Danny Davis spent the early days of fall riding in the mountains of New Zealand, but took his first stateside turns of the season in the last days of October. While the Chicago Cubs were winning the World Series, Davis was knee deep in Tahoe powder. The conditions were far from ripe, but in the mountains where Davis lives, if you’re willing to walk, there’s always an oasis of snow to be found.
Davis got up on the mountain 15 or 20 times in November, hiking with his splitboard to reach the areas of untouched powder where he’d take his runs. The journeys to the peaks, never less than five miles but sometimes as long as ten, had Davis in great form as Thanksgiving approached.
Then his season took a sideways turn when he sliced open his right hand chopping firewood just after the November holiday.
“I was making some kindling, something I’ve done a hundred times in my life, and I just got lazy in my mind,” Davis told me. “There was a knot in a middle of the piece of wood, and I went to split it but left my hand in a bad area, and the axe hit the knot, shot out and just took a right. My girlfriend was tough, she got me to the emergency room, but it wasn’t the prettiest thing in the world.”
Danny had surgery last week, and looked good riding leisurely on Dew Tour weekend. But even if the halfpipe competition hadn’t been cancelled, Davis would not have been able to compete. After consulting with his medical advisors, he’s tentatively planning to ride at the Grand Prix at Copper Mountain in order to pick up the World Cup points necessary to become eligible for next year’s Olympic qualifiers (he finished 10th in Sochi and ironically missed the 2010 Olympic games after suffering a back injury while riding an ATV). He has to wear a protective mitt at all times except when he removes it for cleaning, so grabs with his right hand are out the window for the next few weeks. If he’s able to compete at the Grand Prix, he’ll have to do it with limitations.
“It really doesn’t hurt that much. The biggest issue I’ll have is probably with the judging. The hand limits the kind of grabs I can pull off, and the judges can’t grade me differently from everyone else due to my handicap; they have to judge everyone against the same standards, and using my left hand for every grab will hurt me stylistically,” Davis said. “I also obviously can’t fall on it; I can’t hand plant or anything like that or I’ll undo what the surgery did.”
The goal is to go to Copper and make it out with points and without setbacks, but if he decides against it, the next opportunity for points will be the LAAX Open in mid-January, just before X Games. The idea behind going for the points sooner after surgery than later is that allowing the hand to heal into January and then competing twice in two weeks could be more detrimental than competing now while it’s still fresh and putting less wear on the hand further into rehab (hey, it’s his call).
“If I have to go to Europe for LAAX, then I can’t be in physical therapy preparing for X Games. If I can bang it out next week, I have more time to get well and focus on X Games,” Davis said. “I care less about the World Cup than I do X Games. Last year wasn’t so great for us, so I’m looking forward to getting back into that pipe.”
Davis finished ninth out of ten participants in last year’s blizzard-shortened X Games Superpipe final. Coming into the competition, he was the two-time defending champion.
But Davis is in a bit of a conundrum. Making the Olympic team is important to him even though he openly admits the contest sites to qualify are of lesser quality than domestic comps like the X Games and US Open, events he holds near and dear:
“Those are the contests that mean the most to me, the ones that have driven our sport over the last 20-plus years and take care to create great courses. The World Cup events; there are a lot of them, and they are how I get points to qualify for a contest that happens once every four years.”
So his injury has him caught in the middle. “If I’m not on the Olympic team, then I’m not one of the best halfpipe snowboarders in the world, and that’s what I want to be considered. Can you be the best and not go? Maybe. But it means a lot, and it’s really fun. That’s where my motivation to be on the Olympic team comes from.”
