The Fast Track

On The Bay magazine, Winter 2007

Christina Metzger arrives at a downtown Starbucks in Toronto on a frigid December evening, her cheeks red from the cold and a bright smile on her face. Her cheery expression glows against the parade of bleary-eyed Bay Streeters streaming in and out of the café after a long day at the office. She strides over and introduces herself, revealing a friendly demeanour and professional poise.

Metzger, 26, is a former ski racer and one-time member of the Canadian Alpine Ski Team’s (CAST) development program. It’s really cold outside, but it seems all those years spent screaming down hills in sub-zero temperatures have left her impervious to long days and cold temperatures. She’s just finished a day of work, and despite the short notice of our meeting (arranged that morning), is cheerful and prepared with a list of memories and timelines jotted down for quick reference.

Metzger is one of Southern Georgian Bay’s elite ski racing alumni, a product of the extensive network of ski racing programs available to our speediest young citizens. Thousands of children participate in local ski racing programs every winter. In an area inundated by almost a dozen ski hills and as many racing clubs, ski racing has long been a rite of passage for the youths of local families.

Learning to ski as toddlers, aspiring young racers can be found zipping around race gates by the time they are seven or eight years old. Most race recreationally until their mid-teens and then quit racing as costs spiral or interest wanes.

Some, however, decide to give it everything they’ve got. They work their way up the ranks of the local ski clubs and regional racing programs, move up the provincial team level and strive to reach the national level. In this pursuit, they’ll balance school and normal-life activities like hanging out with friends and family. A successful season on the Ontario Ski Team might even lead to a place on the Canadian Alpine Ski Team’s (CAST) development team and a shot at turning racing into a career.

The quality of Southern Georgian Bay’s ski-racing programs can be seen in the area’s high-profile representation on the 2006/07 CAST development team roster, which includes Larisa Yurkiw (Georgian Peaks Ski Club), Megan Ryley (Craigleith Ski Club), Scott Barrett (Osler Bluff Ski Club), and Patrick Wright (Snow Valley).

The road to the top of the sport is a tough one but the number of top racers from the area signals a local wealth of willing and ambitious young people willing to give it a shot. There is an army of people ready to help these young racers reach the top, but their motivation doesn’t always lie in glory and gold medals. The end game, many skiing professionals say, is well-rounded, ambitious young people like Metzger with above-average maturity and skills. And if gold medals happen to be a by-product, so be it.

When a skier moves to an elite level, the game changes. It’s not a weekend feel-good activity anymore – it’s a serious daily commitment of time, money, energy and effort. It takes a specific personality and a strong network of support to make it happen. Parents too have to be ready to commit. Skiing is a champagne sport that requires more than a beer budget – the annual financial commitment can range in the tens of thousands of dollars.

Elite athletes trade in the typical teenage pursuits of surviving the social strata of high school and getting good grades for an intense training schedule and pressure-cooker competitions. It means working out almost every day of the year, spending over 100 days on snow, and tons of traveling. Southern Ontario’s short season means racers have to go to – sometimes literally – the ends of the earth (Chile, Argentina) just to keep up with their international peers with home-turf glaciers.

That commitment really hit home in her first year of high school, says Metzger, when she realized she wouldn’t be able to play volleyball team alongside her friends.

“You realize that this is your choice and you’re not going to be a regular student for the remainder of your high school years. I knew from there that skiing was my passion and I chose that path, so of course my experience was going to be a lot different because I couldn’t integrate myself into extracurricular activities like the rest of my peers. So I was very separate from the rest of them.”

That separation is a natural result of the travel schedule required by skiers and it’s mostly made up for by tight friendships within their teams and ski clubs. It only gets even more intense as they reach the national level, as Craigleith-based skier Meg Ryley learned this fall as she entered CAST’s all-encompassing training program for the first time.

“My life is pretty much ski racing at the moment,” Ryley, 19, says. “I spent all summer in Calgary with the rest of the national development team working out and then at the end of August we started skiing in Argentina. In September and October, we skied the Farnham glacier in B.C. and presently we’ve been skiing at Nakiska, Panorama and in Colorado. I still have time to hang out with my friends and family and have a life outside of skiing but skiing is basically a full time job and I love it.”

Helping aspiring racers like Ryley or Metzger strike a balance between athletics and academics was why Jurg Gheller and a group of like-minded people founded the Collingwood-based National Ski Academy in 1986. Structured to help athletes find a balance between training and work within a group of peers in the same situation, the Academy filled a need that Gheller saw as critical to the success of Ontario-based racers.

Following a successful stint as a coach with CAST, he and the other stakeholders examined what it would take to create a successful elite ski racing school. The first order of business was to find a home that could accommodate up the athletes. Gheller wanted them to be able to live together and support each other in their pursuits. The beautiful Tornaveen Mansion in Collingwood was donated to the school and it has since housed ski athletes ranging from 14 years old to 19.

The second challenge was to develop an academic curriculum that complemented the athletes training schedule. Academics are the number-one focus of the NSA, but it takes careful planning to mesh the needs of training the mind with training the body. They manage by studying year-round – to make up for winter’s lighter school schedule – and by alternating between training and schooling throughout the day. “We do give them time on the weekends to be teenagers,” Gheller notes with a laugh.

The rigorous schedule is designed to create a calibre of racer that can survive and excel at the sport’s highest level and at the same time earn important skills that they can use in the rest of their lives. About this, Gheller is passionate.

“When you become a good athlete in any sport, you need talent and you need to work very hard to get certain skills,” he says. “And that may get you far, but that’s not all. Besides that, you need to work on extremely good time management, you need to be extremely well organized and you want to be extremely fit. When you look at all of that and you put the package together, those kids – some of them will make it and that’s great – but for the other ones, they learn life skills, like being independent, learning to work with others, handling pressure from parents and friends and how to deal with all of that. It’s a learning process and that’s why ski racing is a journey.”

The journey, as Jurg calls it, can take ski racers to some pretty surprising places. Toronto Ski Club alumni Todd Brooker enjoyed an illustrious and successful career as a ski racer before parlaying that into a career as television ski racing commentator and a recently-appointed position developing a team of young racers for Head skis.

True, Brooker’s Crazy Canucks connection makes him a bit of an extreme example – they are some of the most famous athletes in Canadian sporting history. But the NSA’s roster of past students offers up some pretty impressive post-skiing professions, as demonstrated by Andrea Canning, a former NSA’er turned White House correspondent for American news giant ABC.

The NSA has churned out many of CAST’s development team members past and present. Look for the school’s alumni to gain even more exposure as the 2010 Games march closer and closer. There’s a definite sense of excitement about the revamped Canadian ski team and its chances to podium at the Games.

Brooker says success and ski racing often go hand in hand, because the athletes have to be so independent at such an early age. They develop an ambition far beyond their years because the nature of the sport requires it.

“The kids that I’ve worked with in racing – the ones that excel to fairly high levels – are all successes in life or they will be at whatever they do because they’ve have had to learn the ropes on their own,” he says. “You look at Ken Read, who has excelled to the president of the Canadian Ski Team, Steve Podborski, who’s doing well in the corporate world for Telus Mobility, and Edi Podivinsky who’s a broker downtown in Toronto and doing well … they’ve done well because of the things they learned through ski racing, through the commitment and sacrifice.”

“We don’t ask for 10-minute coffee breaks because we’re not used to getting any breaks in our former world,” he continues. “As long as it was daylight you wanted to be skiing and training so that you could get better. Those are the kind of things that kids learn no matter how far they go, even if they only go to the FIS level at 15. They’ve learned a certain amount of commitment and responsibility. Those are the kind of responsibilities that normal kids don’t have – it makes you a different person.”

So how does an athlete who has spent over half of their lives in a single-minded pursuit of one very specific skill make the leap into the real world? Christina Metzger asked herself that question, once she started to realize in her year with CAST that skiing might not be her dream career. Look south, former CAST racer Julia Delich told her – top American universities pay out big scholarship bucks for elite athletes.

Metzger nabbed a spot at the University of Denver’s alpine team and spent four years racing in the super-competitive NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) alpine league, earning a Bachelor of Science and Business Administration from the school’s prestigious business school in the process. It’s an experience she hopes other ski racers will emulate, given the high value (in both perception and it’s actual dollar worth) of a degree from a respected American school.

Today, she’s an executive suite manager with Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, managing the accounts associated with box holders at the Air Canada Centre. She selected the job carefully, after evaluating the workplace dynamics at the company. After spending her whole life on a team, she’s learned the importance of having the right people around you. It is, she says, one of the most valuable things she learned.

“I think that if I had to pick something that would be the most important skill that I developed over the years, it’s probably the social skills,” she says. “My ski teams have always been my family; the number of sisters, brothers, and parents that I’ve had in my lifetime is unbelievable. I still think of them as my family and miss them as much as my parents.”

“That’s been the hardest part, especially in the last two years,” she continues after a pause. “I love thinking about my experiences, but I hate remembering that I’m not there anymore. I miss it a ton. I actually crave and yearn for that kind of camaraderie that you get from a ski team. Literally they were the most amazing outstanding people that I’ve had around me in my life.”

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