AUSTRALIA Technical Workshop

By Tom Langtry

Overview

For our on-snow Technical Workshop we presented how we mix our four skills (stance, rotary, edging & pressure control) together to result in our different performances (skidded, steered, carved, railed & pure carved).

  

Workshop

Our on-snow Technical Workshops were run by Richard Jameson, James Crompton, Jeremy O’Sullivan and me. We had a lot of participants – around 20 in each of our groups – which was encouraging that there were so many people wanting to hear more about the Australian system.

We started off by giving an overview of our 4 skiing skills, and then a warm-up task of skiing in pairs doing a rhythm change. This led most pairs to change from a pure carved medium turn to a carved short turn. We pointed out this was achieved by twisting the skis on the snow more and edging a little less.

We then got the groups to try a few snowplough turns with heaps of rotary and minimal edge. We pointed out the track width of the outside ski was very large (40+ cm). We noted that we use the track width of the outside ski as an identifier of our ski performance.

We gave everyone a copy of our hand-out card, with a visual of our 4 skills and different performances. This nicely complemented the session and allowed everyone to refer to it during the session and afterward.

Then we got everyone in pairs again and gave them the challenge of mixing the rotary and edging amounts to produce an outside ski track 30cm wide (steering). This was a good challenge for the group, with some people not having tried it before.

We progressed to more edging again, to produce the thinner outside ski track of carving at around 10cm wide. This was the biggest challenge for the group. Some other countries said they deliberately make a similar performance turn, and others said they don’t have a specific performance between steering and pure carving.

We then did railing and pure carving, with this being pretty much the same between all countries. It was great watching everyone rip out some high performance turns on the perfect groomers.

I was asked about our training and examination process – whether we examined these performances at all levels, and what the tasks were.

On our hand-out card we included ‘Mixed Performances’ E.g., carving the top of a turn and then pure carving the bottom. We noted that skiers often use a mixed performance for certain situations, but it wasn’t something with often train and is not something we assess.

To finish we had a carving competition. In pairs, taking it in turns who was in front, and the person behind checking for a precise 5cm outside ski track through all turns. I was following a NZSIA and a German team member. They did great turns, but you could see it was challenging for them to not go into a pure carved performance through the second half of the turn. The Austrian winner got a little clip-on koala for the prize.

 

My Take

Our workshop presented some of our key technical systems but kept things simple. The group seemed to understand everything, and the clinic prompted some good discussion around the relationship between rotary and edging.