The uphill path to downhill
The fearless racer has battled the upheavals of a worldwide pandemic to again emerge as one of NZ’s brightest young sporting talents, writes
Just occasionally, things going downhill for Alice Robinson isn’t how she wants them. The New Zealand teen skiing star has had a rapid uphill career path – but acknowledged that the past 12 months have been tough to handle.
Things are beginning to peak again however – last month, Robinson just missed out on a historic medal at the Alpine World Championships in Italy. The Queenstown skier finished fourth in the giant slalom event in Cortina, missing out on bronze by 0.64 seconds in her quest to become the first New Zealander to win an Alpine World Championship medal.
It’s something she possibly would have achieved if she’d been able to have a year that was anywhere near normal.
Robinson told the Sunday Star-Times from Europe this week that the worldwide Covid19 pandemic had been a major hindrance.
‘‘Definitely there’s been times this year when the motivation has been hard, being away from home for so long with everything going on. But when you have a good race, it kinda makes it worth it,’’ Robinson said.
‘‘This year’s been very, very tough for me and I think had too many expectations considering how my off-season was.
‘‘The off-season’s really important because it’s when we do all our training but because of Covid it was shortened and I came back home. I normally train for six weeks in New Zealand in the summer and I also train overseas in May and that was cancelled, so I really had six months off training – the most I’ve ever had – because obviously my staff couldn’t get into the country.
‘‘It was really challenging to figure out a way to do it. Eventually I gave up trying to do anything in New Zealand and I went to Europe at the end of August, which is only when I started skiing again with my team.
‘‘So I was playing catch-up – for all the European teams it had been like business as usual, their lockdown ended in June and they could all train on the glaciers in summer. I came in on the back foot and tried to catch up on six months of training in six weeks.
‘‘I’m finally hitting my stride but it’s been hard. The last nine months, I haven’t had more than three days off.’’
The 19-year-old said she was naturally wary about heading to stay in Europe during the middle of a pandemic, but her desire to compete won out.
‘‘I just needed to go – all the other athletes are over there were doing it. My dad was a bit worried about me going over so early — but I’ve had people here looking after me and I’ve been completely healthy.’’
It’s no surprise that despite the handicaps she’s faced, Robinson is again poised to regularly be among the best in the world, given her incredible success since graduating to senior level.
She won the NZ Alpine National Championship giant slalom and slalom titles aged 15 and was named as NZ’s youngest Winter Olympian at the start of 2018, eventually finishing 38th out of a field of 86 in the giant slalom at the Games.
She became the junior world champion in the giant slalom as a 17-year-old in Val di Fassa, Italy, becoming the No. 1-ranked under-18 women’s GS skier and then made an indelible mark at elite senior level at the World Cup finals the following month, when she finished runner-up to Mikaela Shiffrin, the US twotime Winter Olympics gold medallist.
Robinson won her first World Cup race in only her 11th start, edging Shiffrin to win the season-opening giant slalom in Soelden, Austria, in October 2019 and then three days after winning the emerging talent award at the Halberg Awards, she won her second event on the World Cup giant slalom circuit in northwestern Slovenia yesterday, finishing ahead of Slovakia’s Petra Vlhova as an 18-year-old last February.
It was her parents’ decision to move across the Tasman which proved the key for the Australian-born Robinson to become of the NZ’s most exciting sporting talents.
‘‘My parents used to come on holidays to Queenstown when they were younger, before I was born. That’s when I first started skiing, when I was three on a holiday to Queenstown.
‘‘My mum and dad were sick of living in Sydney and wanted to move to Queenstown because they loved it so much – it was supposed to be just for a year.’’
Robinson was soon in ski schools as a youngster, then holiday programmes with a local ski club when she was six or seven.
‘‘I asked if I could do a fulltime programme for the whole winter and they [her parents] said ‘yeah, why not?’. They wanted us to be decent skiers because we lived 10 minutes from the mountain.
‘‘When I was younger it was just the weekends, with school skiing day once a week and then in high school there was a programme for three days a week, in the morning, then school from afternoon til six.’’
Robinson said she received plenty of support from Wakatipu High School.
‘‘I would focus on skiing when I was skiing and then when it was school I’d work double-time and double-hard to catch up and managed to get through.’’
When she made her move to the open age-group (15, turning 16), she found in her first year that the successes she’d had in junior company were still possible.
‘‘It’s never guaranteed that your success will cross over. I think then I started to think this could be a profession for me – in the same year I got selected for the Olympics so that was probably the time to do it.
‘‘I’d been told I was skiing well, I was told to go and have fun and so I saw it as a fun challenge to see how I’d go against the older girls and I never really felt that intimidated, I wanted to prove myself more and I was quite confident in my skiing.’’
However, there will still times when she felt notably lacking in experience.
‘‘When I’ve gone to the toplevel races like the World Cup and the Olympics it is quite daunting because you’re with the best of the best, and also you’re from New Zealand and we don’t have a big team. I’d go to these races by myself, whereas the other girls from the big ski nations would have a huge team with a lot of experienced athletes guiding the way for them.
‘‘I felt like a bit of an outcast when I started – I didn’t know anyone and I’m the only World
Cup racer from the Southern Hemisphere. That part of it was quite hard – trying to get the confidence to move up in those ranks.
‘‘But eventually you figure out a way to do it and once you’re there . . . I don’t feel like I’m out of place any more.
‘‘I managed to find a way. ‘‘When I had my breakthrough season two years ago . . . I started having success in races the next level down — I was winning some of those and winning some other races and then I went to the world championships and had a breakthrough result there. You build your confidence up over time until eventually it all clicks together.’’
Now she aims to thrive as a Kiwi against the traditional powerhouses – but still has limited resources.
Coach Chris Knight, from NZ, now lives in Italy while his wife is Robinson’s manager. She has a serviceman that works for the company that I ski for [Volkl] that looks after all my equipment, another coach [American Jeff Fergus] and a physio ‘‘when I need it’’.
‘‘You look at the Swiss and the
Austrian teams and they’ll have
30 staff with them.
So we’re punching above our weight when you look at the size difference. For the Austrians, ski racing is like their rugby – it’s their national sport, every resource is poured into it
‘‘It’s particularly hard when
‘‘It’s so cool seeing Nico Porteous and Zoi Sadowski Synott doing so well in the free-ski.’’ Alice Robinson
you’re trying to compete in the speed disciplines, which is where you need more staff for safety. Downhill, it’s more highrisk than the technical events, you’re going way faster and on way longer courses and you need more staff to cover the hill, otherwise it can be unsafe if you don’t have a lot of staff members to put up nets, and being able to make sure areas are safe
‘‘I’ll have to ask bigger teams if I can join in; ask for favours like ‘will you let us jump in?’ because we can’t physically do it on our own if we wanted to train for downhill.’’
Yet Robinson is quickly carving out a place as a Kiwi among the world’s best – like some of her fellow young New Zealanders.
‘‘It’s so cool seeing Nico Porteous and Zoi Sadowski Synott doing so well in the freeski.
‘‘So we’ve got a group of people doing well in snow sports across the board. And now in NZ there’s so many athletes that come and train here because we have such great conditions and great mountains.
‘‘So there’s no reason why
we can’t be competitive with the European and American powerhouses. I think it’s cool that we’ve got a group of athletes competing at such a high level and can have a whole new generation of youngsters now coming through that can get into it.
‘‘I’m really passionate about the sport. I love skiing and I love competing – it’s a pretty cool sport.’’
Robinson also loves how her passion and profession provides equality for women.
‘‘The prizemoney’s exactly the same for men and women and the top earner every year is a woman. It’s cool to be able to tell other girls you can be a professional athlete and on the same level as the men.’’