Apologies to those of you who’ve been waiting in eager anticipation to see how I got on in the weekend’s snowboarding comps but it’s taken until now for me to start to cope with the humiliation of being beaten by a 7 year old! Yes, I am now prepared to admit that on Saturday I got beaten by the tiny Katie Ormerod, age 7, in the overall Big Air comp in the Bracknell leg in the Orange AIM Series (I did beat her in the slope style though). Katie is one of the Halifax based AKA crew who were mostly kicking ass this weekend. Click the links for the official results, write up and pictures.
Apologies at this point to my family who I didn’t visit after the comp because I was tired and in pain.
I have to say that for the first event of the new season it was great fun. For anyone that has never ridden permasnow then I suggest you give it a go, at least once. It is seriously weird stuff in comparison to my normal surface of dendix and although similar to snowflex it’s much harder to hold an edge on and it’s certainly faster than both surfaces. It was actually quite comical to watch those riders renowned for their skill falling over in a manner I can only liken to my normal style. From a personal point of view I struggled, throughout the whole day I felt like I was flitting between riding relatively well to doing an excellent impression of Bambi, slipping over at every opportunity. My moment of the day though had to be in my first slope style run. For the uninitiated amongst you slope style is where the rider does a series of tricks on the kickers (jumps) , rails and other toys in order to gain the highest score they can. Having ridden the AIM kink rail in warm up I was feeling confident for my run, I dropped in (started off) lined up for the rail and rode the flat, first section without problem….then it all went wrong, as I came to the kinked angle where the down section started I fell backwards and slid the second section on my back/back of my knees landing on my head. To be honest it’s all a bit of a blur (these things happen so quickly) but in the words from Dunx at SCUK
Kat took a nasty knock off the AIM Series rail and slid the down section on the back of her knees before dumping unceremoniously doubled up on her back from four foot up… and then carried on with her run over a kicker and rail. As MC Tim Warwood put it, “I’d be in tears if that was me”.
Either way I have slight bruising across my back & shoulder and I had a bit of a headache! Nevermind, on my 2nd run (you get two each) I managed to slide the length of the rail only to fall on the small kicker. It really wasn’t my day. That’s the way of snowboarding though, so days you’re on form, ride really well and beat the opposition without question other days it all goes wrong, you constantly fall and you start to doubt that you’ve ever been able to board in the first place. For me Saturday was one of those days.
On the brightside it certainly gives me room to improve in future AIM comps, the next of which in on indoor snow in 2 weeks time at Milton Keynes. If any of you reading this are interested in giving snowboarding a try then I suggest you sign up for one of the free taster lessons offered at any of the AIM series events. Who knows, you might get the bug and become an addict like me!
I’d like to take this opportunity to say well done to all the girls I rode with on Saturday, you all did exceptionally well on what can only be described as a difficult surface to ride, but mostly I’d like to say well done to Katie Ormerod for someone so young you showed a lot of confidence and skill, keep up the good work and I have now doubt you’ll be following in the footsteps of your cousin Jamie in no time at all!
