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Ski Racing in the Land of Alexander the Great
This story recounts a voyage to Macedonia for the Mavrovo FIS ski race… I took this trip and wrote this story in 1998. The scene was somewhat unstable in the former Yugoslavia at the time…
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\r\nMacedonia
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\r\n 1956 in the country of Macedonia an avalanche buried fifty-six construction workers near the town of Mavrovo. The first people able to reach the scene were cross-country skiers.
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\r\nIn remembrance of that event a cross-country ski race was organized near the avalanche site at a town named Mavrovo. Racers from all over the world were invited to participate in the “ traditional, 37-th in row, sports manifestation.” The race information pamphlet went on to say, “Mavrovo Memorial brings us back to the memories of the fallen construction workers of Mavrovo Hydroelectric Power Plants in the distant 1956, who, on the conditions of winter, did their best to build this important power facility, as soon as possible.”
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\r\nThere are five of us. Cory Custer had quit ski racing to become a stockbroker but came out of retirement for this event. Jon Engen, a three time Olympian and civil engineer, is the common sense man and a ballast to Eli Brown who according to Jon comes from a different planet. Dragan is our leader. He is a Macedonian living and coaching skiing in Bozeman, Montana. He likes to say, “is OK, no problem,” and most the time he is right. Jon who put all of our tickets on his credit card, so we could get travel insurance, asked Dragan’s wife Boyana how Dragan knew the race organizers would pay him back. She said, “Is OK, Dragan tell them they no pay he gonna kill them.” I don’t think she was serious.
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\r\nWe got off the airplane from Austria and were immediately engulfed in smoke. In Macedonia everybody smokes all the time. Billboards adorn open fields and the sides of ruined buildings with happy people from the world of slim cigarettes and Marlboro country.
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\r\nOn the plane there was no waiting for directions from the pilot. At the instant the plane slowed after landing all the passengers got up at once and started tugging their belongings out of the nooks and crannies they were shoved into. From here there was a stamped to get into the terminal and through customs.
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\r\nWe were caught in a swirl of packed people. No one was moving forward but there was a constant movement as people were pushed and pulled in the crowd. Dragan disappeared through a door lead by a short, frantic man in an ill-fitting military uniform. We were still wrestling in the rotation making no progress for more than half an hour when Dragan re-emerged through the door. He stood peering over the crowd, and upon seeing our light heads of hair and relatively bright clothes waved us over.
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\r\nOur visas were rushed through customs using who knows what method of persuasion. Dragan said that it was “OK, no problem.”
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\r\nA gaggle of taxi drivers, all of them shouting “Taxi? Taxi?” at us even as we pulled away from their cloud of second hand smoke in an old van at top speed.
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\r\nKids played soccer in the relatively lush grass between the highway and the on-ramp. Our driver pushed the van in a high whine around everything on the road until we reached the out-skirts of Skopja (capital of Macedonia) and were under the high-rise apartment buildings of town.
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\r\nNo thought was given to comfort or aesthetics when these monster apartments were erected. These concrete family dorms, which are really nothing more than workers quarters are not limited to Macedonia. I’ve seen them in Estonia, Russia, Poland, The Czech Republic, Germany, and we certainly have our own brand of them here in the US.
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\r\nBut there is also unique and imaginative architecture in Macedonia. It runs from old-world simplicity, to communist monotony, to the modern but crumbling future. There are small shops made of old brick and red shingle sandwiched between a gray tower and a concrete space ship with horns. These monuments to the space age look like a futuristic building would look from the even more distant future – a historical landmark before it is even history. All of it is gray with age and pollution. There is dirt in the gutters and trash in the streets.
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\r\nMid-day downtown Skopja is bustling with foot and motorized traffic. Miniature cars driven by hunched over men with thick mustaches weave in high-pitched low gear between trucks. Mopeds sneak through waiting traffic at red lights and wobble precariously as they are passed back in a rush of dust and exhaust as the light turns green.
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\r\nFrom each balcony a string of dull colored wash dries in the dusty breeze. Old women pound rugs out windows many stories up. Old men with cranes at their side sit in the doorways smoking. They run shaking fingers through coarse looking, black-gray and slicked-back hair. Wrinkled foreheads meet dark eyebrows and faces that suggest much hard work. There are no soft old people here like you find in Sun City. These are survivors and there is no such thing as retirement.
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\r\nThey do not ride golf carts here. Far out on the highway many miles from the nearest town the small dot on the highway’s horizon becomes and elderly women. She is walking purposefully down the road. Black socks are pulled up over strong, thick, bowed legs. She is wearing a well warn pair of flat leather shoes and a brown woolen skirt. Her Olive green sweater is buttoned up over an indeterminable number of other layers. A shawl or scarf is tied over the head. From her exposed wrinkled face a set of eyes squint against the exhaust filtered Balkan sun. Both arms hang straight down, her shoulders sag with each step under the burden of the bulging plastic bags held in each hand. Cars, including ours, whip past seemingly unnoticed.
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\r\n75 percent of Macedonia is mountainous. The flat and rolling lowland is covered with small plots of farmland. Few plots are bigger than a soccer field. There are thousands of these plots, but I saw only one tractor. I saw many donkeys at work, and there were often men on hand and knees working their plot with small hoes.
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\r\nFrom these flat sections the terrain begins to roll until it is too steep to farm. The foothills are thick with short bushes. In the summer it is often in the 100’s and so the vegetation is short, tough, undoubtedly stingy with the water. The soil seems to contain lots of clay and the rocks are sharp and flaky and probably made from the compressed clay. In the valleys between these foothills are orchards – olives, apples, and grapes. Spaced out along the hillsides and in the valley are homesteads. Usually two story once white or tan stucco houses with orange tile roofs, wooden shutters, and strings of laundry against the southern wall. An obligatory ramshackle barn made of river stones, and mortar, roofed with wood and tin contain clucking, skittish chickens, cocky roosters, sheep, and musty hay. Bumpy dirt roads sidle off the highway down toward these little farms and ranches. We motor past toward the mountains.
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\r\nThe race pamphlet states: “Located on the hillside of the wonderful and luxurious Mavrovo National Park, this manifestation establishes at the same time an obligation of ours and of the whole planet, to socialize with the nature and to take special care of it,”
\r\nThis is not an obligation the country seems to abide to. There is trash everywhere. People throw their chip bags and cigarette packages right off the chair lift onto the ski slope below. The clear melt water gurgling over mossy rocks in the creek at the base of our hotel is stuffed with pop bottles and unidentifiable refuse. Every bush is adorned with a flapping plastic bag. Ditches are filled, streets are lined and mountains are dotted with garbage.
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\r\nMavrovo is a resort town, a Macedonian Vail. People come from all over the Balkans to ride the lifts. There is very little snow at the bottom of the resort, but above, hidden by the lower section of mountain, there are high, treeless and snow covered slopes.
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\r\nOur first day in Mavrovo was beset by a heavy fog. We found our way to the lift and rode up wet, white and blind. Eli and I rode together. I couldn’t see the chair in front of me or the ground below. The lift poles would materialize, and as we passed under them a shower of black grease splattered down on us. Eli would squirm and yell about the black dots and streaks staining his white jacket.
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\r\nWe found our way to and around the ski trail even though there were no trees at all to help guide us. We followed the groomed snow, which appears as a path of white corduroy winding through the un-groomed snow surrounding it and the wet, white fog all around us.
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\r\nWe were near blind in this fog and totally detached from everything but the act of skiing and the job of trying to stay on the coarse. I was completely lost the whole time, had little notion of up or down except that I would be going faster easier, or slower harder. I saw nothing but white, or the soft images of Cory, Jon and Eli skiing near me.
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\r\nThe next day, after a few restless hours of sleep and many even more restless hours of not sleeping, the roosters woke us up to a visible and sun struck Mavrovo.
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\r\nThey come from all over to play in the mountains. The slopes are covered with people alpine and cross country skiing, snowboarding, walking, sledding, sliding, falling, slipping, drinking, smoking, eating, yelling, and having a hell of a good time. There are no signs saying ski at your own risk. There is no out of bounds. The resort was a free for all with people walking on the ski run, skiing down dirt trails, laughing, yelling and shouting. Whatever the posted signs say, the people do it all up here, and then they ride the lift back down.
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\r\nHot days melt the snow into watery ice crystals and cold nights freeze the separate ice crystals together into a hard crust. When snow is this way one can ski over it with out punching through and so can ski over it in any direction as quickly and easily as if it were groomed for skiing. Eli, Jon, Cory and I skied over the morning crust up onto a distant ridge. We were told it was the western border of Macedonia. We were surrounded by rolling mountains and there were higher mountains in the distance. Below the valleys were filled with trees. A huge lake lay shimmered far below. An expanse of softening crust lay below us and so we cut telemark turns down into Albania before skiing back.
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\r\nBack on the competition trail Dragan and a collection of other skiers stood waiting. Since there are no trees up this high they had been able to watch us appear and disappear as we skied up and over rising hill after hill until we crested the highest ridge and drop out of sight into Albania.
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\r\nThey were very worried to see us go. We were scolded and made to promise not to ski off in that direction again. It was one of the only times Dragan didn’t say, “is OK, no problem,” He was serious.
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\r\nThe only danger we encountered, not that others didn’t exist, was supreme sunburn. Not only are we in a country just north of Greece but we are at an altitude of five thousand feet. There are no clouds, and no sheltering vegetation. The Balkan sun beamed down unhindered and bounced with a bright glare off of everything but my sun absorbent forehead.
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\r\nWhile we were in Macedonia there were protests and riots related to the ethnic and political troubles that had torn most of ex-Yugoslavia. In Kosovo to the north the situation was beyond calling “trouble”. Every major newspaper had dbo.articles about the violence by Serbian police against ethnic Albanians and Muslims in Serbia. The president of Macedonia predicted this violence would spread into Macedonia if it wasn’t stopped.
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\r\n“Trouble” is not new to the region. Alex of Macadon, a Macedonian known as Alexander the Great, once ruled the world. Macedonia, which is pronounced Makedonia, as in Mack truck or Big Mac, not Massedonia as in Sunday mass, has not been so lucky since. First the Romans rolled through followed by the Serbs, then the Turks, the Greeks, the fascists during World War Two, and the communists after.
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\r\nIn 1991 Macedonia proclaimed its independence from Yugoslavia and became a sovern and independent state. Things haven’t looked this good since Alexander ruled the world, but things still don’t look all that good.
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\r\nThere were no signs of ethnic violence in Mavrovo but there was obvious tension and plain ethnic hatred. I would ask a simple question and not get a simple answer.
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\r\n“How do you say thank you?” and the waiter, whom I asked, bent down close to my ear and very quietly told me. “ When part of Yugoslavia we said ‘falla’, but now since we are separate we say, like we used to, ‘blagodaram’.” All the while his eyes were up looking around so he knew who was listening.
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\r\nI had the same experience two other times with two different people. Once it was related to a loud exchange of angry words and gestures I witnessed at the front desk of our hotel. I asked Dragan who was with me at the time what they were yelling about.
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\r\n“Is nothing,” He said, “No problem.” But I persisted.
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\r\n“Those two boys they want a room, yes? And he, that one, he called the front desk lady, she was rude to them, a stupid Macedonian who can’t understand Serb, and then she says they are stupid Serbians.”
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\r\nA better explanation than that of the political and ethnic trouble I never got.
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\r\nAfter our morning ski I thought a good picture would be of my buddies walking between a group of snow shoveling soldiers. As soon as the shutter snapped I was approached at great speed by an officer. I could tell he was an officer because he was the only one not shoveling snow. He rattled at me angrily. I glanced toward my buddies who scurried off toward the hotel.
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\r\n“Hi ya doing,” I answered, “do you speak any English.” This hung him up momentarily. He motioned over a young soldier who was shoveling snow. I noticed these guys were shoveling snow with blades about the size of a two-egg frying pan.
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\r\n“Why you taking pictures of the soldiers?”
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\r\n“I’m from America,” good answer I thought. “I was taking pictures of my friends,” pointing to where they had been – no friends in sight.
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\r\n“Can’t take pictures of the military.”
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\r\n“OK,” another good answer. The soldier turned to his commander and they started talking and gesturing. I walked off quickly behind their turned backs and broke into a run once out of sight.
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\r\nThat very night, the night before the race, was the opening ceremony. The president of the country spoke.
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\r\n“It is with great sentiment and feeling that we welcome you the competitors of the white-sports to Macedonia Mavrovo sport center.”
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\r\nWe marched Olympic style into a small square led by a young person carrying a sign bearing the letters USA in Macedonian. A great cheer came from the crowd of 100 or so onlookers as we walked in, but the cheering wasn’t for us. As we marched in the announcer announced the Macedonian team which included as its pride Macedonia’s first Olympic competitor in the “white-sports” – their first winter Olympian – a cross country skier.
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\r\nThe speeches were topped off with a fire works display, accompanied by some live traditional music, accordion, flutes, guitar, high pitched singing… all the while a shower of spent fire work shells, sparks and flame rained down on the crowd.
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\r\nNo one was hurt and everyone loved it. All the spectators, race officials, coaches, children and many others had been drinking plastic cup after plastic cup out of a huge vat of hot, spiced turpentine. The party started and did not end for hours. When it did what sounded like a pack of wild dogs moved into the streets and started fighting.
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\r\nMidnight dogs and early morning roosters. I was not sleeping. Our room was so hot we left the windows wide open all night even though the sounds of the Macedonian night would come in with the fresh air. There was sporadic shouting out in the hall and the glass clink of shot glasses and vodka bottles. Cars honked and sped off in low gear. Polka music with a disco beat blended with a woman singing and the sound of toilets flushing. Pipes groaned and Jon Engen snored. The party in the hall died down to a few men engaged in aggressive conversation. Eli in the bunk above me rolled over in what sounded like parchment paper. All of this at three Sunday morning. I don’t know why they didn’t have the race on Saturday, so we could have been a part of the noise the night after the race instead of battling it the night before.
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\r\nOn race morning up at the race sight each country had a military tent complete with military guard set up for them by the officials. The race was 30 kilometers, three times around a ten km loop. The coarse was well groomed, professionally marked with fencing, flags, and km markers. Music played between announcements over a loud speaker. All was turning out to be a first class event.
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\r\nWe plopped our stuff in our tent and went out to warm up. The crowd of spectators grew to several hundred by the time the racers were under way.
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\r\nI didn’t feel good right off, but I stuck it out believing I would over come the initial stiff and stale feeling. I didn’t want to lose much time so I pushed through the disconcerting discomfort of the early km’s. There were good skiers from the eastern European countries but I believed I could win the event. A little less than half way through the race I no longer held that belief. Eli dropped me as the leaders skied away. Other skiers caught me, dropped me. The sun seemed especially hot. I sagged into a pace I thought would bring me all thirty kilometers, and forgot about what place I might get.
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\r\nEli raced a good race and finished 6th. Stockbroker Cory Custer, skied well, as did Jon Engen although neither of them raced as fast as they once could. Neither did I.
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\r\nAt the awards ceremony after the race we, of the American contingent, sat between the Macedonian team and the group of Albanians whose old van sat leaking life fluids into the parking lot.
\r\nA few days before the race this dilapidated old van coughed and wheezed into the parking lot of our hotel. It was a worn gray-blue the same color as the smoke barking from its exhaust pipe. The driver maneuvered it into a space so that it was pointed down hill, and then with one final backfire it died. It was the Albanians.
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\r\nIn halting English I was quietly told by a person with a dismissing sneer that Albanians were uneducated, poor, dirty and surrounded by ten kids apiece. At the awards the Albanian sitting by my right shoulder spoke perfect English and shared, with a smile, his homemade plum vodka with anyone who asked including the sneering person who had whispered in my ear.
\r\nDirectly after the awards the Albanians push-started their van, which came to life with noisy reluctance. They left my view at no more than ten miles per hour waving and smiling as they lurched toward home.
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\r\nOur own departure was delayed. We were supposed to drive down to Skopja and spend the day before flying out that afternoon. Instead we waited and waited up in the mountains until finally the bus came and we were whisked directly to the airport. We stood in line with a team of women volleyball players on their way to Austria for a tournament. They were laughing and talking – excited for the trip.
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\r\nWe later read that gun battles had broken out on the border. The Balkans were erupting, and that was the reason for our first delayed and then hasty departure.
\r\nDragan bought bottles of wine and finding he didn’t have room to carry all of them began to hand them out to us to carry.
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\r\n“How many are we allowed to take?” asked Jon.
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\r\n“Is OK, said Dragan with a smile, “is no problem.”
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Pete Vordenberg, safely returned from Macedonia....
Written By: petevDate Posted: 5/11/2004Number of Views: 388
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