When asked about how they prepare for such a unique challenge, most of the athletes competing in the Red Bull Crashed Ice World Championship 2010 repeat the usual mantra of staying fit and healthy and spending a lot of time on the ice. That may well be true for Canadian skater Christian Papillon, but the 32-year-old has also created a very special training course near his native Quebec City in preparation for Ice-Cross-Downhill WC 2010.
You may think that a 390 meter-long, 3 meter-wide ice track with a 45 m vertical drop and covered with 7,270 square meters of ice sounds pretty impressive, but it is only when you arrive on the ÎIe d’Orléans, just five kilometers north-east of Quebec City, that you begin to understand the true scale of the undertaking. There, Christian Papillon has built what must be the biggest private Ice Cross Downhill training course in the history of the sport.
However, while the huge team responsible for the legendary Red Bull Crashed Ice courses have access to ‘luxuries’ such as electricity and running water when building their tracks, Papillon had neither of these as he set to work on his very own work of ice, relying on the help of lots of friends, lots of shovels, a float to transport material, a mechanical bulldozer and a healthy portion of ingenuity. Three tons of wood, 400 feet of hose, 2,000 screws and over 600 hours of work later, the behemoth of ice and snow was finally ready.
Covered with a minimum of four inches of ice, the unique course features nine separate modules: six modules measuring 8 feet long x 2 feet high, one take-off 12 feet long x 2 ½ feet high, one tabletop 34 feet long x 8 feet high, and another huge tabletop 37 feet long x 11 feet high. It is, quite simply, the perfect preparation for an event often considered impossible to train for due to its unique nature.
The Canadian is all fired up ahead of the race in Munich: “It’s insane. There are so many people and there is so much attention. You end up getting stopped in the street – you really are a star for the duration of the event.” The race in his hometown Quebec will be Papillon’s fifth Red Bull Crashed Ice event and his fourth in front of a home crowd in his native Quebec City.
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