By Mary Clayton, Revelstoke Ski Club
Revelstoke Ski Club skiers competed in Alberta and BC last week, in some challenging conditions and some tough competition. The FIS athletes attended two GS races at Lake Louise and a slalom race in Norquay, while the younger racers were at a GS race in Sun Peaks, near Kamloops.
FIS coach Gregor Družina reported the conditions were icy and inconsistent with some fresh snow in the Alberta ski areas, and the team struggled to put two solid runs together. “Each of them had some solid runs, or attacked certain sections well, but we couldn’t seem to put two solid runs together.”
In Lake Louise Jamie Park skied very well in her first run and was in fourth place but crashed in the second run and did not finish. The following day she finished seventh overall and second among BC U21 girls.
Mitch Smith enjoyed some successful single runs and had his first GS finish of his FIS career. And
Emily Unterberger, with a 15th and 13th in GS, and a 13th in slalom, didn’t get the results she was hoping for this past weekend. Nonetheless, Emily has been invited to train with some of the best young women skiers in BC later this month in Apex.
“When you are pushing this hard, mistakes will happen at some point but this is how we need to approach skiing at this level,” Družina explained. “With more racing and good training, results will come. Our training in Revelstoke prior to these races was very good and the team was skiing very well. I’m very happy with their approach. We have a race series in Panorama in two weeks so we are looking forward to cleaning up a few things and maintaining our progression.”
The event at Sun Peaks for the club’s U16, U14 and U12 racers was their first GS race of the season. This was also a fairly tough field, with clubs from across the Okanagan as well as Prince George.
There were two races on Saturday that yielded a number of top-10 results for Revelstoke. Caroline Bouwmeester was sixth overall in U16 girls and Alexis Welch was seventh among U14 girls. John Sidjak was eight in U12 boys, and Sophia Humphreys came in eighth in one race and sixth in the other.
There were two races again on Sunday but the times for each run were combined for an overall result. The weather came in, making visibility tough and the conditions tricky. The skiers scoring top-15 results for Revelstoke were: Jenna Knight, 15th in U14 girls; Sophia Humphreys, seventh in U12 girls; Aleks Klassen, 11th in U14 boys; and John Sidjack 14th in U12 boys.
The club will be hosting a Nancy Greene zone final race on Jan 25, where you can see some future stars in the making. Thanks to Revelstoke Mountain Resort for giving us such a great home hill to train on, and to all our sponsors for helping to our young racers build on their dreams.