Olympic ski hopeful Alexander expecting major improvements

Jamaica Winter Olympics skiing aspirant Ben Alexander is currently in Austria training with prominent Austian skiing school, the Schild Ski Racing Camp, and the 37-year-old England-born athlete is expecting major improvements to his results when he suits up for his next calendar event on July 29.

Alexander is being coached by Josef and Stefan Schild, former Austrian representatives and siblings to current Austria standouts Marlies, a world championship gold medallist, and Bernadette Schild, a former youth championship gold medallist.

He has so far completed two weeks of training with the Schilds and has another three weeks remaining.

But the skier, who only took up the sport 16 months ago and has been solely self-taught, is impressed with the drastic improvements he has seen under the Schilds’ technical guidance and he is confident of going below the 200-point barrier for the first time when he competes in Chile in July.

“I am training with a very prestigious training school, of which one of the family is a gold medallist for the Austrian ski team. So I am in some really good hands here,” Alexander said.

GOOD GUIDANCE

Alexander trains five days a week and for the first time since taking up the sport in 2019, he is having sustained attention from a coach, and is more than pleased with the results he has seen thus far.

“One of the things I was lacking is a very strong coach who had the ability to look at my skiing and the basic fundamentals and just peel back all the layers and work on the basics all over again.

“That is what we have been doing, and it has been very fruitful in regard to improving my abilities,” he said.

“There are so many things that go into making a skier really good. It is like having a track athlete that is really good, but he is not reaching his full potential. Then a coach comes along and change the way they do certain things or whatever the technical thing may be, and then the athlete gets better just on the advice or training of a specialist in the field,” he continued.

“We are already seeing improvements in the difference between what I was doing when I arrived and what I am doing now. I have been made to focus on many things that I have not noticed before, and it has been very productive so far,” he insisted.

When his training is completed in the next few weeks, Alexander will to travel to Chile in early July and undergo another month of training there before going into competition.

At his last competition at a Snow King Mountain event in Jackson, Wyoming, in March, Alexander scored 381.96 and 374.05 in the great slalom race to end with his 378 average, leaving him 218 points shy of the 160 needed for his historic qualification.

Alexander aims to become Jamaica’s first Alpine Olympic skier. Olympic qualification scores are defined by the average of a competitor’s best two results, and with the improvements he has been making in Austria, he is confident of going below 200 points in Chile, and does not right off obtaining the 160 points needed to secure qualification as well.

“I can confirm that my next race will be on the 29th of July in Chile, and after 25 days of intense coaching here in Austria, one would assume that the results in July will be my best results yet by some considerable margin.

“The question is, by how much; and if things go really well, I think that for the first time I could score under 200. I need 160 to qualify and I don’t think that it is out of the realm of possibility, either. With the coaching here in Austria and a whole month of winter skiing in Chile, I think it is possible that I will shoot under 200,” he said.

livingston.scott@gleanerjm.com