collarbone.

"I definitely do everything I can to be safe," Bergoust said. "I'm not into taking uncalculated risks. Not anymore."

So is there anything out there that does scare him?

"Sky diving," Bergoust said. "I did it once when I was 16 and I'll never do it again.

"It's just too big a risk."

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