High season is upon us once again here in the Alps and the slopes teem with overconfident incompetents, snowplough beginners and wet girlies allowing their boyfriends to teach them. Which would be fine (if a bit twee) except that most of the boyfriends fit into category ‘A’ above. There are plenty of good reasons why qualifying as a ski instructor takes ages and costs a small fortune, even in countries where they don’t insist on Olympic level slalom skills and an ego the size of a small planet.
I do wonder occasionally whether people treat other sports in the same casual way they do skiing. Do they decide one morning that they’re going to have a scuba diving holiday, buy a load of gear they don’t know how to use and then just hop into the briny? Or attach themselves to the back of a mate’s speedboat and expect to be able to waterski despite the fact they they’re significantly overweight and haven’t done anything more physically taxing than open the fridge door since they left school and were no longer forced to play hockey in sub-zero temperatures once a week?
Skiers tend to be marginally more sensible about all this than snowboarders – there’s an ingrained attitude amongst boarders that you are somehow less of a man if you stoop to being taught anything. Not being a man myself I wouldn’t know about that, but it only takes five minutes observation off the first chairlift to see that it certainly makes you less of a boarder.
Your skiers can generally be relied on to sign up for beginner lessons at the very least, and some of them (mainly the female ones) will even carry on with it for a season or two after that. But once they get to the ‘I can get down anything’ stage, most of them pack it in and take to sliding sideways down slopes they can’t quite manage at speeds just a bit too much for them. I should point out here that we can all ‘get down anything’ – it’s called gravity. The trick is to stop at the bottom and not hit anything on the way down.
Now apart from anything else, this can’t actually be such a lot of fun. In fact I can tell you from personal experience that skidding sideways down an icy black run with barely any semblance of control really isn’t a lot of fun at all. You’d enjoy the whole experience a lot more if you could actually do it, honestly. How many of us haven’t looked at someone casually ripping up the bumps down Grand Couloir and thought ‘Gosh I wish I could ski like that’? Well you probably can, in fact, but you’re going to have to submit to being taught.
I’m not suggesting that everyone should sign up for the ESF’s week-long ‘bend ze knees and follow me’ group sessions. There are plenty of other options out there – small groups, one-on-one coaching, specialist bumps/powder/freestyle sessions, you name it. Whatever floats your boat. But whatever it is, it has to be more fun than just doing the same thing and making the same mistakes year in and year out, surely? Obviously you’re never going to be an Olympic downhiller, and you’ll probably never manage that thing Shaun White does in the pipe either, but it might be fun if you could do that black run with a bit of style rather than just ‘getting down it’, don’t you think?
©Christa GIMBLETT 2011
