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Happy new year!

Posted 1233- Mon 05 Jan 2009 at 18:22GMT By  Zoe Gillings
Related pages: Arosa

In December I competed in the second world cup of the season which was in Arosa, Switzerland.

The whole race was shown live on British Eurosport so loads of people at home already knew where I placed before I even got chance to tell them!

It was a bit of an easy course but it was a nice change to race on an easy one and was pretty fun because there were lots of places to pass. And I did a lot of passing! My first heat went well but my second wasn’t too good which put me into the small final where I passed from 3rd into 2nd right before the finish line to finish in 6th over all.

The thing I was really happy about was in that race I beat the 3 girls who were ranked above me in the world. Unfortunately because of the way the points worked out despite beating everyone above me I actually went down from 4th to 6th in the world. There are two girls within 20 points of me though so it won’t take much to overtake them.

I went home for Christmas right after the race in Arosa which was nice. Because I was at home in the Isle of Man it gave me chance to go through to Manx radio and do an interview about the race which was aired the next day.

It was also announced about a week ago that I had won the British Olympic Association snow sport athlete of the year award again. I won it last year and that was great but I am super happy to win it two years in a row!

I hope you all had a good Christmas and wish you a happy new year!

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X-games

Posted 1572- Sat 02 Feb 2008 at 02:13GMT By  Zoe Gillings
Related pages: ESPN Winter X Games 2008  ::  Snowmass

I have just got back from competing at the X games (Basically the Olympics of action sports)

It’s an invitation only event and had 15 hours of live TV coverage on USA TV.

I had some major problems on the run up to the event because my coach had to resign due to family reasons 4 days before I went. As a last minute thing I organized for James Foster, another British snowboardcross rider to come out with me to act as my coach. It turned out that that worked really well!

I qualified in 3rd so all my fears that it was all going to go wrong because I didn’t have my usual coach there went out the window at that moment.

In the X games there are 6 riders racing instead of the usual 4 which makes it interesting to start with. In my first heat I won the start so I was in the lead for most of the way down, 2 girls got in front of me when I hit some soft snow but it was ok because I only had to finish in the top 3 to get into the final. I was still in 3rd going over the final jump but then I flew way too far off the jump and crashed on the landing! I knew if I tried to stand up it would use up too much time so I just lifted up my board and let myself slide across the finish line. I didn’t know if I had got over the line in front of the girl behind me or not until I looked up at the score board and saw:

1:Tanja Frieden
2: Sandra Frei
3: Zoe Gillings

I had got through to the final!!

We had to wait for almost half an hour for the final to start because a guy had fallen on the course and they had to rebuild the fencing around one of the corners. I got nervous standing in the start gate I have to admit but as soon as I got out of the gate all my nerves disappeared. Unfortunately my race didn’t last very long because as we went into the first corner a girl just to my left lost control over one of the rollers and crashed straight into me. I ended up 6th in the final so 6th overall in the comp. Considering all the problems I had coming up to this event and the fact that I came 7th last year I was pretty happy!
 

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