Help with skiing photos at night

I am working on a project with a friend of mine at the hill I am working at. We are trying to set up some night shots in the park to use. He used a Canon 20D and a Canon 24-70mm 2.8 lens and a Canon 580ex flash.

Right now, the photos come out like this
http://www.loopd.com/RFS/57/f6019dcd...e0c06f5f9l.jpg
http://www.loopd.com/RFS/57/a87fd4a8...58ea030bal.jpg
http://www.loopd.com/RFS/57/06a50700...f9f1bcbcel.jpg

What we tried was the rapid shot mode on the camera, but we could not get the flash to sync. I think we were about one ok shot out of every 10.

Is there a mode on the flash to set it up to rapid shoot with the camera, or should we look into getting a spotlight and just light up the area?

Any other tips would be appreciated as well because I am a photo jong. I also have photoshop if anyone can recommend any specific effects to play around with. Thanks in advance.

Tip 1: Don't use rapid shot mode on the camera. Take one shot, and get the timing right.

Tip 2: On-camera flash sucks. Do whatever you can to get the flash off the camera (even if it means putting the camera on a tripod, using a long exposure, and firing the flash by hand from 5 feet away). Ideally, you'd want a few strobes and PocketWizards to fire them; a handful of manually-controllable flashes (e.g. Vivitar 285HV, or Canon 580EX if you want to spend more money) with PocketWizards will also work fine.

anotherVTskibum is right. Get that thing off camera. To get my flash off camera, I use these...
http://www.gadgetinfinity.com/image.php?productid=16766
From here: http://www.gadgetinfinity.com/produc...66&cat=0&page=

A cheap alternative to Pocket Wizards mentioned above.

Strobist is an awesome off camera flash information resource. Even better are all the user photos that give details on how it was shot.

Check it out http://strobist.blogspot.com/

Cool, thanks for the help.