We could make a pretty good ski team

By Bobby Zimmer

Nov. 12, 2012

I know it’s a little early in the year to start thinking about this, but I’m pretty confident that we could make a good ski team. I’m not talking about as a university… have you seen the kids we’ve admitted the past few years? Most of them are as aerodynamic as a chest of gold bars. I’d be surprised if I could kick them down a mountain without them managing to get stuck in a snow drift. No, I’m talking about you and me.

I’ve noticed the way you go down that slight incline between Max Central and East, moving along it as if it were flat, shifting your backpack just right to take advantage of the extra gravitational force. I can tell you’ve got what it takes to handle a mountain. We’ll be the two amigos, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza of the slopes. Now, we’ll need to start training soon if we want to get into shape for the regular season.

I know you’re busy, but I think if we can squeeze in about three or four hours of conditioning and two hours of technical work each week we can put Lee C. Bollinger, Columbia University’s nineteenth president, a prominent advocate of affirmative action, and a leader in promoting diversity and open debate on university campuses, in his place.

I’ve got a membership at the LA Fitness on 47th Street that’ll get you a 15% discount if you tell them I referred you, so we can do our workouts there in the mornings. We’ll focus mostly on thigh development. For technical work, I know a guy who’s good at hiring large work crews to construct university buildings that I think could build us a pretty sick ramp, but it’ll have to be at least 80% glass. I bet we could put it so that it runs from the top of Pierce tower down into North Field. (Glad we got the students out of that lawsuit-waiting-to-happen so we can actually use it for something cool.)

I’m not sure about getting fake snow, but at worst we can just focus more on visualizations and body positioning until we get the first flurry. Maybe we can hit up Wisconsin over Thanksgiving break to get some real slope time. Yeah, I’m pretty stoked just thinking about it. Obviously we can’t expect to just show up to our first event and win gold or qualify for the Olympics or anything, but it’d be pretty cool? if we did.