World Cup at Lake Placid - The Coldest Place on Earth!

24th January 2009


We left Flaine, and departed for Lake Placid, USA. Em and I met up in Newark, New Jersey airport. It had been a long few days and upon arrival into New York Albany airport, my luggage as per usual, did not arrive. This time I was not alone, most teams were without luggage but by the time we arranged for my luggage to be sent on and got the keys to the hire car, it was already getting on to 8pm. We got to the hire car, which they had told us was in parking slot 24, we made the comment “wow that’s pretty big for a small car, I would call that intermediate at least!!” and we put all our bags in the car and tried to put the back seats down to get the skis in when Em said “Mate, I can’t open the boot.” So I said well try the ignition to check we have the right car….”Mate they don’t work in there either”…we had managed to load up someone else's car with all our stuff! After laughing quite hard we got all our stuff out and I started walking around the car park pressing the unlock/lock button repetitively. Luckily we found our car about 200m away. We managed to get a Chrysler Cruiser which we thought was terrific, total style! We set off in the wrong direction for Lake Placid, 15 minutes hadn’t gone by before we had to stop and ask directions! We ended up stopping for a pizza along the way in a ghost town. We were pretty tired by this point, after all the travel, I was seeing double, Em was dozing off and we still hadn’t reached Lake Placid. So after a dangerous drive, we finally arrived at the Olympic Training centre, when we got out of the car…oh my god….I understood at an instant why this place was called the coldest place on earth…it really was! It was somewhere down around –40 mark, it hurt to breath, you just coughed! We ran inside and were told “You aren’t staying here and the accommodation lady has left for the evening”. No one was able to tell us where our hotel was, we were so tired and it was so cold, we just wanted to go to bed. No luggage, freezing cold and no accommodation….this was getting better by the second! Luckily one of the ladies felt pity upon us and luckily there had been a recent flood in the training centre, thus a section of rooms had been damaged, had no carpet and water damage, so she said she could set us up in one of those rooms for the night and we could sort it out in the morning when the lady arrived at 8am. Thankfully we grabbed the room key and got straight into bed! We were in the first training group in the morning and we were absolutely shattered!!

We slept very well, we woke up and arranged where our accommodation was. My bags had arrived over night which was perfect and we travelled across town ate breakfast and got ready to go up for training. The event was being held at Whiteface mountain. We got up there for training and it was savage, the snow machines were blowing in your face it was –35, it was painful, everyone had every bit of their skin covered, I didn’t think my body was going to function! We couldn’t believe there were people skiing out of choice…as Em told one of them “this isn’t pleasurable, this is punishment, we have to be out here, now get inside and get yourself a hot chocolate!” A lot of teams still had no luggage so the training group was small. The course was quite flat, open and had a section with about 4 doubles in a row and quite a big step up jump. The first jump was quite difficult, you either had to suck it with no speed or jump for your life at full speed and still not make it. We took a run and went inside to warm up, took another run, went inside to warm up, our boot liners had a thin layer of ice all around them, the boot shells were rock solid, it was absolutely freezing out there!

It warmed up to about –20 the following day, we realised that this cold snap was not normal when locals said it was the coldest snap they had had in years. I was glad to hear it, and –20 seemed totally acceptable after the first day!! We had another training day, I managed to double eject off the first jump and went off the second jump on my stomach like a penguin. You know when you are winded yet you can still hear people cringing from the chairlift… this crash hurt my shins quite a lot but I was not alone as a few people did exactly the same thing! We had qualification the following day. Because the course was so open, every mistake made a huge difference in time, I was slow in qualification and quite disappointed but they took 32 girls for finals so I was in 29th and ready for my first heat of finals for the season.

Finals took place the following day, I had a difficult heat, but pulled out with quite a good start, I was in 3rd and then didn’t give 100% into the first turn and came out in 4th. It was good to get into the heats again and it made the trip very worthwhile. Final placing was 28th. The following day, we stacked the Cruiser full and also gave Chloe a lift to the airport, 3 people, 3 big bags, 7 sets of skis, and a number of small bags, it was a tight squeeze but we did it! Amazing what you can fit into a small car! Em and I travelled back to Europe before heading to Canada in February.


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