Park City

Park City sets new record in 7th annual Shotski

KPCW | By Leslie Thatcher

Published October 23, 2023 at 7:46 AM MDT

Moments after shooting the shot of whiskey or apple cider on Saturday, participants raise the record shot ski in celebration.

In the ongoing shot ski competition with a Colorado ski resort, Park City once again broke a new world record for participants taking a shot all at once.

Nearly 1,700 rubber shot glass holders were glued onto more than 500 pairs of skis that had been bolted together to pull off the annual Shot Ski competition – a friendly rivalry between Park City and Breckenridge.

This was the 7^th year the charity event was held on Park City’s Main St. – put on by the members of the Sunrise Rotary Club.

The Shot Ski world record was broken as 1,363 participants lined up and down Main St., lifted the horse-shoed single shot ski and counting down from five, swigged a shot of High West whiskey or apple cider.

What had taken months to organize was over in two seconds.

In a matter of seconds, the work of several months is done.

“And we're not talking about a few hours, we're talking about hundreds of hours that people work to pull this together,” Whiting said.

That’s Jeff Whiting, president of the Sunrise Rotary Club. More than 150 volunteers were on Main St. Saturday morning about 8 bolting 535 skis together to form a single shot ski. But organizer Mike Luers says the real work has been taking place behind the scenes for months.

But the real work is really in the prep,” Luers said. “You know, we hold multiple evening work days for the Rotary Club – you know, put the bolts in the skis. As you know, the VIP skis are sold, so we have to replace those every year. This year, we had to prepare 100 skis for the VIP. So, we had to collect 100 skis, you got to drill them, you got to wrap them put the bolts in them. So that takes, like Jeff said, days of work.”

As the event concluded, more volunteers began breaking down the skis and loading them into a truck and taken to a warehouse, where they’ll be stored until next year.

The clean up crew begins picking up the unbolted skis and storing them until next year.

All of their hard work goes directly to the community. Ticket sales and sponsorships raised $50,000 this year for the rotary club and all of that money, Whiting says will be granted to area nonprofits.

“We have about 32 nonprofits that we support during the year. All of those are local. And we're happy to give that out just before the June timeframe, and it gets distributed to all these different nonprofits. They put in a grant and then we have a team that goes through and selects the nonprofits.”

No doubt Breckenridge will be back at it in December when the ski town once again attempts to reclaim the title for the world’s longest shot ski. Last year, Breckenridge set the record for 1,350 shots at a single time. Park City on Saturday, upped that by 13.