JANINA KUZMA
Free skier
Picture a terrifyingly steep, snowcovered mountain chute landmined with cliffs, trees and hidden drop offs.
This is the sort of terrain Janina Kuzma navigates for a living.
Kuzma will represent New Zealand in free skiing at the Winter Olympics in Pyeong Chang, South Korea.
It’s not a sport many outside the skiing world are familiar with.
Kuzma, 32, describes it simply as an extreme sport.
That might be under-playing it.
Free skiers have the kind of guts and healthy attitude to fear that allows them to bomb down a mountain, dodging rocks, trees and anything else that gets in the way, with the aim of getting from the top of a peak to the bottom of the run faster than anyone else.
The ‘‘gnarlier’’ (Kuzma’s word) your line down the mountain, the better your score. It’s not for the faint-hearted.
Kuzma, who will compete in the Olympic women’s free skiing half pipe event next week, is not faint of heart and is ‘‘pumped’’ and ready for her close-up with whatever the Olympics can throw at her.
As the seven-time New Zealand Big Mountain Champion, two-time Canadian Freeski Champion, two-time World Heli Challenge Champion and second overall in the world for half pipe, she’s confident she’s in with a fighting chance for a medal.
It’s her second Olympics, after competing in the half pipe event in Sochi, Russia, in 2014 when it was introduced into competition. She took on half pipe skiing only in 2011 but was immediately smitten.
There’s a blatant irony in the fact that Kuzma spent her youth in perpetual summers, only to swap them for back-toback winters from the age of 17.
Born in Brisbane to a German father and Filipino mother, she and her twin sister and brother grew up first in Papua New Guinea till civil war saw them move to the jungles of Borneo where their father worked in coal-mining logistics.
They were pretty free range parents, she says. ‘‘They just let us run wild. We’d go bushwhacking through the jungle, build forts, climb trees, stalk out animals. It was a pretty incredible way to grow up.
‘‘You think of all these animals on the endangered list, we had them in our backyard – orangutans, snakes, birds. All this crazy wildlife.
‘‘I was this little girl who would be running around in the jungle by myself. I look back and can’t believe my parents let me do that but I guess that’s what made us feel so free and make us love the adventure of life.’’
It was a rude awakening then when she and her sister were packed off to boarding school in Brisbane.
‘‘It was a very scary moment when mum said, ‘Allright, see you guys, I’m out of here.’ It felt like the whole room was closing down on me. It was tough, but we got through it.’’
Ever since she can remember the family have taken annual skiing holidays, mostly to Canada.
She was six when she donned her first planks. ‘‘We were on a family trip in Germany and I was the only one who couldn’t ski. My brother and sister were flying down the hill and my dad just grabbed me by the back of my jacket and said, ‘Go down! Snow plough! Pizza!’’’
Once she found her ski legs, she was off. It’s all she’s ever wanted to do, she says. And remarkably, she’s been able to make a career out of her love of the sport.
As soon as she finished secondary school she started chasing winters.
When she and her sister turned 17 they left Australia for New Zealand and winter in Wanaka. Since then she has done back-toback winters in her bid to be the best in free skiing and half pipe.
Kuzma, who became a New Zealand citizen five years after she moved here, is home in Wanaka for half the year with her husband, Chris Rodgers, who is the technician for the New Zealand Pipe team, and on the road for the other half, chasing the snow in the morthern hemisphere.
The closest she gets to summer is a month or so in the United States, where she trains high up on mountain glaciers. Anything over 24 degrees makes her twitch.
Kuzma, who has been involved with four films in the Shades of Winter series, is heading to India after the Olympics for another filming project. The North Face-funded films will showcase women adventurers travelling to exotic winter locations all over the world.
Her most recent filming project was to ski down four New Zealand volcanoes with a bunch of hard core female free-skiers. Bad weather put paid to the scale of this and they ended up taking on one – Mt Taranaki.
She’s been lost on the mountains and caught in an avalanche.
The latter occurred in Canada when she was 22. A metre crown of snow dropped out from underneath her and two fellow skiers. She and one other managed to hold on to tree branches while the third skier was taken down with the snow.
‘‘It all happened so fast. It was like a huge wave of snow plummeting from beneath my feet. We had only recently completed our avalanche training and we just went straight into rescue mode.’’
They managed to ski down and dig their friend out from metres of snow.
Two years ago she lost her best friend, Swedish skier Matilda Rapaport, in an avalanche. Life on the mountains brings with it risk, no matter how careful you are, she says.
Right now she’s channelling all her nerves and energy into that pinnacle of sporting glory – an Olympic medal.
She reckons she’s as ready as she’ll ever be. ‘‘I’ve been competing a long time. Experience prepares me for these events. I know I’m a great competitor ... I know how to keep my cool and even if I’m having a bad day I know I can throw it down when it comes to my competition run.’’
‘‘We’d go bushwhacking through the jungle, build forts, climb trees, stalk out animals. It was a pretty incredible way to grow up.’’ Janina Kuzma on her childhood in Papua New Guinea and Borneo