PRESS » Stuff.co.nz
The Kiwi snowboarding team has a secret weapon for its Olympic venue Cypress Mountain – one of its own works on the superpipe.
John Melville is a key man at the venue where there's been a frenzy over the lack of snow.
The warmest winter in Vancouver resulted in snow being flown in by helicopter, courses built out of straw and plywood and draping tarps to keep out the rain.
Pipe-shaping guru Melville is the only non-Canadian working on the Cypress superpipe. At 160m long and 20m wide with 6.8m walls, it will be the biggest, longest, steepest pipe in Olympic history – and with the help of a system Melville developed, geometrically perfect.
Several years ago, after spending a summer playing around in his back shed, he invented and patented the global cutter, a machine that uses a laser-guidance system to create the perfect pipe. From Cardona to World Cup events, his terrain park grooming skills have drawn worldwide acclaim.
Having Melville on board was a great advantage for the New Zealanders, winter performance programme manager Ashley Light joked.
"We being Kiwis always seem to get some inside running," Light said. "He's confident it's going to be one of the best pipes ever built. It's going to be spectacular."
Melville said he updated the Kiwis as much as he was allowed, "but we can't favour anybody more than anyone else".
But he expected to unveil the best pipe the world has seen when 70 of the sport's top riders make their debut later this week in what has become the glamour men's and women's events of the Olympics.
However, he admitted building at bare Cypress had thrown up a few challenges. Halfpipes are usually a half-cylinder cut out of the snowpack, but these Olympics have mostly been an exercise in earthmoving, with the addition of a giant pile of manmade snow. Only about 5 per cent of it will be natural.
Though the start platform had to be made of hay bales and scaffolding, Melville said those wouldn't be seen with the human eye.
"People have been led to believe that there are thousands of hay bales lying in the walls of the halfpipe but that's not true," he said.
"We've used about 40 hay bales and most of them in the start platforms. Every last flake of snow was conserved for the pipe itself.
"The weather has definitely had its challenges at times, and at that time it was worrying for sure," Melville said. "Things couldn't have got much worse – it just rained a lot. But we worked through it and despite all the things that the weather threw at us were at a point where we've got a really good halfpipe."
The Kiwis were to test out the pipe for the first time yesterday, and will compete later in the week. The New Zealand men, James Hamilton and Mitch Brown, will compete on Thursday morning, with the medals decided in the evening.
The women – Juliane Bray, Kendall Brown and Rebecca Sinclair – will be in action on Friday morning, with the medal races in the afternoon.
