In recent races Seattle native Jill Kintner’s name has shown up on the women’s downhill roster as well as her signature event, the dual slalom.

We’ve suggested this means Jill may be looking for bigger vistas. Jill herself won’t confirm or deny the extent of her downhill ambitions, although in a new blog post she suggests she’s seriously pursuing DH.

And there it was again, at the Sea Otter Classic. After wearing out the field in the dual slalom and taking home the gold, Jill threw in her lot with the downhillers the following day.

The result was quite respectable: Sixth, about 5 seconds off the smoking hot pace of Melissa Buhl. Interestingly, Buhly had an off day in the dual slalom, at fourth, after narrowly beating Jill in last year’s Sea Otter slalom matchup.

More significant from our perspective was the fact that Jill finished ahead of some real high rollers, including Fionn Griffiths, Kathy Pruitt and Katie Holden. And she was just a hair off the paces of Sabrina Jonnier and the ageless wonder, Leigh Donovan.

These results translate simply into one factor: Experience. Jill has been honing her downhill skills under the tutelage of Aussie boyfriend Bryn Atkinson, a world class downhiller himself. If she can get more downhill racing under her belt, there’s no reason she can’t contend for World Cup titles.

Why bother with downhill at all, when you’re so good at dual slalom? Any champion wants to push her envelope and keep testing herself. Having medaled in the Olympics in BMX, Jill is pretty much the gold standard in dual slalom. And in the competitive arena, downhill racing is still the ultimate challenge. The downhillers get all the glory — disproportionately so, perhaps, but deserved as well.

The only question is whether downhill could hurt Jill’s campaign for the world title in dual slalom this year. You don’t find someone at No. 1 in both disciplines at the same time, for a variety of reasons starting with, as Jill acknowledged to Brett Tippie (scroll down for video interview), being too whupped winning the slalom to face a second day of racing.

But the one quality you have to love with Jill is she really believes anything is possible. You can see the steely determination when she rides — it translates from her body language right through the goggles and jump suit. And any interview I’ve seen with her shows an uncommon resolve to follow through on her goals.

Kintner may at this point be undecided about pursuing downhill. It’s still early in the season. But we’d sure love to see her rock in the Big Dance!

Full race results.

Mountain Bike Action recap.

When we say “crushed,” we mean smoked. Pummeled. Bashed. Destroyed. Her final margin: A whopping 3.91 seconds over Emmeline Ragot of France.

Kintner had put in some serious practice runs on the scary-fast course earlier in the week, and it showed. At a critical tabletop right before the “tunnel of love” she cleared both sides where other competitors chose to stay grounded. Jill also put time on her foes with fierce pedal wheelies over stutter bumps in the mid-section.

Finally, the girl is just plain smooth. It’s a joy to watch her meld grace and precision with such power into a ballet on wheels that looks as good as it clocks. By the time the final switchbacks came into play, Kintner was so far ahead on all her heats that she pretty much coasted home.

The only caveat on Kintner’s performance was a surprisingly thin field. Long-retired Leigh Donovan showed up for a bronze but was not a factor head-to-head against Jill. Kintner’s arch rival Melissa Buhl might have given her a run for her money had she competed, but having watched Kintner progress this season and compared the two on courses like Whistler’s, we doubt it would have changed the outcome. (Buhl competed in last Sunday’s Garbanzo Downhill but finished last and may have injured herself. Buhly finished 4th in last Saturday’s dual slalom, which Jill also won.)

On her blog Jill tends to dwell more on the misses than the hits, and she’s too modest to crow after victory, so it’s up to us fans to give her a pat on the back for a “Double” to remember.

So completely did Kintner dominate the competition that we at BikeIntelligencer are left to wonder if she’s angling toward the downhill racing scene. Coming from a BMX background, Jill has never been one for the rad of downhill racing. But her skillz keep amping up, especially over the past couple of months, and she showed in yesterday’s competition that she’s not shy about pinning it on the big jumps and “pipeline” berms.

Whistler’s course is less a “big slalom” than a “mini-downhill.” We’ll be watching with interest to see if Jill decides to try her luck with the Big Dance. (Note: Jill tweeted she also got a 2nd in the Air DH competition at Crankworx — another indication?)

On the men’s side, Brian Lopes redeemed last year’s crash-out (he still bronzed) with a decisive win over top qualifier Jared Rando. Lopes “grew” with each advance — he actually lost one of his early runs — and by the end of the day was just hammering the berms while seeming to get stronger in the pedal sections. He complained afterward about being gassed, but this guy is ageless, which is just one reason I wear his shin guards and ride his bike (an Ibis Mojo, although mine’s set up stupid light for XC).

The one disappointment for the GS was a light turnout. Crankworx has set up huge video screens at mid-course and down below, but there were no spectators lining the tapes whatsoever, and the crowd in the village was just a couple or three hundred folks. And pretty quiet ones at that. It was chilly all day even though the sun broke out, and while the parking lots filled to capacity, this isn’t yet the crush of Crankworx past. Lift lines are modest at best, and a lot of prospective race watchers were still on the mountain, riding to the end of light. The word at Crankworx is that the best time to hit the lifts is when there’s racing below. Apparently word has gotten too far out, though, which is a shame. You can ride any time at Whistler. You can see racing like this only once. Let’s hope folks put away the bikes for this afternoon’s Monster Energy Slopestyle event. With the sun out, the jumps have dried out and are perfectly groomed for a “monster” competition. Full report tomorrow.

More on the Crankworx site as well, including results.

Kintner is back on the mountain bike for 2009 and was on the slate for the Sea Otter Classic this weekend in Monterey. Curious how her comeback from ACL reconstruction and a separate meniscus scope was doing, and wanting to root her on, I went out to the dual slalom competition on Saturday.

Dual slalom is for my money the best of all cycling competition to watch. Road and cross-country races stretch out too far and too long. Downhill races run against the clock, an unflinching but faceless foe. Dual slalom offers a brutally fast and quick snaky course full of berms, twists and turns, jumps and pedaling. And it pits riders mano-a-mano, or in this case, femi-a-femi.

Sea Otter’s layout is compact and accessible. During the early afternoon the dual slalom track was empty, so I took a couple test runs down it. You think, as an experienced cyclist, you can at least ride pretty much everything the pros can ride, just not as well. Then you go out on the real ticket and find how woefully overmatched you really are.

The course was not just steep and lumpy, with off-camber troughs, wicked hairpins and thumping rollers, it was fast deteriorating in the baking sun. Normally the concern at Sea Otter is soaking rains that turn the course into a water slide. This time around the temps were into the 80s, it hadn’t rained a drop and the course was caked like a dry lake bed. It was a challenge just to stay upright through the top sections. To think about pedaling a tall gear as fast as one is capable through this stuff boggles the imagination.

The slightest miscue on the upper run was putting the world’s best riders into the dirt like school kids. Braking on the sketchy surface was highly problematic. If you misjudged a jump or got too far into the middle of the track, you were out of luck for any correctional maneuvers. As you gained speed down the turns, you had to hit the berms really high or you stood to wash out in the loose powder in the mid-section. The slightest bobble could cost you the race. After dozens of runs, no rider who had emerged from the zigzags behind his or her rival had managed to make up the difference in the downhill section, which featured two tabletops but was far too short to bridge a gap.

The dry conditions help explain why champions like Eric Carter, Nathan Rennie and Cedric Gracia bit the big one, handing their runs to lesser rivals.

The only rider who really mastered the course was Sam Hill, lunging into and ripping the corners as only a pro on top of their game can do. Even then, it was only on the final couple of runs where Hill clearly had things in command. He got better with each run, which is another great thing about the slalom. If you stick around long enough, you can grow into the course like a virtuoso. By the finals he was hitting the turns in a rooster tail of dust like a hydroplane spouting water on Lake Washington.

For most of the race, Kintner looked to be Hill’s counterpart on the female side. Clear through to the finals, her only encounter with dirt was to watch the competition go down. As foe after foe overreached, trying to make up lost ground, they spun out or took a flyer or just plain crashed. More often than not Jill was just coasting by the time she reached the finish line. It was looking easy. Maybe too easy.

On the other draw, 2008 national downhill and dual slalom champion Melissa Buhl was similarly cleaning up. But unlike Jill, Buhl was being pushed. It was coming down to a question whether Buhl would have the gas to motor in the final against a daisy-fresh Kintner.

Then things fell apart.

On the first run, Kintner had trouble on the top washboard, looking hesitant and unsure through the first berm. She re-righted and managed to keep it a race, but not in time to close the gap Buhl managed to open up at the top.

It was never clear exactly what happened, whether a mechanical, or slipped pedal, or just bad luck threw her off (she wasn’t quoted on anything specific in post-race interviews). But one thing undoubtedly contributed: Not having been pressed all day, she may have been playing it too cautious, counting as much on something going wrong for Buhl as seizing the opportunity to put down the hammer from the start.

I say this because the second run was nearly a reversal of the first. From the outset Kintner was the stronger rider, leading through all the turns and smoking Buhl across the tabletops. In her defense, Buhl may have been playing it safe this time, figuring all she had to do was stay upright and her first run would carry the day (one report also mentioned a mech up high for Buhl). The way slalom scoring works is that you have to make up the difference of the first run in the second. It doesn’t matter if you win the second, you have to do so by that crucial time differential.

And this time, Kintner fell short. An otherwise perfect day was ruined by a bumpy penultimate run.

Still, there’s no doubt that Kintner is back, and 2009 looks to be a great season. An early season disappointment might be just the motivation Jill needs to put her over the top through the rest of the year. Hopefully there will be more epic matchups with Buhl to come.

Some great video from PinkBike.