Just as I now have the pleasure of adding photos of his work to ice carving secrets, some years ago, I had the pleasure of teaming up with Ed Tillotson of Elegance in Ice at an Orlando competition. At that competition, we attempted to qualify for the 1998 Olympic event in Nagano, Japan. We didn’t do as well as we hoped we would, but we had a fun and exciting “learning” experience, so not all was lost.

    The Orlando event was comprised of at least two competitions (it might have been three), a single block, single carver competition and a multi-block two-man team competition. The winners of the team competition would earn a spot in the Nagano event. Ed and I were competing together in the team event and we were carving a piece that depicted an approximately life-sized Michael Jordan standing on top of a small globe with a lettered banner around it. I arrived in Florida a day or two early and we were able to get a little practice time in on the piece, but not as much as we would have liked because Ed had gotten some last minute sculpture orders.

    The team sculpture was Ed’s design and it was a challenging and somewhat precarious piece; just the sort of piece that does well in competition. He was responsible for the Michael Jordan portion of the sculpture, while I was working on the globe and base. Somewhere near the end of the competition we had pretty much gotten the sculpture together. Jordan was standing atop the world and we were working on adding the finishing details. However, we were a little rushed and uncertain; our lack of practice time probably had caught up to us. I was working on the globe down below and I was perhaps stressing the ice a little bit more than I ought to have been. Meanwhile, Ed was working on Michael above, adding finishing touches. Between us was the crucial weld that kept Michael on top of the world, which was apparently not as strong as we were counting on. Suddenly, that weld failed, and Michael began to topple. Fortunately, Ed was more concerned for my safety than Michael’s, so rather than make a desperate and likely futile attempt to keep Jordan from falling off, he pushed the ice away from me. As Jordan crashed to the ground, we saw our chances of going to Nagano smashed into a thousand pieces.

    In the end, Aaron Costic and Matt Williams earned the trip to Nagano. However, some of their thunder was stolen by a dramatic underwater scene that Mike Palumbo and Erik Cantine had created. Were it not for a few problems (small, but important pieces left unattached, for example) with Cantine and Palumbo’s piece, we might have seen a different outcome. But that is part of the nature of ice carving competitions: it’s all about what you’re left with at the end of the competition, not what could have been.

    On a final note, at this event Ed earned the dubious distinction of perhaps being the only ice carver to crash beyond repair three times at one event. In this case, the event I’m describing is comprised of more than one competition. And for non-carvers, a crash is just what it sounds like: your carving crashes to the ground along with your chances of winning. You see, in the single block, single carver competition that came before the team competition, Ed was carving another dynamic human figure piece. He had some problems with it and it collapsed beyond repair. Then, we had our crash during the team competition, which made two. But about the same time Jordan was crashing to the ground, a carver on another team had the misfortune of getting his die grinder stuck in his hand, so when he went to the hospital, his teammate was left to finish their piece alone. In a highly unusual move, the organizers and judges allowed Ed (they might even have suggested it) to join the solo carver’s team so that they could finish the piece. I believe this unusual situation occurred because the judges and organizers felt that the piece was not in the running for a top prize. As it turned out, they were right. The piece was apparently doomed before Ed got there, but for the third time, Ed had a role in a crashed sculpture.

    When we talked about that event recently, we had a good laugh about how things had turned out. I don’t remember that Ed was laughing much at the time of the event though. However, Ed, like all competition ice carvers, knows that if you don’t ever crash a sculpture, you’re not pushing hard enough. Competition carvings should be right on the edge and sometimes, you go over that edge. Ed just had a bad run of luck and his experiences would help him at future competitions. In Ed’s gallery, you can see a few examples of his competition sculptures since then, all of them intact and very impressive. Thanks for the pictures and the experiences Ed!