The 2006 Olympic halfpipe gold medalist and Vermont native is among several planning to compete in the three-stop AST Winter Dew Tour, which begins Dec. 18 at Colorado's Breckenridge, stops at Vermont's Mount Snow Jan. 8-11, and wraps up in Lake Tahoe, Calif., Feb. 19-22. Shaun White, Kelly Clark, Torah Bright, Danny Kass, and Kevin Pearce are also expected to compete. The snowboard and free-ski Tour has a $1.5 million purse.
"Kelly [Clark, an Olympic gold medal winner with Vermont connections] is definitely the one to look at this season," Teter said. "She's definitely pushing it and I'm going to be on her tail."
Teter is from Vermont's first family of snowboarding. She is being coached by big brother Abe, whom she remembers competing in the X Games at Mount Snow in 2000.
"I went there and watched Abe compete," she said. "I remember thinking it looked fun and that I should do that. That inspired me to do the same."
Since her Olympic win, Teter, 21, donates her competition earnings through her charity, Hannah's Gold, which raises money through maple syrup sales to children in Kenya. She and her family visited Kirindon, Kenya, recently where she saw the money being used for improvements to buildings and sanitation.
"This is a rest-of-my-career decision," she said. "I wanted to make some cashola for the children there. I needed a new kind of motivation to compete and this keeps me going while helping other people."
Cushioning the blow
Windham Mountain in upstate New York will become the first US ski resort to use a huge, inflatable compression bag to cushion the blows for skiers or boarders who botch their landings while performing halfpipe aerial maneuvers.
The heavy-gauge "Big Air Bag" measures 56 feet by 33 feet and reinflates every 10 seconds. Manufactured in The Netherlands and just now starting to catch on in Europe, Windham Mountain expects it will be a hit stateside, and signed on to be the product's distributor in America.
Windham intends to incorporate the Big Air Bag as a training tool for local freestyle teams as well as a fun perk for ticket-holders, but aspiring aerial acrobats will be required to view an educational demo video first.
