Life after Skiing

Rob Rees met up with Emily Sarsfield OY at the ‘City Ski Championships’ in Crans Montana to understand more about her career, what drove her to be a successful Olympic athlete and life after skiing.

Emily Sarsfield is the pioneer of British women’s skiercross, finally achieving her Winter Olympian goal in South Korea 2018. She had been cruelly denied two much earlier visits through an horrendous injury in 2010 and the bungling bureaucrats of GB’s snowsports in 2014.

Emily is now happily retired from competitive skiing but she is still very much involved in wintersports, running European Marketing for clothing brand Spyder, as well as commentary duties for Eurosport.

Within minutes, you realise one thing ….. Emily is not a quitter. She combines a steely nerve and inner strength with the most beguiling smile. Against the odds, she came back from a potentially career-ending knee blowout sustained at the Vancouver Winter Olympics test event on Blue Mountain in 2009. She is friendly, authentic and utterly normal.

Emily grew up in Durham, one of two sisters with parents both involved with teaching and immersed in a sporty environment where gymnastics and tennis abounded. Thirty hours a week of gymnastics was the norm as a young girl. Her PE teacher father Ernie organised budget ski trips for the state schools in the Durham area. So from the age of about three Emily and her older sister Victoria were indoctrinated into the world of skiing both on these chaotic group trips and personal family ski holidays. Long coach journeys to the Alps were tolerated for an early love of the real thing. Her first ever ski trip aged 3 was to tiny Götzens, Austria, now part of the Innsbruck Olympia Ski World.

Emily was in the same Snowsports Club as Dave Ryding in the north of England and was talented enough as a teenager to progress from the artificial ski slopes to the English Schools ski team in slalom, GS and Super G. She was a year behind Chemmy Alcott in the GB system but Emily really did it the hard way, as Dave Ryding has done. Whilst Dave skied on the brushes at Pendle, Emily was based out of the ski slope at Sunderland Ravens Ski Club, a million miles away from the Alps and the comfy surroundings of a wealthy Surrey suburb. Along the way, Emily got her BASI instructors badges and qualified in sports massage to maximise her ski time.

Emily was pretty much retiring from competitive Alpine skiing at the 2005 University Championships in Les Contamines near Megève. She’d just completed a sports science degree at Loughborough University with a respectable 2-i. Emily was ready to have a year off to kick back, enjoy the mountains and ski for fun again.

At these goodbye University championships, someone casually mentioned that Emily was pretty ballsy and her ”all or nothing” attitude to alpine ski racing was very well suited to the embryonic sport of skiercross. Before she knew it, her coach Duncan had entered her for the skiercross competition as the ultimate swansong …… and the rest is history.

This first race in Les Contamines was a salutary lesson in the dangers of this sport. It also allowed Emily to play to her key strengths – never giving up and always finding a creative way to get to her end goal. Face planting into the bank on a ‘gap jump’ on her very first ever run, badly whiplashed she dusted herself off, was advised by a watching Slovenian coach to “just go for it” and launch herself properly at the same jump next time around. She subsequently completed the run with flying colours, finished in 6th place and was totally hooked!

Funding was non existent on tour in 2006 – skiercross was essentially an amateur sport. Aged 21, continually scrimping, and blagging help, she would tip up in a battered Peugeot 105 with her Aussie fellow competitor Susan Sauvey to events on the new World Cup circuit. But they were carefree, happy, adventurous times. Over the years and as the sport professionalised, Emily had support from a wide stable of brands from Animal to POC to Head. She finally graduated to Stöckli, Luzern’s premium specialist Swiss ski manufacturer.

PYEONGCHANG-GUN, SOUTH KOREA – FEBRUARY 23: Emily Sarsfield of Great Britain competes during the Freestyle Skiing Ladies’ Ski Cross 1/8 Finals on day fourteen of the PyeongChang 2018 Winter Olympic Games at Phoenix Snow Park on February 23, 2018 in Pyeongchang-gun, South Korea. (Photo by Matthias Hangst/Getty Images)

Life After Skiing

Emily now lives in West London with her husband, ex-London Irish rugby player Kieran Power. He’s Director of Sport & Performance at nearby Rosslyn Park RFC.

Spyder is a ski brand Emily adores working for. Spyder is a true story of risky entrepreneurship. Set up by David Jacobs in his kitchen in Boulder Colorado in 1978, he was 1957 Canadian Downhill Champion, first full-time head coach for the Canadian National Ski Team 1964-66 and the inventor of the eponymous Lange competition race boots. Ski racing is its very DNA, famed for the yellow spider’s web skisuits and long-standing sponsorship of the US ski team. But Emily is helping them develop a broader range of apparel and more of the layering systems beloved of European skiers.

Emily‘s parents eventually decided to invest in an apartment in Méribel. This was a better use of family money than hiring training accommodation and living from season to season on a shoestring.

Not surprisingly, her perfect ski day would begin with a good coffee under the duvet with hubby in an überposh chalet in Méribel, looking out at the Tarentaise mountains, before a full-on powder day with local guide Derek Chandler.

“We’d get the first fresh tracks and ski until 2pm before heading down to La Folie Douce for a long late lunch, with lashings of Rosé.

A few dances on the tables with Kieran who has joined me for lunch. Then stagger down to the Lodge du Village to meet parents Janet and Ernie to catch the band ‘Bring Your Sisters’. Back to the luxury pad, chill out and then a few famous skiers back for dinner. “

Emily’s heavyweight guest list would be Bode Miller, Hermann Maier and Picabo Street. She admires the adversity they all overcame. “They were all a little bit maverick and rose to the top the hard way on pure talent and grit, battling big injuries in the process”.

But the far lighter philosophy of Emily’s I most admired was “If you’re lucky enough to be in the mountains, you’re lucky enough”.