45
Harvest & Holiday 2013
Escarpment Magazine
ESCARPMENT FEATURE
|
on the road to sochi
Q:
How has riding on the Escarpment helped you hone your
skills for the world stage?
A:
It’s sort of not intuitive when you think about where the great snow-
boarding athletes would come from. One would assume it’s from out
West, either BC or Alberta but I think the best athletes come from On-
tario. With our weather our winter snow is always very compact, very
icy and it’s rare to see a true powder day. So the trade off for never see-
ing waist deep snow is that you become great at carving and turning
on the ice, which just so happens to be the conditions we race on. Com-
ing from Devils Glen, one of the steeper hills in the area, I loved going
fast and you start to loose the fear of going fast when every other slope
you go on seems like a green run in comparison.
Q:
Where do you train?
A:
In the summer most of our training consists of dryland. We spend 6
days a week in the gymworking out at the national sport centers. Every
few weeks we get back on snow to keep our 'touch' fresh. For that we
need to follow the snow so our op-
tions are a little limited. We tend
to go to the snowfields in Mount Hood, Oregon. After that we usually
spend the month of August down in New Zealand to get on some true
winter snow during the Northern hemisphere's summer.
Q:
Do you have any advice for up-and-coming athletes?
A:
My advice is to ignore the pain. There will be a lot of tough
and uncomfortable situations and it takes
grinding to progress to the
top. However it’s tempo-
rary and it pushes your
comfort zone. All of a sud-
den those tough things don't
seem so hard anymore and
the more you push the more
you'll grow.
Matthew Carter
Age: 23
Sport & Discipline: Snowboard Parallel Giant
Slalom and Parallel Slalom
Member Canadian National Snowboard Team
Home Club: Devils Glen Country Club
photo Courtesy Canada Snowboard
photo | Oliver Kraus
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My advice to
up-and-coming
athletes is to ignore
the pain.
