Freestyle Skiing

The announcement in the Whistler, B.C., newspaper declared Julia Murray had been born just shy of midnight on Dec. 23, 1988, weighing a "hefty" 8 pounds 11 ounces.

The author - who described himself as a "most loathful of creatures, a slobbering mushball ... a new father!" - was Crazy Canuck Dave Murray, whose kamikaze approach to downhill ski racing was as bold as the capital letters and exclamation marks he used to introduce his "Jules."

Tonight, she carries the Olympic torch as it arrives at her hometown of Whistler, where she became her parents' "new little master" 21 years ago. She will hand the torch to her late father's former teammate, Steve Podborski, and ride a snowmobile down a run where, during the 1970s and 1980s, a crew of legendary young men raced in a style Murray once called "bad-ass crazy."

On Feb. 23, if doctors give her the green light regarding her injured knee, she will race the Olympics in a brand new sport, ski cross, three decades after her alpine racer father finished 10th at the Olympics in Lake Placid.

"I think," she said recently, "he would be proud."

It's an almost perfect story, one that first popped into her mind in Grade 5, when rumours began swirling that Whistler might one day play host to the Games. She and her mother, Stephanie Sloan, did the math. She would be 21 in 2010, a good age for an Olympic debut. The Olympic course would most likely be a long run that had been named after her father, Dave Murray Downhill, which had been used as World Cup Downhill and super G course.

"For the longest time, it was, wouldn't it be cool if she was an alpine racer skiing down a run named after her dad?" her mother said.

Julia Murray was 22 months old when her father died from skin cancer at age 37. But her father's presence never seemed far off in Whistler, where the ski school he founded two years before his death continued to thrive, and ski days always finished with a race down the same run.

"I always enjoyed asking her, which run do you want to ski down today? Just to hear her say, ‘Dave Murray Downhill!'." Sloan said.

She began racing competitively at age 8. People told stories of the laid-back, guitar-playing peacemaker who, along with Podborski, Ken Read, Jim Hunter and Dave Irwin attacked courses to bring Canada more than 100 top-10 finishes. Murray never topped the podium, but left other marks.

After World Cup races in Lake Louise, he skied down the run, thanking every course maker and shaking their hands.

As 2010 drew closer, however, her father's footsteps no longer seemed a perfect fit. "With ski racing, alpine, I never really believed I could make it to the Olympics," she said. "I just didn't feel the love for that any more."

She made the new Canadian ski-cross team in December of 2007, after proving herself in three selection camps. The daredevil was in her genes, and ski cross - in which four racers battle over jumps, rollers, and turns - appealed to Murray, who took up motocross racing this summer.

The sport has its roots in alpine, but is lumped under freestyle skiing - a sport once dominated by Murray's mother. Sloan drove herself to competitions around Europe, becoming a three-time world champion during the early 1970s and early 1980s, when freestyle skiing wasn't an Olympic sport. "She was in a developing sport, trying to get recognition, kind of like us," Murray said.

She was speeding through a training run last month when she crashed. It left her with a piece of cartilage in her knee, the meniscus, folded over. The discs of connective tissue between the bones of the knees act as shock absorbers to cushion the lower part of the leg.

She had her second surgery this week and on Feb. 18 doctors will tell her whether she can compete.

If she does, she won't be an alpine racer. The ski-cross course is in Cypress Mountain on Vancouver's north shore, instead of Whistler (the main Olympic course for men's alpine is on Dave Murray Downhill, but the women race on Franz' Run).

But perhaps this new hybrid sport is the best fit of all.

In the final last line of the birth announcement, Dave Murray mused about his daughter's future. "The only question now," he wrote, "is will she be a freestyle skier or a downhill racer?"

Asked that question recently, Murray answered with a grin: "in between."

With reports from Justine Hunter and James Christie