Europe To Canada the Long Way
by Peter Foley
(December 17, 1996)

The vans were almost packed and we were getting ready to make the drive from Sestriere to Zurich when Sondra realized that someone had stolen some of her personal effects from her hotel room including her wallet, her passport and a large sum of prize money she had won.

We deciced we had better report it to the Gendarmerie so that we had a police report to show the US embassy officials. After interrogating Sondra and I for close to an hour through an interpretor who spoke about two words of english, the cops decided to make us unload the vans and have the athletes completely empty all their bags on to the floor of a parking garage to see if we were the ones who stole the stuff. After going through a few items of Pogue and Davila's unsavory dirty laundry the cops decided that just searching one of the three vans was enough. We drove on to Zurich, spent the night and flew to Vancouver next day. We went through two broken planes in Chicago before they found one that could fly us to Vancouver. We finally arrived in Whistler at 4:30 am.

The first ever FIS World Cup Super G was our first event in Whistler and it was great. It was fast, looked awesome on TV, and we're good at it. FIS snowboarding director Hanno Treindl said "It's the best event we've ever done."

Entry one: Sestriere Giant Slalom; Slalom (12-7-96)