teva fo'eva

There is no competitive sport more laid back than climbing. Except for surfing. In the same way, there is no competitive sport competition more laid back than the Teva Games with the exception of Competitive Metal Detecting, which was, I heard from an IFSC judge, one of three sports in line before climbing for...get this: the Summer Olympic Games.

Luckily, the same man who rode bull-riding into the same list is currently pushing to see climbing on the table at the IOC meetings; maybe we'll see climbing in the Games in 2016 or 2020?

Anyway, back to the Teva Games. I'm going to talk about the clouds.

This year, the glorious return of the IFSC World Cup was compounded by the also gloriously awful weather Vail is so known for cooking up specially for this event. Last year the youth division was drowned in inches of rain while the event staff threw pieces of blue tarp over the wall, where young and tough competitors smuggled themselves up puddle-filled problems with scarves of warmth inside their jackets. The affair was an unintelligible gourmet meal of strange ingredients: clashing stages of precipitation, where great rain clouds met cool winds met hail, and all - the miserable, happy, cold, huddled and cuddling, the climbing - were all intermittently showered, by ice and ice water, whose suddenness would break the monotone of the intense chill...the same chill that abruptly disappeared the next day and left every bewildered man, woman, child and bald dog (sorry, no bald dogs...but there were furry ones) with stingy sunburns and crude tan lines.

This year the sky was simply bipolar, or manic, or both: the fast wind currents swiftly swept clouds of all kinds across the sky, bringing to the Games a sense of unpredictability. As the sun shone, it would be suddenly drizzling, then harsh hail would bombard the people, and spectators would run to find ponchos or dive into their warm hotel beds until the concert that night. Then as rudely and miraculously as it came, it went. The strong sunlight would flicker behind the crawling white monsters than kept us cold much the time, but never left for long, and was in fact warming our faces when at the same time hail bounced off our foreheads. Timmy O'Neil (who slipped a stream of crazy commentary into the mic for three long days, with a few bathroom breaks) was on the mic. And he tilted his head back once, as if to catch the combination of hail and sunlight on his tongue, shortly after the sky had chosen to turn bipolar again and just snow.