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Manny gets back up to speed

National title caps impressive comeback year on the slopes

NORTH Vancouver native Manuel Osborne-Paradis won the national downhill title at the Sport Chek Alpine Canadian Championships in Whistler March 23, capping off a season that showed that his racing career is back to full speed after a few slow years.

Osborne-Paradis whipped through the brand new Raven/Ptarmigan downhill course in a time of one minute 1.97 seconds, besting second place finisher Jeffrey Frisch by more than half a second with veteran John Kucera placing third. Osborne-Paradis was dominant in Whistler over the weekend, winning two training runs before taking top spot in the main event.

"Lots of times doing well in a race is really figuring out the course and I just figured it out the first run," the man known as Manny says on the phone from Invermere where he is prepping for a spring-season race. "I knew the line that I wanted to take and it seemed to be quite fast so I was able to elaborate that line and take a few more risks here and there and stay a little lower and I think it just paid off."

The win gave the former Deep Cove resident his second national downhill championship title following a victory in 2010.

"It feels good. The downhill title aside, I was more interested in winning the first race ever held on the new Raven/Ptarmigan course and I thought it would kind of help solidify my return to racing. My season was great but I think a national title really put the cork on the bottle, you know."

It's a great sign for Manny that he's corking a vintage season given the fact that his promising career was basically smashed to pieces, metaphorically speaking, by a series of unfortunate events starting with the Vancouver 2010 Olympics. Manny was a headliner for a Canadian alpine team that was expected to produce podium finishes on home soil but crashes, near misses and outright flameouts resulted in a complete medal shutout.

"Vancouver was very knee-knocking - it was a lot of buildup," he says. "I hadn't raced yet in Turin (at the 2006 Games) and people were already talking about how this was just practice for Whistler."

The mental pain of Whistler was followed by physical pain less than a year later in January of 2011 when Manny crashed during a World Cup race in France, breaking his left fibula and tearing his ACL. Injured, isolated from his teammates and somewhat estranged from Alpine Canada's staff, Manny's 2011 got even worse when he was involved in an embarrassing accident during the Calgary Stampede, falling off of and getting dragged behind a party bus. The incident tacked on a couple of months to his rehab schedule and made headlines across the country.

The timing of his injuries meant that Manny missed almost two full years of racing but by the beginning of the 2012-13 season he was fully fit and ready to go. The time spent off the slopes, however, caused him to plummet down the world rankings and so he was forced to start the World Cup season skiing at the back of the pack with the rookie racers while the elite guys got the smooth terrain and low bib numbers. Navigating the chewed up track that comes with a high bib number was taxing.

"It's just a grind," Manny says. "It's more of a battle - it's a battle you don't really want to be in. You battled your way up through when you were younger and you first started and it's tough to do it all over again."

His bib number may have been in the 50s to start the season but Manny immediately started to outperform his ranking. Aside from two DNFs, he finished every World Cup race in the top-30. The comeback culminated in Kvitfjell, Norway on March 2 when Manny finished fourth in a World Cup downhill, missing the podium by one-hundredth of a second.

"One-hunny off third was kind of hard to swallow but at the same time I was just happy," he says. "That was the first race where I just decided I was going to ski my own race, I wasn't going to take too many risks, just see how I could fare by skiing solid."

The national championship win followed and then the season was over.

"It was kind of like as I was hitting the peak of figuring everything out the season ended," he says. The results, however, were encouraging, particularly considering what he went through in the years leading up to them. They were tough times, says Manny, but looking back now he sees positives in everything that happened to him. The knee injury forced him to take time off from competition and get back to basics.

"I think that the injury was not necessarily a bad thing, being a little burned out after two Olympics and needing a little bit of a break anyway," he says. "I think coming back and having a whole other summer to work on drills, work on my technical skiing really actually made me a better skier, a more solid skier."

Even the party bus spill, which Manny now labels a fluky accident, turned into a positive, he says, even though he took a lot of flack for it. He knew it was bad when crime and gossip reporters were trying to track him down.

"All of a sudden it wasn't sportswriters talking to me, I was like uh-oh, this isn't good," he says. The accident may have been blown out of proportion by some, says Manny, but he credits it with helping him refocus his career and renew some of his important relationships.

"I was fairly stressed at the time, I was trying to come back from the other injury and I wasn't getting very much support from my team because they were overseas during the winter. I think I burned a couple of bridges during the winter for the summer. It was a tough time," he says.

"Alpine Canada, myself, my sponsors, we all sat down and went through exactly what kind of goals we were trying to get out of this lifestyle. It's a very high intense, high risk, high energy game that we're in and how do we go about spending all of that energy in the right way? We all sat down and figured out really good game plans - that's what brought this great comeback season. I didn't have any sponsors leave me throughout my injuries, everybody stayed fully behind me. The team and I were able to rekindle what we used to have. I think it was a really good time to rebuild after everything was said and done."

With the 2014 Sochi Olympics less than a year away, Manny says that even the disappointment of 2010 has turned into fuel for himself and the rest of the Canadian team.

"I learned a lot. . . . I think the failure that we had in Vancouver has taught our team a lot about ourselves that we can build on for Sochi," he says. "This is the best I've felt going into an (Olympic) year."

He'll have one more summer to fine tune his game before the Olympic year begins but first Manny will host the Mike and Manny Ski Camp with West Vancouver native Mike Janyk April 16-20 in Whistler. The annual event gives deserving young skiers from across Canada the chance to live and train with the elite racers at an all-expenses paid camp. The camp, started in 2008, is always a highlight of his year, says Manny.

"I think we get more out of it than they do," he says. "First of all, it just makes you feel good to give back and to just be a part of what the ski racing culture was when you were a kid, what really made you love it. Second of all, we live in a world where everyone does stuff for you and they're trying to free up your time and let you just do your job and for us to just come out of that bubble of me, me, me and start giving back and say you, you, you a little bit, it's a little bit liberating and it keeps you a little more grounded."

The camp keeps the sport in proper perspective, says Manny.

"For us it's a business now and everyone that talks to you, it's all about numbers and contracts and results . . . it does tone down the love of why we got into it, the pure pleasure of skiing. And to hang out with some kids, live with them and everything, the smiles on their faces when you give them a tip and they do it right the next run, that's more rewarding than winning a race."

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A fundraiser for the Mike and Manny Camp will be held April 20 at the Miele Demonstration Gallery in Vancouver. For more information or to purchase tickets, $150 per person, visit mikeandmanny.org.

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