Snow more excuses for financial parsimony
February 22, the 13th day of competition for New Zealand at the Winter Olympics. Unlucky 13? Not for New Zealand, whose winter sports community should be in a state of near delirium courtesy of the country’s most celebrated 16-yearolds, Zoi Sadowski-Synnott and Nico Porteous. Doubt that and you’re wrong.
It won’t last but the administrators say this is a case of striking while the iron in the snow is hot. The sports bosses can now look at the future with vastly different minds from a fortnight ago.
Sadowski-Synnott and Porteous are also bright young people who, along with their team-mates and friends back home, view the world through a slightly different prism from most of us. The language, for a start. “Sick” and “insane” are words more commonly used in different situations, with different meanings, than in the form of celebrating achievements in the snow.
Never heard of a switch backside
900 either I’ll wager. Or a cork, at least in this context. (A switch is when a snowboarder rides in the opposite of their natural stance, with the ‘wrong’ foot at the front of the stance. And to put you out of your misery, a cork is an off-axis rotation. If a rider inverts twice, the trick becomes a double cork and so on. Clear?)
It’s a different world, for sure, but one which calls for athletes to possess serious courage, self belief and skill. Imagine throwing yourself metres in the air, spinning all the while and landing safely. There’s a significant risk of injury, all the time. The luckless Byron Wells discovered that on Thursday, injuring himself in training preparing for the halfpipe final. That’s two consecutive Olympics he’s been counted out at the last minute by misfortune. But there’s a pragmatism in these athletes too.
Beau-James Wells, who finished fourth in the halfpipe, was asked whether he was thinking of his brother as he prepared for his first run in the final. “That’s just the sport,” Beau-James said. “Any run you could be in hospital.”
And remember his other, more celebrated older brother Jossi missed the Olympics due to a torn patella tendon injury in the middle of last year. He’d hoped to have recovered, aiming to better his fourth placing in Sochi four years ago. It was not to be.
No question there’s a camaraderie between this young group of athletes. Sadowski-Synnott is off to the United States shortly for competition before returning to the books at Mt Aspiring College in Wanaka. The word is she is academically smart and a clever, focused teenager.
Now consider all the 12 to 14-yearolds who have seen her and Porteous’ achievements, and dared to dream. They have done what so many sports crave; someone to push open the door for others to see the possibilities. Think Eliza McCartney in the pole vault, and what her bronze at the Rio Olympics did for that discipline.
Just give us one athlete, many lower profile sports must think. Snow sports have had two in a couple of hours, and at the perfect, impressionable age too.
Boom years may lie ahead for winter sports in New Zealand, if the administrators play it smart.
The snow sports community has been languishing for more than two decades since Annelise Coberger’s slalom silver in 1992.
Administrators and High Performance Sport both have parts to play. They need the financial wherewithal. There’s no excuse for not ensuring a rosy future.
Zoi SadowskiSynnott