Erstellt am: 5. 1. 2012 - 11:20 Uhr
A Day in the Life of a Freeskier
For me, it was a glimpse into a fantasy world. Freeski professional Lorraine Huber was taking me on a powder tour of the slopes of Lech am Arlberg where she honed the skills that have made her a star of the Freeride World Tour. That`s where the world’s best off-piste skiers and snowboarders compete to carve powder turns down the most extreme lines in the most extreme territory in the mountains and are awarded points for style and fluidity from a panel of judges.
LK International / KJUS
A 72-hour snowstorm had left the slopes blanketed by a layer of seemingly bottomless powder. We`d spent the afternoon up to our thighs in snow that was so light and easy to ski that made me feel that I was floating. Even when she is not competing, Lorraine`s motto is to never ski on a marked ski piste if you can avoid it and she was doing a pretty impressive job of sticking to that pledge.
"Just try to stay as close to me as possible," she'd advised me as she launched herself into yet another untracked expanse of it, the fresh snow exploding above her pink ski jacket as she sprang into the first turn. But following Lorraine is easier said than done.
Stephan Schlumpf
As a child I was obsessed with freeskiers – or extreme skiers as we called them then – in the same way that my friends were obsessed with rockstars. I wore ski boots in my living room while watching ski movies so that during the helmet camera scenes I could jump to my feet and pretend it was me. It was my equivalent of singing into a hairbrush or playing air guitar. I couldn’t think of any better way of earning a living than skiing in the steep and deep with friends. But hanging out with Lorraine gave me a chance to see the realities behind the glamour of life on the tour.
chris cummins
"Watch out!” my friends in the bar had chuckled when I boasted that I was skiing with Lorraine “She`s wild!". Indeed the motto on her homepage, which features pictures of her cannoning down couloirs, reads “Life begins at the end of your Comfort Zone” and her initial appearance seemed to confirm that dangerous reputation.
I was standing by the side of frozen white main street of the village, eagerly waiting for Lorraine to pick me up for our “date”. The parked cars were so laden with snow that they looked like a row of soft white pillows. For me this is fairy land. Lorraine was rushing back by car to Lech after a morning of training in nearby St Anton. Seeing me she pulled over, tyres crunching in the snow, and wound down the window, revealing a bandage on her chin to cover a fresh skiing wound.
"How did you do it?" I asked.
The Last Adventure Of Winter: Descending from the Valluga with freeski pro Eva Walkner
"Jumping off a cliff,” she replied nonchalantly.
On the last run down of the previous afternoon in neighbouring St.Anton, while skiing with fellow freeski pros Stefan Häusl and Björn Heregger, Lorraine had landed in big “bomb hole” – the snow that had already been flattened by a previous jumper . The unexpected hard landing forced her knee up into her chin. Ouch! A visit to casualty, a tetanus shot and 5 stitches was the upshot of this misadventure, but Lorraine was up the mountain at 9 O’clock the next morning skiing as hard as ever. The first stop on the Freeride World Tour was looming (it`s today, the 5th of January in Revelstoke Canada) and the conditions were too precious to waste. If your métier is skiing off-piste, you have to use the fresh snow when it`s there. Lorraine says she likes the train with the “boys”, who are both on the men’s Freeride World Tour, because she liked to push her limits.
chris cummins
I don’t think that I pushed Lorraine`s limits too much during our afternoon together. The fact that she skied most of the time with my microphone in her hand suggests not. But as we exploded the powder, Lorraine also exploded a few of the myths about life as a freeskier.
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As we walked to the top of a line through untracked snow that we had spotted from a chairlift, Lorraine told me that freeskiers don’t like their wild child, devil-may-care reputation. We see TV footage of the pros on the World Freeride Tour dropping cliffs and carving big arcing turns across slopes that seem almost vertical. It can seem like a kamikaze sport, but the lines have been chosen after hours of meticulous, you might even say geeky, study. Everything is planned, nothing is left to chance.
“You just see the finished product. What most people don’t perhaps realize that we study the lines for days.”
Mountain Professors
Before a competition run, the skiers use binoculars to have a very good look at the face and climb to different vantage points to gage the steepness. They study the snow conditions in minute detail and consider the consequences of where and how they would land if they were to fall. They take photos of the face that they have to ski and study the images for hours on the computer in the evening. In many respects they are professors of the mountains rather than punk adrenaline junkies – it is the contemplation that keeps them alive and allows them so ski spectacular lines: “You can only ski aggressively if you know it is safe.” It`s the judges who decide who wins on the Tour. Taking unnecessary risks is penalized rather than rewarded by the judges. It should be spectacular and challenging but everyone wants to come home safely at night.
There is a very high avalanche risk in the mountains at the moment. Powder fans watch out and get informed
Lorraine sees herself very much as an athlete. Being a freeskier is a full time job that involves 6 days a week of training - in winter on snow and in summer hard, thankless slogs of condition training. But unlike the skiers on Alpine World Cup circuit, the freeskiers are not mollycoddled. Besides structuring their own training, physiotherapy, sponsorship deals and media relations, they have to organize their own travel. "At events we get free accommodation and lift passes, but in relation to the risks we take, there is very little money in the sport."
Little money but big risks.
Despite the most careful study, things can go wrong, whether in competition, in training or out filming. Lorraine missed months after destroying a knee in a crash and has been a victim of what she describes as an “avalanche incident” which she describes as so terrifying that it almost persuaded her to quit and seek a safer profession. Last year tragedy hit the Freeride World Tour when, at a stop in Kirkwood, California, 25-year old Ryan Hawks died of injuries sustained when a back-flip stunt went badly wrong. The skiers know the risks, it is a question of learning to deal with them.
Yet all the skiers I have met wear their courage lightly. It is something I’ve come to love. I grew up in a rugby culture, where toughness is trumpeted by chest-thumping bravado and boasts of legendary alcohol consumption. The freeskiers I know, on the other hand, tend to be thoughtful, gentle and generous with their time and opinions. They ooze love of skiing and the mountains which is easy to relate to, whatever your level. I find the scene utterly seductive.
LK International / KJUS
Lorraine says that even in the intensity of competition the atmosphere is dominated by camaraderie rather than rivalry. Fellow competitors on the Freeride World Tour, she says, are “genuinely delighted” if you pull off a good run. “I think it`s because you`re not competing against each other on the tour directly. It is about your performance on that face and trying to pull off the line that you planned. For me if I`m able to ski the line that I planned well then I`m happy with that. What the judges decide is a separate thing.”
It must be hard though when your livelihood depends on decisions that are by nature subjective? Lorraine sees it philosophically. “Sometimes they might give you fewer points than you maybe deserve but another week it might be more. At the end of the season the skiers at the top of the rankings are undoubtedly the best skiers.”
Luckily the judges weren’t giving me marks as I followed Lorraine through the deep snow of the slopes where she honed the skills that helped her turn pro. She gave me some last minute tips on dealing with the deep snow, teaching me tricks on body awareness such as concentrating on feeling my weight spread over the whole of the sole of my feet in the boots to make sure my weight was spread evenly and centrally over the ski: “Many people are tempted to lean back because you feel you want you tips to come out,” she told me, “but it is much better to have a good middle position.”
"A whole new world and I was hooked"
From the Kriegerhorn lift she showed me the lines she skied dozens of times as a teenaged ski instructor during 3 solid days of deep snow in February 1998. The whole of Lech was snowbound and the ski schools were shut because of the heavy snow and bad visibility. The instructors were just bored and were just skiing the only avalanche safe slope around, but in those 72 hours of deep snow skiing Lorraine, who`d never thought of being a freeskier before, discovered her vocation. ”For the first time ever I was skiing fast, long turns and dropped cliffs,” she wrote on her homepage. “Of course I bailed every time, but in the heavy snow fall, it didn’t matter. For me, it was a whole new world waiting to be discovered, and I was hooked.”
Many people will have felt that addiction, but few of us have the talent to turn it in to a career. But despite the inherent risks, being a freeskier can seem like a dream lifestyle. So if you love skiing off-piste and fancy making your hobby your career – how do you follow in Lorraine’s footsteps? It won’t happen overnight: “You have to take small steps and keep working on your level. You have to educate yourself and there are good courses on mountain skills that you can take.” It was six years between that fateful powder session and Lorraine’s first freeride competition in 2004, the Red Bull Snowthrill in Slovenia, which she won at the first attempt. “You just have to have a dream and stick with it and opportunities will come up.”
helmet Düringer
For me, sadly, I knew it too little too late. I would only ever be armchair freeskier. But for one afternoon I was living the dream. As Lorraine and I discussed life on the tour, the winter landscape had been transformed into the sort of dreamy kitsch of a Robert Redford movie. As the sun dropped, the clouds that had obscured it all day became pink-tinged and so did the falling snow. My afternoon date with a freeski pro was coming to an end. But, in the sub-zero temperatures, the early season powder was just as soft and fluffy and inviting as it had been at nine in the morning and we had one last powder run before the lifts shut.
The Sort of Skiing Dreams Are Made Of
“There are quite a few shrubs here,” Lorraine advised me, “But just ignore them. Just choose the line you want to ski and focus on that.” And with that, and a yelp of joy, we plunged into the deep inviting snow." It`s hard to get it wrong when the snow is cold and fresh. The snow gave way but checked my speed and I could just jump into it and feel my heart leap with joy. This was the sort of skiing dreams are made of, swooping and plunging and rushing through the perfect conditions.
I couldn't keep up with Lorraine, of course. I followed her through some waist high snow between some brown shrubs that gave welcome contrast in the dying light, then as things got steeper and i had put in some cowardly and rather hesitant turns, she had shot straight down the mountain and had already caught her breath by the time I arrived, bursting with joyous endorphins at the bottom of the powder run. We yahooed and high-fived, but English boys never pull off that American maneuver without a certain degree of awkwardness.
"You`re a lucky girl to live here!" I panted.
"I know!" She grinned.
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