Tyler Walker

Paralympics

carolwalker — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 17:40:07 +0000

The opening schedule is on Friday the 12th at 6:00 PM at the BC Place in Vancouver.

The ski events occur at Whistler starting Saturday the 13th (about 2 hours north of Vancouver).

After no coverage 4 years ago, this year there will be coverage- NBC and Universal Sports will have 1 hour on the Opening Ceremony Sat 13th 1:00 PM EST and highlights in April on the 10th 3-5 OM EST.

Universal sports will broadcast nightly at 6 PM (repeat 11 PM) EST Mon 15th thru Tues 23. MORE INFO
The Canadians will be broadcasting – where that will show I don’t know: MORE INFO

Paralympic Sport TV has coverage over the internet. http://player27.narrowstep.tv

Team USA will have postings and video: http://usparalympics.org/

Another source for news: http://www.paralympic.org

Some more information: http://www.disabled-world.com/sports/paralympics/2010/

And events will be broadcast on the internet – need a fast connection: http://www.findinternettv.com/Sites/433/Paralympic-Sport-TV.aspx

Paralympics Day 2 – Travel to Whistler

tylerwalker — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 23:20:33 +0000

Today we flew from Denver to Vancouver, Canada, then took a bus up to Whistler where all the Alpine events are being held. The travel experience was not too exciting.

This evening we got to the Whistler Athlete Village which is about 10 minutes down the road from the ski area. The village is really well built and resembles a small college campus. Every country has their own floor in one of the numerous residence halls and their are many lounges and public areas where you can find cafes, game rooms, workout facilities, entertainment plazas, movie theaters and even a multi-faith center if you need to get your meditation or bible study on. The dining hall is a massive permanent tent with tons of food options. It even has a full service McDonalds and McCafe if you feel like you want to “eat like an olympian.” If you don’t get that reference and think its rediculous, check out McDonald’s recent add campaign where they have olympic athletes eating at McDonalds, giving the impression that their food somehow enhances one’s performance.

Paralympics Day 1 – Team Processing

tylerwalker — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 23:06:39 +0000

The world cup races are finally over and now we get to focus on the bigger and better things, such as the paralympics. Today we drove down to a hotel in Denver where we spent most of the day getting our uniform for the paralympics. Never before have we gotten so much swag for any event. The two main sponsors of the US Paralympic team, Nike and Ralph Lauren, made sure we had enough cloths to wear something completely different, every day, for a month. Each one of us went around a big conference room and filled three huge duffel bags full of jackets, shirts, sweaters, shoes, socks, more jackets, scarves, gloves and hats. Ralph Lauren even gave us a style guide for those times when we are feeling totally overwhelmed and just can’t figure out how to pull off “that classic Ralph Lauren look.” Apparently, its all about how you mix, match, and layer.

After we got our uniform we got to sit through a three hour presentation about how to be a Paralympic Ambassador. The whole thing ended up being a lecture about how to not freak out and not be stupid at the games. Unfortunately it was presented to us as if we were little kids with ADD, so it was quite excruciating to sit through. One useful thing I did learn was that I am not allowed to post any pictures or videos of any paralympic venues, logos or ceremonies on my blog. Apparently “THE MAN” owns the entire experience, regardless of the athletes who make the whole thing possible, and “THE MAN” doesn’t want free publicity or anyone else to enjoy the experience unless they want to bend over and pay big bucks. With that said, my posting of pictures and video will be somewhat limited.

Tyler featured in UNH Magazine

carolwalker — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 16:55:51 +0000

The Winter 2010 issue of UNH Magazine has a feature story about the upcoming Winter Paralympics. Tyler is featured on the cover and in the story.

Read the article.
Download pdf of scanned magazine.

Additional feature about Tyler, read No Mountain Too High.

Training in Aspen

tylerwalker — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 02:14:27 +0000

I have decided to do a bit of training before the paralympics. I chose to train with Challenge Aspen in Aspen, Colorado where I could get all the race training and freeskiing that I ever wanted. I have been able to get lots of runs on a downhill and super-g on the Tiehack side of Buttermilk mountain, which turned out to be a ton of fun and also happens to be the location of our world cup finals for this year. These speed races were actually part of the Rocky Mountain Masters series, so the competitors were in ages from 21 to 80’s. This was quite a mixture of people, as you can imagine. Some of them made it down the mountain in a minute and thirty seconds, others in over three minutes. Course inspection was highly entertaining because it seemed that every racer had an opinion about how the course was set, and made their opinion known to the course setter, who actually reset the course the way the racers wanted it! This could only ever happen with the masters category, as such input by racers to any other course setter in any other form of ski racing would be unthinkable. The course ended up running fine, but it was also quite do-able in its original form.

Besides training, the weather demanded that I do quite a bit of powder skiing. We had three days straight of ~12″ dumps, so I thought it prudent to ski each of those days. The snow was so deep that I would almost go under the snow every turn, then pop up out of it in each transition. I was using a 186 cm Volkl Gotama rockered pow ski, so I was able to porpoise out of the snow when it got really deep. The three days were easily the best powder days I have ever had. In no other form of skiing do I use more muscles to control my movements and it was great to rip down steep runs and not be hindered by gates telling me where to turn.

Skiing at Aspen Highlands, this was as close as we were to get, short of hiking, to Highlands bowl.

Me, coach Tim of Challenge Aspen, and my teammate, Chris Devlin-Young. Highlands Bowl is in the background.

A cool picture of Chris.

X-games 14 Moni-skier X Gold

carolwalker — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 21:59:01 +0000

Tyler won both his semi-final heat and the finals.

Paralympic Promotion Featuring Tyler

carolwalker — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 15:48:27 +0000

Watch this really great Paralympic promo feature about Tyler.

X-Games 14

tylerwalker — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 02:50:55 +0000

I just got back from Winter X-Games 14 in Aspen, Colorado. My event, Monoskier-X, is basically skier cross, but everyone uses monoskis and we go four at once, first one to the bottom wins. This year our course had quite a bit of modification to allow monoskiers to actually finish the course and make all the jumps successfully. We often have problems with normal skier cross courses because we are not able to generate enough speed to clear the bigger jumps. This year we had our own features in key spots to enable us to have a smooth run. The jump at the bottom of the course was really big and had us going at least 60 feet, about 10 feet off the ground, more than enough time to recite one’s ABCs before landing. There was a great deal of carnage this year as well. Every heat had several people fall, sometimes into each other, making it very entertaining. You will find a lot of that in my last heat, the final, where I had to react very quickly to avoid flailing bodies.

The video above was taken of the jumbotron. Below is ESPN’s summary video.

It was a really fun event and I want to thank my support crew, consisting of my parents, my cousin Ernie, and my Aunt Liz for making all of this happen.

X-Games 14

tylerwalker — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 01:44:03 +0000

Aspen, Colorado

World Cup in Sestriere, Italy

tylerwalker — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 02:27:16 +0000

I just finished up a series of world cup races in Sestriere, Italy, on the same mountain as the 2006 Paralympics. I had two downhills, two super-Gs, and one super combined. The track was almost exactly the same as when we raced on it in the past and the snow was almost perfect, man-made and really fast. We stayed in this hotel called The Belvedere which is supposed to be about four stars, but made sure that most of us were in two star rooms. My room, in particular, had all the humidity from our entire floor funnel into the room, which caused the window and surrounding ceiling to drip with water. After a bit of airing out it was slightly bearable. Below is a clip of my first downhill race. I ended up not skiing the next day. See if you can figure out why.

I ended up breaking my shoulder straps, popping out of my monoski like a cork. I also bent by best downhill ski. I did eventually recover, but I was seriously sore the next day. At he end of these series of races I managed to scrape together a fourth place finish in the final super-G, even after I just about fell half way down, so not too shabby.

A cool ridgeline in Sestriere that I really wish I had a chance to ski.

Before we flew home we spent the night near Munich, Germany. Having some free time on our hands, a bunch of us went in to the city to check things out. The above picture was just one of those things we checked out. Oh the boots!