The Ski and Snowboard team had their second league race this past Saturday and had another strong showing. The skiers took the top four spots (Rosie, Rebecca, Catarina, Lauren) and the snowboarders took the top two spots (Selina and Cici, who were also the only two female snowboarders but we’ll take it!).
The team has grown from six girls in our first year to 29 registered this year and 20 who competed at this race! We are on the hill again this coming Saturday if anyone happens to be on Blackcomb.
Olivia, Gr. 8, won the IFSA North American Freeski Championships in the 12-14 age category. The championships were held at the Grand Targhee Ski Resort in Alta, Wyoming the weekend of April 11th. Check out Olivia’s interview in Whistler’s Pique Magazine:
Free and easy Whistler Freeride Club member Olivia (centre) topped the podium at the IFSA North American Junior Freeski Championships at Grand Targhee Resort in Wyoming over the weekend.
by Dan Falloon, Pique Magazine, April 16, 2015
Repost from Pique Magazine. Read the full article here.
Whistler Freeride Club coach Derek Foose said a three-point lead in freeskiing is nearly insurmountable, barring a catastrophe from the leader.
Bot no one told Olivia that.
In a sport where top competitors are separated by hundredths of a point, Vancouver-based freeskier Olivia was seeking to overcome a 2.5-point gap at the IFSA North American Junior Freeski Championships at Grand Targhee Resort in Wyoming over the weekend. She scored a 63.73 in total after a 29.93 during a tentative first run before unleashing and scoring a 33.80 — the highest of any competitor in the 12 to 14-year-old women’s category in either run.
In her initial run, she recalled taking a safer line and slower approach that left her a little bit back of the leader.
“Usually, in qualifiers, I’m so nervous,” she said. “As soon as I start skiing, it’s so much better, and then usually before finals, I’m no longer nervous. In finals, I just do it or I don’t.
“Like it said on my jerseys, I do or do not, there is no try,” she explained of her Yoda-inspired threads.
Olivia described her final run as a fast one, where she quickly took on a pair of drops, did a large turn to a rocky moguls section, skied into a gully, around a clump of trees and took on one more drop — incorporating a hop for added style — to finish off with a little kicker.
Foose explained the championships take only the top 10 per cent of riders on the tour, so there’s little room for error if one hopes to come out on top.
“She didn’t put down a classic Olivia run in qualifiers,” he said. “She skied slowly and a bit tentatively and when she was finished, she was shaking her head like ‘That’s not what I wanted to do at all.’
“In finals, she dusted everybody. She put down her best run of the season, for sure, and probably one of the top runs I’ve ever seen in the 12-14 girls’ field.”
Olivia described herself as inherently competitive and feels it will serve her well in the coming seasons as she looks to push the limits and become the best skier she can be. That competitiveness is sometimes overruled by fear, which is the biggest roadblock she’ll work through in 2015-16.
“I want to break through my mind that ‘I can’t do this’ because I can, but I don’t think I can at the moment,” she said. “When I’m doing it, I’m ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, what am I doing?’ and I can do it if I try, but sometimes I just get a bit scared because I guess I’m not as ballsy as some of the boys are. But apparently I’m just as good a skier.
“If I could break through that mindset of ‘Oh, I can’t do this drop, it’s too big, I can’t see the landing that well’ — if I could just push past that, I could do a lot better.”
