At the U.S. ski team’s summer training facility last month, Matt Chojnacki did something no freestyle skier had ever done before: He stepped into his skis, hurtled down a plastic-coated approach ramp at 35 miles an hour, shot up a steep, one-story jump, launched himself some sixty feet into the…
When does an athlete stop being an athlete and simply start being a lunatic? The question of where to draw the line occurred to me a few weeks ago when a friend and I drove up to Leadville late on a Saturday night to watch the finish of the Leadville…
Tom Horn made his name in law enforcement — even if many of his actions straddled the law. Legal or not, however, they were certainly effective, although not the sort of behavior that inspires most modern law-enforcement agents. Then again, those agents don’t have Kelly Hamilton’s job. A few years…
To an outsider looking in, Shane Swartz was on top of the world in the spring of 1997. Twenty-one years-old, handsome, polite, a servant of God with a body as tight as a drum skin, he was living the life he’d always been instructed to envision for himself. He’d begun…
In the nine and a half decades since Teddy Roosevelt was president and the Ford Model T was introduced, only two American men — both of whom, as it happens, live in Boulder — have won gold medals in international marathon competition. Most people, non-runners included, could peg the first…
Monty Doiel had his first inkling of trouble as he turned right at the end of Mercaderes Street onto Estafeta. The corner is hard and angular, difficult under the best of circumstances. Doiel had hoped his new black Nike Air ACG cross-trainers with the reverse-tread grip would provide an advantage…
Olympic sports purists — i.e., those who stay up until 4 a.m. to watch the live telecasts of synchronized swimming, rhythm gymnastics, curling and badminton every four years — will be gratified to learn that plans are proceeding apace to include the game of contract bridge (and not contact bridge,…
It was with high hopes and a glowing sense of community purpose that Ryan Mullaney began this past high school baseball season as head coach of the woeful Evergreen Cougars. A former standout athlete himself — he’d dabbled with a pro football career before being cut by the Minnesota Vikings…
The Colorado Division of Wildlife recently announced that it will issue more elk tags this year than ever before. A spokesman for the agency says that 106,000 hunters — roughly one for every two elk in Colorado — will receive permission to hunt elk in the state in one of…
There are things you know — and then there are things you know. The difference is everything. In 1969, while he was in Germany attending his first international track-and-field competition, Frank Shorter roomed with a hammer-thrower, a man of immense proportions. One night the roommate began bouncing off the walls,…
After preparing for this day for two years, Peter Thomas leaves Denver on the morning of Monday, January 2, 1999, nearly misses the connection at JFK in New York (runs to make the flight), changes again in Stockholm and then lifts off for St. Petersburg. He has checked through two…
It’s springtime in the Rockies, the time of year when a young first-term governor’s fancy turns to education reform, gun control through legitimate legislative means and…high-stakes pigeon racing. Or so I’d heard — about the pigeon racing, anyway (the other stuff seemed reasonably true). “That’s right,” says Richard Ott Sr.,…
If you look hard enough, there are plenty of similarities between a car dealership and a strip club. For starters, both rely heavily on sex to sell. (If you’ve ever been to an auto show, the comparison becomes even clearer.) You’ll probably find more pinkie rings per person in either…
Basketball players and boxers, in particular, like to talk about how they get no respect. What this usually means is that the athlete allegedly being disrespected (see also: “dissed”) feels his opponent is not showing proper regard for the dissee’s sporting skill. Denver-area curlers, though, have a much more basic…
There are many fine bowlers in the state of Colorado. There is George McDonald, who, in his 68 years on this piece of earth has won 36 state and local championships, a record that makes people like John Wooden, UCLA’s Wizard of Westwood, look like a flash in the pan…
In the unhappy and shameful world of sexual abuse, the case brought by Denver cops in the first week of November last year barely rated at all. It began with a private complaint to friends — known as an “outcry” among professionals in the field. Late last summer, the now-22-year-old…
ere are some terms commonly associated with the word “potato”: French-fried, mashed, Mister, scalloped, baked, Dan Quayle. Here is one that is not: embezzled. Colorado ranks sixth of all states in the nation in potato production. Seventy-five trucks a day rumble out of the San Luis Valley alone during harvest…
So there she was, standing in the vast ballroom at the Las Vegas Riviera at the North American Eight Ball Championships last May, and Conifer resident Christine Honeman knew she was toast. She knew it with such certainty that she couldn’t even look at the table. The shots that were…
No question: Kids are different today, diluted versions of earlier specimens. At the Northglenn Judo Club, which meets Tuesday and Thursday nights at the Northglenn Community Center behind the Holiday Inn off 104th Street, the old-time instructors have had to adapt in a way that Bobby Knight should have and…
On a crisp morning early last February, Paul Jensen, a 44-year-old man without even so much as a traffic ticket dulling his reputation walked out of his ranch house near the central mountain town of Salida and prepared to break the law. Consistent with his shoot-straight, live-by-the-rules character, Jensen had…
If you live in Colorado and follow basketball at all, you certainly know about Chauncey Billups, homegrown sporting legend, one of our finest success stories. You can survey his accomplishments on the official home page of the Denver Nuggets, the corporate division for which Billups currently works. He was a…
In case you missed it, Denver heavyweight Will Hinton fought former World Boxing Council champion and current contender Oliver McCall last month in a small arena at the Grand Casino in Tunica, Mississippi. To say the fight did not go well for Hinton would be like suggesting that Mike Tyson…
