Adam Williams – Kamloops This Week
It was the super-flip that was ultimately Brett Turcotte’s undoing.
The Kamloops snowmobiler (formerly of Clearwater) landed the trick — a backflip combined with a Superman (when the rider holds on to the handlebars but extends his legs out behind him, like Superman) — during his run at the Winter X Games in Aspen last month, but the impact of coming back to earth ended his race.
“It was definitely a pretty big pill to swallow,” Turcotte told KTW.
He was leading the race when his drive belt failed, causing him to lose all power to the snowmobile’s track.
The Aspen competition, which ran from Jan. 21 to Jan 25, was the 27-year-old’s sixth trip to the X-Games, but his first competing in the snowmobile speed and style event, which combines racing with tricking.
In previous trips, he was a perennial favourite in snowmobile snocross — he described it as “a motocross race on snow” – winning a silver medal in the event in 2008.
Turcotte ultimately finished the 2015 event in seventh place.
“As far as the X Games event itself, it went off awesome,” he said.
“For me, obviously had a little bit of hard luck in the final, but I’ve learned a lot from that and I’m already looking forward to next year.”
It was an unfortunate end to what had been a brutal few months for the rider. Hours in the mountains and in the foam pit were yielding results.
It wasn’t until December that he landed his first backflip off a ramp and it was just a month later that he landed his first super-flip.
In spite of the disappointment, there was some good to come from Turcotte’s trip to Aspen.
“This year I feel like I went in there as an underdog,” he said. “In past years, when I went there as a snocross athlete, I was going in expected to be a front-runner and win and do well.
“This year, I went in, nobody really knew my game-plan, nobody knew what I had in my bag of tricks. I kind of just flew under the radar.
“It took a lot of pressure off me and made it a lot more fun.”
