Cool Runnings gets a remix as DJ skis for Jamaica at Olympics

Uk-born enthusiast plots his way to Beijing just six years after first sampling thrill of winter sport

WHILE Jamaica is renowned for its track and field prowess at the Olympics, when it comes to the winter event the tropical island rarely makes waves.

Now, a British-jamaican skier hopes to change that, having qualified for Beijing despite at one point last year ranking outside the top 3,000 in the world.

Benjamin Alexander, who grew up in Wellingborough, Northants, had a career in international finance in Hong Kong and then as a DJ before taking up skiing six years ago.

He has among his mentors Dudley “Tal” Stokes, a member of the 1988 Jamaican bobsleigh team, immortalised in the film Cool Runnings.

In October last year, Alexander said he was ranked just 3,748th in the world at giant slalom, his chosen event.

However, Winter Olympics qualifying guidelines that help countries without a history of success enter athletes have allowed Alexander, who has a Jamaican father, to “nerd out” over the International Ski Federations’ database and target races to compete in.

On Wednesday he secured qualification for Beijing 2022 by coming seventh in the Cape Verde National Ski Championships in Liechtenstein.

Alexander told Olympics.com that he had spent “30-40 hours” plotting the races he needed to take part in and the times he needed to achieve to qualify.

“I’ve totally nerded out on that database and I have my own version of it, my own spreadsheet, which has all of the links to all of the information about the race and the historical races, so at any moment, if I decide to change my plan, I can just go into my own database and figure it out,” he said.

Jamaica’s first Alpine skier at the Winter Olympics only sampled the sport for the first time in 2016, spending most of that time falling over. Within two years, however, he wanted to become a professional skier.

The East Midlands native knew he never had any hope of competing for Team GB, but after watching the 2018 Olympics he realised that there might be a chance of donning the black, green and gold of Jamaica.

In 2019, he spent a day working with a former US Olympic skier, Gordon Gray, who said that his technique was “absolutely atrocious”.

However, Gray also told Alexander: “You’re fearless, the fact that you’re fearless means you have more than half the battle won.”

As recently as March, he was seven seconds off where he needed to be to qualify, but he attributes his subsequent success to his inexperience.

“Because I’m coming from such a low base, my improvements are happening very, very rapidly,” he said.

Alexander said he initially looked to skiing as a “selfish pursuit”, but in the wake of George Floyd’s death and the protests that followed, there was a “pressure to perform” as one of the few black athletes in winter sports.

“There is a little bit of pressure being the one guy that’s going to go out there,” he told the Daily Mirror. “I hope I can do us proud, both Jamaica and minorities.”