E&A championship u21 2016

Tonight is the closing ceremony of the European and African u21 and disabled championship. This means that all the preliminary and final rounds have been skied and all medals have been distributed. A good time to look back at how I skied this week and what I want to take away from this competition.

The week started off with some training and familiarisation sets on the competition site. This is to get used to the water and if all goes well, gain a little confidence before the competition. In the slalom familiarisation, I crashed and had to stop the already short training set of 5 minutes even earlier due to the pain. I wanted to do too much and flew over my ski, after which my boot clicked off and I landed on the top of my ski with my knee. Initially I was afraid I had opened another scar that I have on my knee from before last Europeans, but luckily it was just the hit that was hurting. That afternoon I had had some time to rest and I skied my trick familiarisation. Both runs went really well and I even almost completed the last trick of my toe run, which is one I’ve never before completed and it is in my run just in case I do finish it in competition and get some bonus points. I was happy and newly confident after being quite upset with a slalom crash, which is not a great feeling to go into a competition. The next day was the jump familiarisation in which I jumped 22.1 meters, only 90 cm under my personal best and with some great coaching from Michael Kjellander, who has won world medals!

On Thursday the competition really started, first up was the slalom preliminaries. The fact that I fell in the last training was still in the back of my mind, but with some encouragements from my team and the French team, I was ready to fight for  a new PB. I had a very relaxed and well executed first pass, which I was happy with, because I started on a faster speed than usual. After came my second pass, on which I fell in the last training, but other than that I usually run this pass. I was relaxed on the first few bouys and it

was looking like I could finish the pass, but then I was a bit late at the fifth bouy and I tried to rush the turn. Because of that my upper body went down straight into the water and that was the end…. Next time I just have to keep calm and trust that I will have enough angle to get to the last bouy no matter how late I am. This is something that I also learned in training and started working on, but I had too much stress from the competition to be able to think about that. This fall landed me in 16^th place, just short of the top 15 that I was aiming for for this competition.

I had the entire day to deal with this disappointment, because tricks started on Friday. Luckily the other skiers were a good distraction on Thursday. I was up for tricks early in the morning and I felt ready. My tricks in practise are very stable, so the only hurdle was to deal with the competition stress. The first run went really well, I did all my tricks in my hand run and it felt like they were in time. This added some pressure to the second run. When I went on the boat to change skis for my toehold run I felt so much stress being released from clearing my first run that I was shaking. When I started my toehold run, I didn’t feel ready. I went for the first trick anyway and I fell… this means 0 points in my toehold run, which is worth the most points out of the two. I had never fallen on this trick in competition so this was a great disappointment. When I got my score of 1360, I knew I had done a good hands run and was on my way to a PB if I stood up my toeholds. Only my last trick was ‘ no credit’, it was disapproved by 3 out of 5 judges. This, along with getting over some competition nerves, is something to work on for the next competition. With this score I was last, and didn’t get the top 10 space I was aiming for and which would’ve been well within reach.

Finally on Friday as well was jump. Here I felt much less pressure, even though in all disciplines I was skiing for my own PB and not

per se for the competition. Most likely it is because you have three jumps, whereas if you fall in tricks or slalom, it’s over. My first jump was 21.9m, my second jump was also 21.9m, which was so bizarre, I thought the measuring system was lagging. After some tips for the third jump I tried to focus on them and because of that went very early. When you are early, you have to slow down before the ramp, which means all the built up speed is essentially lost. This jump was less far, so 21.9m is my jump score, which got me 9^th place.

Even though there were not many in the #teamNL, everyone was watching live stream and staying in contact through every social media there is!

Overall the main idea is that I need more competition experience to be able to deal with the nerves that I was feeling. I am upset that I did not ski a PB or even close to what I wanted in slalom and tricks especially. However, I am very motivated to go back and train hard and do more competitions. New PBs will be set soon!