The journey to Europeans

With this blog I would like to start telling you about my journey to the Youth European & African championships, which were in August 2015. During the season of 2014, Europeans didn’t even cross my mind yet, I didn’t think it was possible. However at Nationals in September 2014 I skied a PB that met the qualifying criteria for slalom for Europeans. This was very unexpected and everything that happened after this, was uncharted territory. Honestly I was quite out of my depth and if I look back on it now, I would have definitely done some things differently, but you win some, you learn some.

In training I was a bit of a mess. I wanted to slalom a lot, because this was what I would be doing at Europeans and I wanted to set a good score. On the other hand I wanted to train a great deal for tricks and jump because I wanted to meet the qualifying criteria. So in the end I was a bit all over the place. On top of this everything had to be fast, because September was the end of the season, so I would have to qualify in the start of the 2015 season. This left little room for training and even less for entering competitions, because I had to qualify at least 3 weeks before the start of the European championships. Because of the time stress, I just started entering competitions. My PBs in training were barely good enough to qualify, so to ski it in competition was nearly impossible. At each competition that I didn’t qualify the stress increased, there was less time and I had less confidence.

There are not many competitions in the Netherlands and there were none in time to qualify. This added some stress, because every competition was at an unfamiliar lake. Looking back at it that is good to gain experience, but in the moment it was mostly frustrating. I skied one competition at a lake in Germany. Hugo, another Dutch team skier who had qualified to slalom at Europeans, but not for tricks, was there with the same goal. We both didn’t get the scores we want, so this was quite disappointing.

The lake in Toulouse at Vinneys ski school

At this time the Dutch coach recommended that I go to a professional trainer to get my scores up. Otherwise there was no way I could improve my scores enough within the time frame given. She had good experiences with Vincent Soubiron, so whilst still in Germany, we asked Vinney if he still had space for me. He did, which meant the start of a rollercoaster ride for me. I would go home to the Netherlands, pack my bags and the same day drive to Schiphol and fly to Toulouse. This was my first time flying alone and I didn’t have much time to mentally prepare. Luckily, it was easy to settle in in Toulouse due to the great people there. I trained 4 times a day and learned so many new things. At the end of my two weeks there, I entered a competition in Muret, which was the last competition in time to qualify. This was also my first competition without my parents, so the stress levels rose quite high… I had three trick rounds, so three chances to qualify. I knew that for jump I was definitely still too far behind and I had almost given up hope to meet the criteria for this. This meant all the focus was on tricks, no pressure… The first round I was 400 points short of qualifying. The second round I added 100 points to my score, but I still needed 300 points! The last round was insanely stressful, it was the last round of the last competition where I had a chance at skiing the scores. Everything I did was a PB, but that wasn’t really satisfying, I wanted those 300 points. In the end I skied very well, but I was still 80 points short of qualifying. Despite the result, I had an amazing time skiing with Vinney and with the people I met there, so much so that after Europeans, I went back to train some more!

On the bright side, back home I knew what to train. 2 more weeks to work on my slalom techniques and get ready to ski a PB at the Europeans. I pushed to the limits, and over. I crashed and found myself at the first aid at night. My ski had cut into my leg just below my knee and I got 4 stitches. The thing that stressed me out was, how long would this take… I couldn’t let anything get in the way of Europeans! I needed the stitches in my leg for 10-14 days. Seeing how I had 10 days before leaving for Europeans, we made it 10. The day before we stepped on the plane to Rome, my dad took out my stitches. I had never felt less prepared, but Europeans were around the corner and I just had to focus. In my next blog I will tell you how the Europeans went after this hectic start.