Red Bull has picked St. Paul as the venue for some unusual extreme sports recently: mountain bikers racing through the skyway system. Homemade flying machines crashing into the Mississippi River. Skateboarders grinding on a concrete skateboard park built on top of a river barge.
Now, the Austrian-based energy drink company is proposing to send racers plunging down the steps of the Cathedral of St. Paul and Cathedral Hill on a refrigerated ice chute.
The event is called the Red Bull Crashed Ice World Championships, an ice cross downhill race, scheduled to hit St. Paul Jan. 12-14.
The competition will send racers down a 1,330-foot ice track, starting at a three-story tall platform to be built just north of the cathedral.
The racers – wearing ice hockey skates, helmets and pads – will wind around the cathedral, zoom down the front steps, plunge down the hill in front of the church, run along Old Kellogg Boulevard and end up between College Avenue and Interstate 35E. They’ll encounter bumps, jumps, banked corners and an ice wall along the way, dropping about 131 vertical feet from start to finish.
The competition will feature heats of four racers going at the same time, hitting speeds of up to 40 miles per hour. Spills are not uncommon.
“It’s the fastest sport on skates,” said Team U.S.A. coach Charlie Wasley at a news conference Monday at the Xcel Energy Center, which featured a dripping lectern carved out of ice.
A total of 100 competitors from the U.S. and about another 100 international competitors are expected to participate, Wasley said.
He said he expects about 75,000 people to come out to watch over the three days of competition.
When Red Bull sponsored a homemade flying machine competition called Flugtag last summer at Harriet Island, it drew an estimated 90,000 spectators. The event is also a few weeks before St. Paul’s other big winter event, Winter Carnival, which runs Jan. 26-Feb. 5.
The Crashed Ice event will result in some road closures on Dayton Avenue and John Ireland Boulevard. But Red Bull will provide parking and shuttle services for people attending Mass at the cathedral during the event.
Wasley, a former University of Minnesota hockey player, said the sport of ice cross downhill originated in Europe when an Austrian daredevil wondered if it would be possible to go down a bobsled run on skates.
Red Bull began sponsoring ice cross downhill events in 2001 and put on events in Duluth in 2003 and 2004. The first world championships were held in 2010.
To recruit U.S. competitors, Red Bull is sponsoring qualifying tryouts at ice arenas around the country in December, including one Dec. 12 at the AMSOIL Arena in Duluth and another Dec. 13 at the Xcel Energy Center.
Wasley said 100 to 200 skaters will get to try out at each location by skating through obstacle courses. You have to be at least 16 to try out. Both men and women are invited, but everyone will race in a single open division. Registration information can be found at redbullcrashedice.com.
After the St. Paul competition in January, the top three Americans and one reserve will be chosen to continue to compete in the World Championship series with stops in the Netherlands, Sweden and Canada.
Wasley said the best athletes in the new sport tend to have both hockey and skiing experience, because they must be able to skate and successfully land jumps going downhill.
St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman may be finding that out himself. Coleman said that when Red Bull put on the Red Bull SkyRide, a mountain bike race through the skyways of downtown St. Paul, he rode the course before the race.
He said Monday that he also will sample the Crashed Ice course.
Richard Chin can be reached at 651-228-5560.
Copyright 2011 Pioneer Press.