From tea cup to World Cup

The summer is over and so with it is a great summer of training. I spent the best part of four months in my favorite place in the world, Park City, Utah.

The summer started off a little bit slow for me, shortly after the start of my water ramp training, injuries to my heels made jumping very painful and it got to the point where crawling over-powered my will-to-walk by the end of the day. You wouldn’t think so… but jumping into water with skis on is a high impact sport! I took it easy for a few weeks, jumping on the small ramp doing mostly single somersaults to let my feet recover, before moving onto bigger jumps from the larger kickers.

My main focus for the summer was to qualify two new jumps for snow this winter. I was aiming to achieve Lay-Tuck-Full and Lay-Full-Full. Both are triple somersaults; the first has one twist in the final somersault and the second has a twist in the second and third flips. So with that in mind, I crawled out of bed every morning and made myself walk up thousands of stairs, thousands of times, over and over again to achieve my goal. It was worth it, but I’ll probably be stair climbing in my sleep.

The first few triples where nothing less than scary! The speed of the in run and how fast that big ramp comes up, is truly terrifying. Once I got accustomed to skiing into the ramp at 70km an hour and hurtling over 50 feet into the air, I started to have some fun! Being a Brit, the American athletes love to make fun of my constant tea-drinking, so with the help of Troy Tully, I made a short video to celebrate my heritage which you can watch below. If there are any tea companies out there that would like to sponsor the team… get in touch!

After weeks of training and hundreds or jumps, I succeeded in qualifying both my new triples to perform on snow, so I am very excited to be throwing those jumps and more in competition next winter! I also had time to have a play with Full-Full-Full and Lay-Double Full-Full which I hope to add to my arsenal of tricks next year.

Tim Lever