George Merkert

"Daddy"

52

Inline Downhill

Los Angeles, California

In the late '90's I heard about a summer ski race training program run by Scott Peer and Willie DeLorie called Skates & Gates. It was a slalom racing program for which you used inline skates instead of skis. Lots of turns. Low speeds. Then some lugers told us about Glendora Mountain Road in the San Bernardino Mountains. GMR is a thrill lover's paradise. Speeds are fast and turns are challenging. In 2000 Scott Peer organized the US Inline Downhill team and four of us went to Austria for the Inline Downhill World Championships. I didn't do well there-which pissed me off-so I practiced a lot and became the US National Champion for the next two years.

Since 1997

all sorts of skiing--racing, back country, bumps, cruising corduroy

My wife Lila and I have a sweet 6-year-old daughter named Molly Rose

Muhammad Ali is my hero. I cried when he lit the torch at the Olympic Summer Games in Atlanta. My dad has had an incredible influence on me. He'd never see any similarities between himself and Muhammad Ali but they're a lot alike.

Making more motion pictures, experimenting with new skate gear, skiing in the Himalayas,n/a

Train 'til you bleed. "You must repeat a movement pattern a thousand times correctly

n/a

I'm number six in the world now. I just lost the US National Championship title after holding it for two years, darn it. I'll have it back. Wait and see if I don't!

The most frightening moment I've ever had was while rock climbing. When I was about 20 my brother and I went climbing near Deckers, Colorado. There was a permanent piton (steel pin used to anchor climbing ropes to rock) placed at the top of a cliff that was almost exactly 75 feet high. We hiked up the backside of the cliff, which was an easy, non-technical clamber, to a place where the cliff had a hole in it wide enough to crawl through. I wormed my way through the hole in the cliff face and stood up on the six-inch wide ledge there. I threaded the climbing rope into the carabiner that was clipped into my climbing harness. Then I clipped into the ring on top of a permanent piton that someone had hammered into a crack in the rock at my feet. Neither my brother nor I knew who had placed that piton. It may have been there for 10 months or 10 years. It was a little rusty looking actually. I faced the rock wall and steadied myself by grasping a couple small finger holds on the rock wall above me. Then, I leaned back away from the wall and prepared to jump out into space to start my rappel. From the side my body separating from the wall probably looked a lot like a pocketknife blade hinging out away from its case. As soon as my weight hit the piton it shot out of the crack in the rock like a bullet and whizzed past my ear. All of a sudden instead of being securely anchored to the wall by the "permanent" piton I was hanging in space over a 75 feet drop. Only because the tips of the middle and ring finger on my right hand were jammed into a tiny cleft in the rock did I not immediately fall to my death. I hadn't jumped yet so my feet were still planted on the ledge. The rest of my body, though, hovered over the chasm. My brother was four feet away on the other side of the hole in the cliff. We locked eyes. He couldn't reach me! His face went white. My entire body quivered with fear. Thank god for fear! It pumped so much adrenaline into those tiny muscles between the first knuckles and the tips of my two fingers that, somehow, they were able to pull the other 180 pounds of me back up onto the ledge-like a knife blade folding back into its case. I kneeled and vomited down the cliff. I kneeled there-trembling-for 10 minutes before I had enough strength to crawl back through the hole in the cliff to safety.