Image Aside, Freestyle Skier Takes Her Fun Very Seriously : World Cup: In a sport once associated with hot-dogging and party animals, highly regarded Ellen Breen of West Hills is succeeding through hard work.

Freestyle skier? Oh, yeah, isn’t that another name for a hot-dogger? A party animal who lives life on the edge--of a cliff? The kind of slope jockey who somersaults down the hill and showboats all the way to the apres ski bash?

“Well, we try to stay away from calling each other hot-doggers and saying that all freestyle skiers are partiers,” says Ellen Breen of West Hills.

Freestyle skiers used to be hot-doggers before they went legitimate when the Olympics recognized their sport in the 1980s. Now they’re bona fide athletic competitors who take their sport seriously.

“We train just as hard, if not harder than alpine skiers,” Breen says.

Breen, 26, is currently ranked No. 1 in the United States in the freestyle grand prix ballet, which will be an Olympic demonstration sport in the 1992 Winter Games in France. The event is like ice skating on skis. Competitors do a series of choreographed gymnastic-like moves on a gently sloping hill. Each routine is two minutes long and is done to music blaring from an outdoor speaker. Judges award points for choreography, execution and difficulty. Last weekend in Calgary, the 5-foot-3 Breen won her first World Cup freestyle event. Accompanied by Elvis Presley’s “Jailhouse Rock,” Breen did a near-flawless routine that included 720-degree jumps, two-handed pole flips and her specialty, a one-and-a-half twisting pole flip, something no other woman freestyler has done in competition.

The win in Calgary moved Breen to third in the World Cup standings, only a point out of second and 10 points behind leader Conny Kissling of Switzerland. This weekend, she and the rest of the U.S. freestyle team will travel to Japan for two events in the World Cup series.

So how did a Valley girl reach the top of the mountain?

“She became interested in skiing in high school and we sort of pushed her along,” says her father, Jim, an assistant principal at San Fernando Adult School.

Jim Breen doesn’t ski--”I came out here from the Midwest to get away from the snow,” he says--but he encouraged his children to get into athletics at Chatsworth High “to keep them out of trouble,” he says. Eddie was a top basketball player and Tim started in football. Ellen, his youngest child, played varsity basketball. She was a point guard who “could jump up and hang in the air like Michael Jordan,” says Jim, a former golf pro who still shoots par.

Ellen also got involved with the high school ski club and the Blizzard Ski School. While other club members were satisfied with merely racing down hills, she was, uh, a hot dog who enjoyed doing flips and jumps. “I wanted to be an aerialist,” she says, referring to the acrobatic side of freestyle skiing. “That’s where most all the glory is. I thought that would be the most fun to do.”

After graduating from Chatsworth in 1981, Breen moved to Lake Tahoe and competed in Far West Ski Assn. races. Working at a hotel at night “turning down beds and putting chocolates on pillows,” she was able to ski all day. But her freestyle career didn’t really take off until the fall of 1982 when three-time world ballet champion Bob Howard arrived in Tahoe to coach the U.S. freestyle team.

“I skied with him and just concentrated on ballet,” Breen says. “I worked my tail off.”

Breen became Far West ballet champion in ‘82, then was second in the nationals the following year before being named World Cup Rookie of the Year in ’84. Howard has remained her coach and she also gets instruction from former U. S. freestyle team Coach Park Smalley plus a strength coach and a choreographer. A year ago she took time off to avoid burnout and to work on dance, “my weakness.”

While her brothers have gone on to professions that earn them a living and independence from their parents, Ellen still lives at home and supports herself during the summer off-season by working as a waitress at a Sizzler restaurant and coaching freestyle ballet in Oregon. Alpine skiers may make a lot money from endorsements and corporate sponsorship, but freestylers barely scrape by. Even the U.S. Ski Assn. treats them like orphans, Breen says.

“We only get equipment and some clothes,” says Breen, who is looking for a corporate sponsor. “We get some travel expenses, but mostly it comes out of my pocket.”

With eight-time world ballet champion Jan Bucher of Salt Lake City sidelined with a knee injury, Breen is the mainstay of the U.S. team. Her goal is to maintain her ranking and make the ’92 Olympics.

“I’m in this to go to the Olympics,” she says. “I’ve dreamed about that since I was a kid.”