Timmy’s World Cup
I just got home from the Deer Valley World Cup. It was good to see old friends this week arriving for the competition, its the people that make it the best for me! The site was perfect, the jumps, the in-run and landing all perfect. No chopping, no stepping and no shaping! I can get used to this! We had Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday to train before competing on Friday.
Tuesday – I jumped doubles only, to get used to the site. The double kicker had a lot of bang on the first day that I really like. The landing was a little steeper than I am used to so it took a few jumps to get accustomed to it.
Wednesday – I took a day off from training because four consecutive days of snow jumping is pretty hard on the body and I’m still recovering from a recent pulled calf in training.
Thursday – The double kicker had been reshaped and ALL of the bang had gone, so I was happy to only have to do two jumps on it and moved straight over to triples. I had previously only done four triples on snow with a jump that was MUCH smaller than the triple kicker at Deer Valley! The jump was huge! If i said I was not scared I would be lying!
Standing up at the top of the inrun I was surprised that I wasn’t that scared after all. The jump looked pretty nice from up at the top, it was just standing next to it that made me wonder what I was doing. How did I end up in USA stood next to this wall of a jump, actually thinking about jumping off it? It’s a thought I will remember for the rest of my life, standing just looking at the jump and thinking “how”?
I did five or six LayTuckFulls. After the first jump, the thought that I was going to die passed and I could think about what I needed to do. I have a really bad habit (thanks to trampolining all my life); which is when I’m in the air, I see the ground but I dont really take that much notice of it. I know it’s there and I have done the moves so many times that I get lazy and just take it for granted that I’m ok up there. On trampoline I know I’m the same height on every move I do. I know how long I have in the air, so I never really look at the trampoline to gauge how high I am. In aerials there are so many more factors involved… speed, jump angle, ramp size, transition, wind, snow conditions… the list is endless!
Friday – I woke up to clear blue skies and a beautiful day for jumping. I got to the jump site with plenty of time to spare, so I took a few runs on some groomers to warm up. There is nothing better than skiing on a day like today. We only got about 45 minutes to train, which was a bit stressfull. Speed checks are always the most scary part for me; skiing in a straight line at 67kph to throw a quick stop in a very small space always gets my heart going. Luckily, I got it right first time so I only had to do it once.
The way the jumps face in Deer Valley, means that the morning the sun shines on them making the jumps soft slow and sticky. The coaches did a great job salting to keep the jumps hard, but it was very noticable when jumping. On my second triple I landed a little bit in the back seat and for me at the moment, thats even worse than back-slapping. I hurt my calf last month and landing in the back seat brought it all home. I stopped training at that point to save it for the competition later. I was feeling good about it, my jumps were looking good and I wasn’t worried about only doing two jumps before competing.
In the time between training and competing the sun went down and the temperature quickly dropped. The snow got faster and the jumps harder and icier. Unfortunately for me, that made me 5-7kph too fast on my competition jump! I launched my LayTuckFull off jump number five to hear the dreaded “STRETCH” call. Looking at the ground after my first flip I knew I was big… You are then faced with a choice; to make it look pretty and lose landing points or to forget the form and think only about the landing. I knew that no matter how much I stretched there was nothing I could do to stop me landing on my back, so in that split second I bit the bullet and went for form… OUCH! straight to my back. There is no sound quite like hearing your body smash into the landing; you hear every particle of snow being crushed along with your body. For a short while you feel nothing then everything hits you at once, OUCH! I stood up feeling a little worse for wear to see a camera in my face, so I put on a brave face and forced a smile, all the while I was in agony on the inside.
I was a little upset that I had just crashed in my first World Cup, but when I think about what I did, making it to a World Cup event, all on my own, working to pay for everything on my own, I dont feel bad at all! I’m from a country with no snow, no resources for aerials, not even a British coach! I’m happy with how I performed and what I achieved. Sure, there is room for improvement, there always is… and I plan on doing exactly that!
I would like to thank the people who have helped me along the way including my sponsors; Sunwise, Bikes & Prams and Lavender Hotels, my coaches Sharlee and Matt, who believe in me. David Morris from the Aussie team is always there to help and every single word he says makes perfect sense! The US team and their coaches.
Tim taking huge air in Deer Valley