The oldest skier in town... Hilda still hits slopes at 100!
MOST people lucky enough to reach the age of 100 start to slow down a bit.
But centenarian Hilda Jamieson is still hitting the slopes as the world’s oldest female skier.
The great-grandmother of 19 suffers from macular degeneration and is registered blind, but refuses to give up the sport she loves. She still visits the French Alps every year, putting skiers decades younger to shame.
Her grandson Gavin Anderson, 49, said: ‘Now she has turned 100, she said she wasn’t going abroad skiing this year – but she changed her mind.
‘My grandmother loves to do it, I think at this point she is more agile on a pair of skis than she is on the land.
‘To have no vision, to be 100 years old and to be able to do that is amazing.’
Mrs Jamieson said: ‘I love to ski, I’m not bad – my daughter told me I was better this year than five years ago. I’m not giving up.’
She began skiing in her twenties, before the Second World War. At that time, her skis were just two planks of wood, which her local shoe shop in Broughty Ferry, near Dundee, helped her line with steel. She practised on the Sidlaw Hills in Angus. Some of her gear was made from sealskin and webbing from a jute mill where her husband David worked.
Mr Jamieson later set up Glenshee Chairlift Company in the 1960s and helped make the Aberdeenshire resort a successful tourist centre.
Mr and Mrs Jamieson’s daughters, Valery, Sheila and Helen, all skied for Scotland. Helen was in the GB team at the 1968 Grenoble Winter Olympics.
Mr Jamieson died in 2002 but his widow, who turns 101 in August, still lives independently in Newtyle, Angus, and has just returned from her latest skiing trip to France. Her daughters act as guides for their mother, who competed in ski master races well into her seventies.
Kate Hunter, director of Glenshee Ski Centre, said: ‘Hilda is amazing and iconic – I hope I’ll be skiing at 100.’
Mrs Jamieson is believed to be one of the world’s oldest skiers, along with Charles Elliott, also 100, of Colorado.