My son and I just returned from Crested Butte’s Prater Cup—a race like no other. It’s a J4 event, which means racers are 11 and 12 year olds. The race consists of three events—slalom, giant slalom, and super giant slalom. These races are held over four days, one of which is a training day for the super G.

That’s a lot to pack in to four days, especially when you’re talking about a field of 77 girls and 120 boys. But what makes the Prater Cup even more remarkable is what event organizers do to get the children to make friends outside their immediate ski clubs. Organizers break the children into groups with roughly equal mixture of males and females, but more importantly, ski clubs are broken apart. Only kids who belong to large clubs find a familiar face in their midst.

Here’s the cool part. Every group represents a nation that participates in alpine ski racing—Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg, Canada… It’s implicit that the kids represent the United States as they grow up here, but at the Prater Cup, they represent the Czech Republic, Poland, or Finland, or Sweden… The list goes on and on. These teams earn points not only by skiing well, but by being good stewards of the event, being grateful to gate keepers and lifties alike, showing team spirit, and demonstrating good sportsmanship. It’s brilliant in design, flawless in execution, and easily the best recipe I’ve seen for an event like this.

The Prater Cup is all about ski racing, of course, but it’s is not so myopic that it fails to embrace the larger picture of amateur sports. The Prater Cup is international in scope, even if its participants come from communities throughout the western U.S. That’s no small feat, nor is it an insignificant lesson for the young.