WARMING UP FOR WINTER

Maybe Jean-Claude Killy started it all. His racing style featured edge-of-control turns followed by catlike recoveries, and the Killy era was followed by a generation of hot-doggers bouncing down the slopes. But that was years ago and the sport has grown up. Now it is called freestyle, if you please, and the gentleman flying across the summer sky at right is Darryl Ferges, an aerial specialist. Ferges, his brother Terry and other professionals are teaching summer school at South Lake Tahoe, an open-air classroom where students come down from their wintertime hillsides to learn the niceties of moguling, ballet and stunt skiing, and where an instructor will always tell his pupils to go jump in the lake. Similar training camps are springing up around the country to serve the boom in freestyling, and as the action on the following pages shows, the Class of 75 will be ready to face the future in its proper role: out in the cold

Suited up for summer freestyling in shorts, boots and skis, Darryl Ferges completes a back layout off the Lake Tahoe trampoline, while students (inset) show their stuff in workouts on the 30-foot ski jump

Tightening up his Moebius Flip—a front somersault with a full twist—instructor Terry Ferges bounces heels over head off the trampoline, while students in background do homework on the moving ski deck.

Teaching a trick called the T-drag, Bill O'Leary rides deck at 5 mph with Patty Weithington, then swings into a splashier stunt, a flying spread eagle from the 30-foot jump to a less-than-snowy splashdown.

Clearing the lip of the ski jump, Bill O'Leary performs a daffy over the lake. Ex-world champ Suzy Chaffee (inset) takes a run and a quick bounce to do a pike spread high above the mini-trampoline

SEVEN PHOTOS

JOHN G. ZIMMERMAN