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My Journey into Ski Racing

My name is George Brown and I am a 15 year old Alpine ski racer from Birmingham in the West Midlands, that bastion of winter sport. I went on my first ski trip with my mum and dad when I was just 18 months old and I loved it, apparently. I didn’t exactly ski, but I had some plastic skis that went over my boots and I would walk around on them and say “Ski, ski. Ski, ski.” all the time. My next time skiing was a year later in Scotland at the Lecht where I seemed to fail to learn the basics. Standing up!!

So, mum and dad decided when I was four to get some lessons at the local dry slope in Birmingham so we could go away on our first ski holiday as a family. These went great and before I knew it, it was time to head to Kranjska Gora in Slovenia. This became our go-to destination, and we spent four amazing family holidays there. My first ever black run was going down the World Cup piste at Podkoren. Maybe one day I’ll get back there to race? Before our fourth and last time there we joined the local Midland Ski Club, to get some extra skiing in before we went away. This was in January 2018. Little did we know that, over the next 4½ years and 45+ sets of skis later, all three of us would become racers, my dad would become a professional ski race photographer and I would be spending up to 30 weeks a year in Europe training with my ski team, Team Evolution Racing. Evo are a British run, Austrian based team in Radstadt, training in Reiteralm and the surrounding Schladming area as well as indoor slopes around Europe and the glaciers of Austria, Italy, France, Switzerland and Chile. This is where the Alpenverein Britannia, came into things. Back in 2021 they contacted me and my dad to talk about a potential grant for me. This was after there had been a couple of news stories about me on national television, about my skiing and my dream to go out to Austria and train with Evo. Nothing had been agreed with the team yet and we were still gripped by the pandemic, but having a dream to keep me going was all I needed. I had spent all of 2020 doing so much of my gymnastics and ski training at home during lockdowns and it was a great way to get me through things. As things were improving with travel etc, we as a family took the decision for me to sign with the team in May 2021 and my first alpine season was in front of me. I received my grant to help me through 2022.

This was going to be a huge change for me as I was so used to being at home with my mum and dad and my cat. I had only had four one-week ski holidays and three weeks of alpine training before this, but the thought of getting to train in Europe was incredible. My first season with the team was a huge learning curve for me having to deal with all my ski prep, organising time, training every day, going to school in the afternoon, ski prep or fitness in the evening and then lights out and phones handed in at 21.00 every night. At 06.30/07.00, lights on and start it all again. This was just like being in a World Cup team! And that was the whole idea. We are lucky to have British World Cup and Olympic racer Alex Tilley in our team and we all aspire to make it as far as her. By the time they have finished racing in children’s racing, most of the children’s team are already part of the GB team and that is my goal as well.

I would have loved that to happen last year, but race results didn’t go my way, even though I was making great gains in my training. It certainly was a steep learning curve going from a 120m plastic slope in inner city Birmingham to the mountains of Austria! When I’m away training it is for anything from one week at a time to blocks of five weeks, which is pretty tough when you are only 14.

Since I’ve been back home after the end of the Season in April, I have still gone back to Europe every month to train, either at a base for physical camps or in the snowdomes of Belgium and the Netherlands. This is invaluable as the glaciers have really suffered this summer from very hot weather and a winter of poor snow depth.

In the summer in the UK we have a domestic race season on the plastic slopes and indoors. I’ve had a successful summer and am unbeaten indoors at U16 and have had some strong results on the plastic as well, even though I decided at the start of the year I would be doing much less on plastic as I wanted to concentrate on my Alpine and indoor racing.

The summer has seen me become:

I’ve only had one race I didn’t finish this summer, one race where I was 5th, and every other race has been a win or on the podium. Really happy with these results. The Lowlands Championships are a series of races that take place every September between some of the best racers from the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Iceland, Luxembourg, Ireland and the UK. I am over the moon to be 2022 Lowlands overall champion and hope that all of these results will form a platform for my winter season this year.

I’ll be back in Austria and Italy in October for my autumn glacier block, getting back on the giant slalom skis, and then from mid-November my winter season starts with a five-week block until Christmas. Then in January a very busy schedule of racing starts and hopefully my GB children’s team selection. This will be the first steppingstone to my dream of winning a Junior International, starting FIS (International Ski Federation) racing and then on to being a World Cup racer and Olympian. I have a mantra “When it gets hard, keep going. When it gets easy, make it hard!”

All this is possible through sacrifices from my family and support from my sponsors Rossignol, Panda Optics and Briko UK, as well as the AAC(UK) and their generous grant, which helps towards my training or equipment costs. It’s equivalent to a week’s training or two sets of race skis after the discount I receive from Rossignol. I also could not do this without the support of my school in Birmingham that allows me to travel to Europe to train and send all my work out to me to complete. My education is just as important to me as my skiing and I hope to get a scholarship to study and train in America, racing within the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) college setup.Thank you, AAC(UK), for being part of this amazing journey.

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2022 Child Championship – Photos by Stuart Brown


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George Brown


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On plastic


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Podium finish


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