Tignes (part 1)

The British Championships has usually been pretty kind to me. A win in the Super Combined last year, 2nd overall the year before and lots of podiums in earlier years. Meribel was certainly a happy hunting ground. This year with the races in Tignes, things would be a different challenge.

A change of venue made it tough for everyone. No one really knew the slopes and how the sets would be, the timings for races were new and it was all a bit of a stab in the dark for the first few days. 

That once in a lifetime moment

Strangely, my British Championships started off in London, at Wembley to be precise. Missing the Super G races, arguably my strongest discipline, to watch my football team Walsall was unquestionably a huge sacrifice. However it was a sacrifice I was always going to make. My skiing is hugely important to me and Super G offers me genuine podium opportunities but with a team like Walsall you only get one chance to go to a place like that. Seeing them walk out into the National Stadium in front of 72000 people was a truly spine tingling experience, so despite it being a tough choice the answer was always going to be 36 hour round trip to Wembley. 

As it turned out the Sunday Super G's were cancelled and moved back 24 hours. At that point I knew I'd made the right decision to fly back as I'd have been fuming if I'd missed Wembley for a cancelled race day. However it was still slightly frustrating to see the following day's results and how everyone had benefited from the arrival of the French National team with a bit of a FIS points bonanza. That said I knew I had already scored respectable points in Super G this season and deep down I've got a pretty good idea of where I rank against my competitors in this event.

A nice start to the week

I flew in for the Downhill on the Monday. At first it was only meant to be a training run but as the day wore on it became a training run then a race, then a training run + two race runs. Three runs of downhill after a day of travelling took a lot out of me both mentally and physically, however I was skiing downhill pretty much for fun this year rather than for points and results. Going as fast as possible gives me an amazing feeling that is difficult to describe and I didn’t want to ruin that by putting pressure on myself when thinking about points. That can come when I've got a lot more downhill miles in the tank. For now just going from A to B as quickly as possible and learning the discipline was all I needed to enjoy myself. That I managed to grab a second place in the NJC was a great way to kick start my British Championships and a bit of a bonus result.

After the slog of downhill there was a day off racing and although it sounds silly given I had only been in Tignes for 24 hours the downhill’s really did sap my legs so a bit of a lie in was particularly welcome. 

We started off that morning with a good confidence building slalom course. I needed to score a result in slalom as I hadn't done any training or racing with my hand in plaster for 8 weeks of the season and illness had left me in no shape to compete in early January. The morning went really well however, I got some fantastic runs in and these gave me a huge boost of confidence to go into the upcoming slaloms. Following a quick lunch we had a short training block of GS. The GS was also going great for me until the last run where I crashed hard into the base of the gate, face first. I was pretty shaken by the whole accident and I wasn't feeling the best for a good 24 hours after the injury. My face was covered in cuts and scabs and whilst my brace probably saved my front teeth it absolutely shredded the inside of my mouth. More worryingly however, my knee was very sore internally from twisting during falling and it did knock my confidence for what was ahead.

For Tignes (part 2) please click here