SKIING / BOB LOCHNER : Olympic Quest Keeps Breen on Her Toes

One of the Southland’s more successful athletes nowadays performs, if you can believe it, in the ballet--not on her toes with the Bolshoi but on skis with the U.S. freestyle ski team.

Actually, Ellen Breen of West Hills prefers to call what she does so well “acro-skiing,” a term that might at least subliminally help get the sport included in the Winter Olympics, where it would join its two cousins, moguls and aerials.

“We really do a 90-second acrobatic and gymnastic routine on skis,” Breen said the other day from Lake Placid, N.Y., before leaving for Europe to continue her quest for a clean sweep of freestyle’s World Cup circuit. “It’s also like figure skating, with points awarded equally for artistic impression and degree of difficulty.

“I’m not especially graceful, but I can do the difficult tricks as well as anybody.”

She is graceful enough, however, to have won the World Cup ballet title the last two years, and is seven for seven this season after taking first in Thursday’s competition at Altenmarkt, Austria. It’s the last competition before Sunday’s start of the World Freestyle Ski Championships at La Clusaz, France, where she will try for her third world title in a row, having won in 1991 and ’93.

What Breen would like most, though, is an Olympic medal.

Ballet was a demonstration sport in the 1992 Winter Games at Albertville, France, where moguls became the first of the three freestyle disciplines to gain official recognition by the International Olympic Committee. Two years later, at Lillehammer, Norway, aerials also became a medal sport, but ballet skiers weren’t even invited.

“It was a housing problem,” Breen said. “They said there was no place for us to sleep, so we didn’t get a chance even to demonstrate the event again.

“But the FIS (International Skiing Federation) is supporting us, and I think we’ll be a full-fledged Olympic sport by 2002, for sure. Of course, there’s still a chance we’ll make it in 1998 (at Nagano, Japan), and if so, I may try to hang in there and compete.”

Otherwise, Breen, 31, said, “I’ll probably ski one more year, then quit. But I definitely want to be at the Winter Olympics in 2002, at least as a coach.”

This is Breen’s 11th season in big league freestyle competition, but she started out wanting to become an aerialist.

“I saw these skiers like Scott Brooksbank flying through the air on television when I was in junior high,” she said. “I thought, ‘Wow, I’d really like to do that.’ So when I graduated from Chatsworth High, I went to Lake Tahoe for a freestyle camp, then attended the Ski Etude Academy (at Incline Village, Nev.,) and finally got into ballet.”

She credits Jan Carmichael, former world ballet skiing champion who is now a U.S. coach, with boosting her confidence and helping her create a winning routine.

“I learned a lot competing against her,” Breen said. “And later she helped me put my run together. She really gave me the confidence I needed.”

That was in the summer of ‘92, a year that began with Breen injuring a knee and barely making it to Albertville for the Olympic demonstration.

“I was happy to finish sixth,” she said. “I skied well, but it was hard.”

Since then, she has trained almost year-round, spending six to eight weeks of the summer on Mt. Hood, near Portland, Ore., and much of the spring and fall in Sweden. Why Sweden? Well, her fiance is Fredrik Andersson, the Swedish aerials coach.

“I’ve known him for 10 years,” she said. “But we just started dating a couple of years ago.”

Whenever possible, she returns home to West Hills for brief visits with her parents--Jim, vice principal of a West Valley occupational school, and Roz, who works for Blue Cross.

“Without their support and being able to live rent-free part of the time, I couldn’t be doing this,” she said.

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Skiing Notes

Besides Ellen Breen’s victory in the ballet last weekend at Oberjoch-Hindelang, Germany, Americans also performed well in the aerials. Trace Worthington and Kris Feddersen placed 2-3 among the men, and Nikki Stone was second among the women. Worthington won the men’s combined for the fourth week in a row, and Kriste Porter took the women’s combined. Donna Weinbrecht, who has won twice this season, finished fifth in the women’s moguls.

Bjorn Daehlie of Norway tops the Nordic World Cup men’s cross-country standings with 720 points, 190 ahead of runner-up Vladimir Smirnov of Kazakhstan. Elena Vaelbe is the leading woman with 696 points, 106 more than fellow Russian Nina Gavriliuk. . . . Andreas Goldberger of Austria is the World Cup jumping leader with 1,171 points, 402 more than his closest pursuer, Janne Ahonen of Finland.

Barring any sudden rescheduling, the Alpine World Cup racers are off until the weekend after next. The women will compete in a downhill and giant slalom on Feb. 17-18 at Are, Sweden. Katja Seizinger of Germany has 799 points in the overall standings, 55 more than Heidi Zeller-Baehler of Switzerland, who is followed by teammate Vreni Schneider with 662, Martina Ertl of Germany with 540 and Picabo Street of the United States with 505. The men, with Alberto Tomba of Italy leading runner-up Jure Kosir of Slovenia, 1,050 points to 570, will race in a slalom and giant slalom on Feb. 18-19 at Furano, Japan.

California ski resorts are reporting mainly spring conditions, meaning hard pack in the morning and soft snow in the afternoon. Some say their slopes are machine-groomed and others maintain that they have packed powder, but it’s definitely an early spring--at least temporarily--in the mountains. Base depths range from 24 to 72 inches in the Southland, and up to 240 inches in the Sierra.