On Wednesday 14 August more than 30 Special Olympics athletes from across New Zealand competed in Alpine Skiing and Snowboard events on 2024 Snow Camp’s Tier 1 race day.
Conditions were perfect at Cardrona Alpine Resort with clear blue skies and plenty of fresh snow providing an ideal canvas for the incredibly talented athletes to show off their skills on the slopes.
Each athlete completed three competition runs, with their time from the first run being used for divisioning, where athletes are grouped with others of similar ability for final classification purposes, followed by two more runs which were combined together to form the athletes final time.
One athlete who shone on race day was Haris Imran Khan, a skier with the Upper North Island team. This Snow Camp was Haris’ first time skiing on real snow after previously only taking part at trainings at Snowplanet in Auckland. However Haris took to the new environment brilliantly, flying down the mountain to claim first place in his division.
There was also plenty of incredible skill on show in the top Alpine Skiing divison, which was contested between Southland’s Ryan Senior, a double gold medal winner at last year’s National Winter Games, Tim Clayton from the Hawke’s Bay club, who will be representing New Zealand at the 2025 World Winter Games and Yorke Parkin, a dual NZ and Canadian citizen who will be representing Team Canada on the slopes in Torino next year. In the end it was Parkin who took out top honours in this divison, beating Senior to top spot by just one second.
On a more sombre note, many athletes were wearing black armbands on race day and a minute’s silence was observed at the beginning of the medal ceremonies in honour of Rodney Penney, who passed away last month. Rodney was a long time champion of the Special Olympics Snow Sports programme and committed countless hours to supporting snow sports activites and athletes in a wide range of roles including Chairperson of the Upper North Island Snowsports Committee in his seventeen years as a volunteer.
The week also served as a training and selection camp for the New Zealand Squad for next year’s World Winter Games. The nine athletes who have been selected to represent New Zealand at the games all spent the week in camp together along with Head of Delegation Dave Cowie and the five other support staff who will be joining them on the trip in March. When not on the slopes the team had plenty of opportunities to bond across shared meals and during their down time as well as other preparations including being fitted for their World Games kit.
