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Sam Penrod reports
PROVO — "Daydreams" shattered for a U.S. ice carving team just minutes before time was up Saturday morning, and Buddy Rasmussen and Gene Puryear wept.
They, along with teams from all over the world, for 17 hours had battled fatigue, intermittent losses of power and too little space to work — and then a steady hot sun — as competitors in the Olympic Arts Festival Ice Carving Competition in Provo Friday and Saturday.
"It just makes me sad because the judges will be saying, 'It could've been a nice piece if it didn't fall,' said Puryear, standing among the broken ice pieces that were arms on the "Daydreams" sculpture he and Rasmussen worked on all night.
Puryear and Rasmussen watched Vivat Hong Pong and Arthur Hong Pong of Thailand take the first-place medal for "Sound of Paradise." Michel Amann and Patrick Roger de Campagnolle from France took second-place honors for "Hymn of Aphrodite" and Kevin Gregory and Antonio Young for the United States took third for "Harmony."
Judges chose the winners at 10 a.m. as organizers were frantically looking for tarps to cover the work against the beaming sun.
Fascinated festival visitors crowded the sidewalks between the sculptures all through the night and marveled at the complexity of the designs in ice.
But by the awards ceremony at 4 p.m., little was left but broken blocks and bits of what were once elegant carvings.
For those who didn't beat the 54-degree temperature, organizers have put pictures of all of the finished creations on the city Web site www.provo.org.
The skilled carvers put scales on dragons, feathers on flying eagles and a shimmer on pairs of dancers as they whittled, shaved, and buffed 3000 pounds of ice each. Blowtorches, drills, wire mesh and whisk brooms were all part of the mix along with the ever-humming chain saws.
Onlookers found it unbelievable.
"I think it does (look hard)," said 8-year-old Carol Beck from Alpine, "terribly hard."
"My favorite is the eagle," said her brother Daniel. Daniel is 6.
Peter Beck, also 8, is doing a report on Michelangelo and thinks the ice sculptures are just as good as what he's seen in his research.
"Daydreams" was meant to be a 14-foot clock with arms coming from every side. A bobsled with young passengers slid directly through the middle.
"Captain Hook's Escape" was a tall sculpture with swirling waves and a snapping alligator trying to catch the legendary villain from "Peter Pan."
The Swedish team of Barbro Balm and Irja Ahs built their creations entirely inside the frozen blocks.
Kevin McDonald, one of the organizers of the competition, said when teams lose power because a circuit trips due to all of the electrical equipment running simultaneously, the amount of time lost is added back in for that particular team or group of teams.
He said working space is allotted as fairly as possible but sometimes the equipment takes up more space than expected or allowance for spectators can cut in.
"We do our best and everyone involved knows there are always some unexpected challenges," McDonald said.
E-mail: haddoc@desnews.com
