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 ARREN,
Vt. - On the ride up the Sugarbush Mountain chairlift for his first
warmup run, Dan Cardillo was doing what any young ski racer would do
on race day. He was talking, excitedly. His race was a Super-G, the
fastest event short of a downhill race, in which he would be going
about 50 miles per hour. The course was full length, much longer
than courses usually run by his eighth-grade age group, and
Cardillo, 14, was talking about how much fun such a long run would
be, and about the competition.
''Who do you think the top skier in the race is?''
Stephanie Peters recalled him asking her. ''I think it's Sam Beck. I
wonder if I can beat him.''
''He always had a goal like that, a goal he was
working toward,'' said Peters, a classmate of Cardillo's at the
Waterville Valley Ski Academy, one of several boarding schools
sprinkled across the New England mountain ranges for aspiring gifted
skiers.
That would be the last time anyone talked with
Cardillo. Wearing a helmet, he took off down Birdland, a narrow
intermediate trail used frequently by recreational skiers, though
the mountain was fairly empty on this Tuesday morning 12 days ago,
with maybe 30 other racers on the same trail doing practice runs.
Cardillo picked up speed down Birdland to a junction
that connected to a lower trail, a road with a hard left turn. The
conditions on the trail were loose granular, created by a tiller
pulverizing an icy surface that had been resulted from heavy rains
on Sunday followed by a fast freeze. Skiers agreed that the trail
surface was well-prepared, though hard - a condition that racers
favor because of the speed potential.
Cardillo was going 30, maybe 40 miles per hour when
he angled out high and wide to the right side to get a better angle
on the turn. In an instant, he was very close to the tree line, and
somehow - maybe his edge got caught in the snow, maybe it hit an ice
chunk - he was out of control, careening off the lip of the trail
edge and into the trees.
Ivar Dahl, who works for Voekl skis and Technica
boots, had been skiing with the racers and was the first to reach
Cardillo, who had hit a tree, full force.
''He was going at a high GS speed,'' Dahl said,
''and he didn't slow down. It would have been impossible for him to
slow down.''
As Dahl and ski patrolmen placed Cardillo into a
rescue toboggan, he was unconscious. There was a pulse, and he took
oxygen. But they would soon discover that his spine was broken in
two places, several ribs were broken, and his lungs were punctured.
Cardillo died during the trip to nearby Berlin Hospital.
Ski racing deaths are rare, but there is a sense of
fatalism about Dan Cardillo's death. Among skiers, school and race
officials, and even his family, no one is attempting to lay blame.
Three other deaths in New Hampshire that day, and
another one at Sugarbush Friday, were attributed to skiers losing
control on the slopes - but ice is part of skiing, they say. And
yes, the kids were encouraged to ski fast in warmups, because that's
what the sport is all about.
''Here was a kid who just did not know death
existed,'' said Ken Cardillo, Dan's father, who lives in Falmouth,
Maine, with his wife, Paulette, and two other sons. ''He died
without pain, doing what he loved.''
The day after the accident, a fine snow fell on
Waterville Valley, blanketing the town's Victorian gables, frosting
the pines. To kids in the Waterville Valley Academy who spend
mornings in class and hit the slopes for afternoon practice, this
would have been an upbeat time - finally, snow in this winter of
drought.
But there were no customary snowball fights. In
fact, few of the teenagers were talking at all.
''It is,'' said Colonel Pickering, the assistant
headmaster of the 60-student academy, ''the lowest point in the life
of our school.''
Portrait of a friend
In his office at the base of
Snow's Mountain in the village of Waterville Valley, Pickering was
at his desk early on this morning, answering telephone calls, many
from concerned parents who had heard the news. But Pickering also
took time to deal with kids coming through his door. Some didn't say
a word and just gave him a hug. A few shed tears.
''Some of them are still kind of stunned,''
Pickering said. ''Some of them don't really know what to think.''
Cardillo was 5 feet 9 inches tall, weighed 150
pounds, and could bench press 250 pounds. He had ski talents well
beyond his years - ''fast feet,'' say his friends and coaches at
Waterville Valley, where he spent about five months a year away from
his hometown in Falmouth, Maine.
Aside from ski racing, his favorite sport was
soccer. His other passion was tuna fishing with his uncle in the
Gulf of Maine. His sports hero was Austrian ski great Hermann Maier,
frozen in an action shot on a poster over the boy's bed at home.
In many ways, he seemed older, mature.
''He had a way of making you laugh - always,'' said
Mike Fairbrother, 13, of his roommate. ''You could just never feel
bad when he was around. He just always made everybody feel better.
He'd just start telling you a story like the one about how he caught
a bass when he was fishing in a derby, and kept feeding it to get it
fat so he could win. Those kinds of stories. He made you laugh.''
To Anne Barbeau, wife of Waterville Valley
headmaster Tom Barbeau and housemother to Cardillo and two other
students, a playful day in the snow around Christmas best
illustrated the young man's personality. As he rolled a big snowball
around the yard with the other kids, including the Barbeaus'
6-year-old son, the ball eventually got too big to move.
''I saw him out the window struggling with his
shoulder against that snowball, telling the others, `Come on, we can
do it,''' said Anne, who also is a teacher at Waterville. ''And
finally they had this huge 7 1/2-foot snowman built in the back
yard.''
Whether he was talking about a pancake-eating
contest (''He had a tremendous appetite,'' Anne said) or about how
he was sure he would go bald like his father and uncles, Cardillo
''always had something funny to talk about, and he could always find
something good in everyone.''
Teachers and coaches described him as goal-oriented,
an athlete who aspired to race on the World Cup circuit. In the
summer, Ken Cardillo said Dan mowed lawns and worked on fishing
boats out of Falmouth. Cardillo said one reason Dan idolized Maier
was that the Austrian champion, once cut from the team, worked as a
bricklayer as he slowly turned himself into one of the sport's
greatest skiers.
''Danny liked that, and he liked that hard physical
work,'' Cardillo said.
Dan also was impressed with Maier's seeming
imperviousness to pain, as witnessed in last year's Olympics when
the Austrian walked away from a spectacular crash in the downhill.
But when Dan once boasted to Tom Barbeau that he never got hurt when
he skied, Barbeau remembered telling him: ''Don't you ever say that.
Even kidding.''
He touched so many
Last Friday, nearly 1,500
people crowded into the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in
Portland, Maine, to attend Dan Cardillo's funeral, and the only
question afterward was how, at age 14, he had touched so many lives.
''I think that there was just some kind of special
quality that touched people,'' Ken Cardillo said. ''It was his
passion. He was passionate about everything he did, and that
infected people who knew him.''
Waterville Academy felt a collective loss. After a
memorial meeting on Mount Tecumseh in which the entire school took a
run down the mountain in his honor, the student body was bused to
the funeral.
Longtime family friend Dan Pellegrin noted that the
lyrics in the Elton John song at the funeral was hauntingly
appropriate: ''Daniel, my brother, you are older than me.''
''That's the way everyone felt about him,''
Pellegrin said.
On the morning of the accident, the Cardillos rented
a plane to fly to Vermont.
''I remember when we were flying over the White
Mountains, feeling very close to Dan,'' Ken said. ''I wasn't a ski
racer, but I watched Dan enough to know the kind of sensation he
loved, and as that small plane banked and rocked, I knew those were
the same sensations. Looking out at those mountains I felt like I
was in touch with him.''
This story ran on page D01 of the
Boston Globe on 02/07/99.
©
Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company. |