FLIPPED OUT

There are those who wonder if Eric Bergoust is nuts.

And there are those who don’t wonder at all, judging him by his actions, which include, or have included, leaping off semi-tall buildings and bridges, climbing and jumping off the chimney of his parents’ house, juggling fire. . . . What’s to wonder?

But most of that was years ago, when Bergoust was an irrepressible kid. Now that he’s a grown-up of 28, Bergoust’s tastes are much more refined. He’s into twists and flips. He does them on skis, off a snowy ramp that flings him chimney-high into the air. And he’s hoping to do them well enough in Nagano to win a gold medal.

All that stuff he did as a kid? Nothing more than preparation for Bergoust as an Olympic aerial skier. And judging from the results, he went about things precisely the right way.

Last year, for instance, he finished second in the World Championships at Nagano only five weeks after he had broken his right collarbone in six places. And it took a record score by Canadian Nicolas Fontaine to beat him.

Bergoust led the World Cup standings for most of the season and said after routing Fontaine and the rest of the field in late January at Whistler, Canada, “It looks like I’m peaking at the right time. My plan was to jump better earlier in the season and keep it going, but everything is going right now.”

Something has always been going, it seems, in Bergoust’s busy life. And, almost always, it had something to do with acrobatics.

“We lived out, 30 miles from town [Missoula, Mont.] and we had six kids, so we entertained ourselves,” he said. “Me and my brothers used to jump off anything we could find. We’d take little mini-[trampolines] out on bridges and jump in the rivers. We’d set ‘em up on a railing of a 25-foot bridge, run across the street and jump off ‘em and do flips into the river. We used to jump off roofs. I loved acrobatics. We used to do all kinds of crazy stuff. We’d walk on stilts, ride unicycles, juggle fire.

“I like stunts. You think up this crazy thing that looks and seems impossible, but when you figure it out, the odds are pretty good that you can go through with it. I just got a rush from doing acrobatics off anything.”

Behold, the chimney.

“When we first moved out to the house [in the country]--I think I was about 11--I liked to climb things,” Bergoust recalled. “I saw the size of the chimney and . . . I climbed partway up. Then I got scared and went back down.

“But over about four years, I would climb higher and higher until I just could climb up to the overhang. I was afraid to go past the overhang. Finally I got myself to go around the overhang and up to the top, and that was a big sense of accomplishment for me.

“That’s when the idea came to really conquer the chimney and jump off it.”

And that’s when Bergoust and his siblings carted the mattresses and bedclothes out of the house.

“When my parents left, we’d throw every mattress out of the house, pile ‘em under the chimney, put on some pillows and some blankets and I’d go for it,” he said. “The most dangerous thing was the rebound. I’d hit the mattresses and bounce about 10 feet back up and then hit the ground next to the mattresses.”

When he discovered skiing, it was more of the same.

“I started skiing when I was 12 and started [tricks] right away,” he said. “I used to spend all day Saturday building jumps. It wasn’t allowed at the ski area, but I used to wear a huge parka and my parents bought me a collapsible shovel and I’d hide it in there and . . . hide from the ski patrol out in the back woods. I’d spend all day Saturday building my jumps and jump on ‘em on Sunday.”

Eventually, he got pretty good at it. And it was there, at Lost Trails ski area, that Bergoust, at 16, launched his most memorable jump.

“One day, I decided to try some front flips,” he said. “I did a couple of layouts--body extended and fully straight--warming up to go for a double. I figured if I could do a straight-body single, I could probably do a double in a tuck. So I built the jump up a little bit and I went for it.

“I didn’t have any idea what I was doing or how to do it. I just got in this little ball, and I barely made it around to 1 3/4 flips, [landing on] my back. And I’m like, ‘Well, OK, I’ll just start way higher and just go for it way more.’

“So the next time I went way higher and I somehow hit one of the best front takeoffs I’ve ever hit--to this day. I had so much rotation, I came off and did the first [flip] in a tuck. But I figured, ‘I’m getting this around for sure. I’m sick of coming in short.’ So I’m entering the second flip, I’m upright again, and I see the ground and I watch where I landed last time just go past me.

“So I kick out and I’m totally laid out, stretching, trying to slow the flip down as much as I can, and I do the whole second flip totally laid out. I’m thinking, ‘I’m gonna hit the ground any time now. I hope I land on my back. I’m not even going to try to land on my feet.’

“I come around to my feet again, I look down and I’m still 15 feet up. I didn’t even consider doing a triple, which is what I would have done today. I would have just tucked again and done three [flips] and landed. I was just so shocked at how high I was I didn’t even have time to react.

“My arms went down to my side and I stuck in the [snow] like an arrow.

“All my brothers and sisters were there and everybody was watching. It was just like a cartoon--just, boom! Only my feet were sticking out.

“I knew everybody was wondering if I was OK, but I didn’t move and stayed there as long as I could. But I couldn’t breathe. I started wiggling out and they had to come and pull me out.”

Considering that, it’s easy to understand how Bergoust broke his collarbone last year. Except, it didn’t happen that way. What happened to him happens all the time to recreational skiers.

“What I was doing was preparing the jump site,” he said. “We get some bumps on the in-run for the kicker and we ski in standing up fairly straight, so those bumps shake us around and you can’t really see the top of the jump that well and that makes it hard to jump at the right angle. I was skiing in quite fast--a lot faster than you do for triple flips--and just slammed my skis sideways, trying to dig my edges in and scrape away those bumps. I caught my edge and went down hard and fast on my right shoulder.”

Doctors fixed the breaks with eight screws and a piece of bone from a cadaver, predicting an eight-week recuperation period. That meant Bergoust would miss the World Championships.

The very thought of that was enough to make him jump off a chimney. Instead, he went to the Olympic training center in Lake Placid, N.Y., rehabilitated the injury under the direction of the sports medicine staff there and was back on skis in four weeks. The next week, he was in Nagano.

“I wanted to compete in worlds so I went hard and was able to do just the right things with my arm, things I needed to do to compete,” he said. “And that was enough.

“I was so physically traumatized that I didn’t really feel the mental pressure of the World Championship competition. I had so much to overcome physically that I kind of ignored the results and everything and just tried to jump.”

So, Bergoust finished second on the very jumps he’ll be using in the Olympics. One broken collarbone, one silver medal. Should he break them both to go for the gold?

Are you kidding? What kind of crazy talk is that? That’s not what aerial skiing, or Bergoust, are about.

“We ski into the jump about 45 mph and the jump . . . sends us flipping, twisting 50 feet in the air. [The idea is to do] three flips and four twists and make it look easy and have a good time and land on our feet safely and smile about it.”

Of course. What could be simpler?