Denver Wins 19th NCAA Championship

Saturday, March 8, 2008 – RMISA Staff Report

Results Available On Schedule/Results Page

BOZEMAN, Mont. – In the teeter totter of being a skier down, Denver ended up on top, edging out Colorado for the school’s 19th skiing National Championship Saturday here at the Bridger Bowl.

Denver’s John Buchar won the men’s slalom for his second individual nation title while Colorado’s Lucie Zikova also won her second individual championship of weekend by winning the women’s slalom, as well.

RMISA schools have now captured 47 of the 53 team national championships in the sport’s history. Denver’s 19 is followed by 16 from Colorado and 10 from Utah. Individually, RMISA skiers finished with six wins in eight races and have now won 266 of 375 in NCAA history.

Denver had the skiers advantage last and used it to turn a 17.5-point deficit into a 30.5 win, as the Pioneers won with 649.5 points. Colorado finished second with 619 points, as both teams performed one skier short of the maximum 12 here this week. DU was short one woman in Nordic, CU one male in alpine. Even though CU’s cross country teams sizzled here and scored a meet-best 387 points, the cushion wasn’t enough to counter DU’s alpine effort. The 30.5 margin made it the closest NCAA championship since 1999, when CU defeated DU by 14 points.

Utah (585), defending champion Dartmouth (546) and Middlebury (529) rounded out the top five. There was some irony in that all three had full 12-skier squads, the only three in the 21-team field, but couldn’t topple the two finished ahead of all.

Denver becomes the second team in NCAA skiing history to win the title shorthanded; the Pioneers competed here with 11 skiers, the same number CU had in 2006 when it was the first team to win. That Buff team won by 98 points, and under this year’s scoring format, would have been a 75-point win. If the same scoring format was still in use this winter, DU won by the same 30.5.

Coming to an end was a streak of 13 straight years where the third day leader went on to win the title, but this was the first time that the leader didn’t have a full complement of skiers for the final two races. The last school to rally the final day was Vermont in 1994, which pulled off a 57-point swing in moving from third to first in Sugarloaf, Maine.

CU and DU shared the four other “sub-titles” this week, as Colorado led the meet in Nordic points (387) and in women’s scoring (358), while Denver had the edge in alpine points (359) and men’s scoring (353).

“I could not be more proud of this team,” alpine head coach Andy LeRoy said. “All of our athletes worked hard all year toward the goal of winning an NCAA Championship, and they all skied their best when it counted.”

Buchar’s sweep of the slalom and giant slalom marked just the second time that a DU skier had won both events at the NCAA Championships. Adam Cole (Park City, Utah) won both events last year, but missed this season after breaking his left leg during the first run of the year.

“The only thing that mattered for me was that we won as a team,” Buchar said. “That is even better than both of my wins. Everything was a team effort. We had a rough season with a lot of injuries and a lot of people didn’t think we had the best team.”

Zikova won her third career NCAA title, capturing the slalom for a second time.

Zikova’s win marked just the third time a Colorado woman won the slalom at the NCAA’s. Linda Wikstrom was the first to do it in 1999 before Zikova’s title as a sophomore in 2006. CU has one other national slalom crown, won by Lee Sevinson in 1982 in the last AIAW championship before the NCAA absorbed women’s sports.

Zikova concluded her career with a CU record seven top five, first-team All-America performances in eight races in the NCAA’s; the lone exception was a “did not finish” in the giant slalom as a freshman, otherwise she had three firsts, one second and three fourths. The three NCAA titles are tied for fourth-most by any athlete in any sport at Colorado.

The four CU individual champions crowned here also tied for the most in a single championship by the Buffaloes, previously done on three other occasions, in 1960, 1963 and 2006.

It was CU’s 78th overall NCAA individual ski title, as the Buffs extended their lead over second place Denver (71) with four wins here to the Pioneer's two, and was also the 21st win by a Buff skier this season, which tied the most in single year dating to 1983. The 2006 Buffaloes also had 21 individual winners over the course of the season.

Zikova also wrapped up her four years at Colorado as the second winningest all-time individual with 16 career wins, trailing only Grevsgaard, who passed her this winter by winning 11 of 12 races.