WHY I KEPT RACING: HOW SKIING FILLED MY WORLD WITH COLOUR

Written by Youth Advisory Council member, Nicole Bucur

“Racer ready.” You kick the snow off your skis.

“Three.” You close your eyes.

“Two.” You take a deep breath.

“One.” You smile. Always, you smile.

“Go!” And when you kick out of the start gate, everything except for the sound of plastic hitting freshly groomed snow fades away.

I fell in love with alpine skiing long before I was old enough to ride a chairlift on my own. My parents put me on skis almost as soon as I could walk, and some of my first memories are of barrelling down the hill on a powder day, hands frozen but heart happy.

When I started ski racing in the Junior Development League at Milton Heights Racing Club (a small, volunteer-based not-for-profit racing club outside of Toronto) at the age of seven, it was reluctantly—drills were never as fun as the moguls I skied with my parents. But the promise of catching a chairlift with my friends and a grilled cheese at lunch got me to the hill many early weekend mornings. When I look back on those years, it’s not the skiing I remember. It’s the forts I built with teammates after training sessions, the snowballs we hurled at our coaches on race days, and the sound of my friends’ laughter as we crowded into the photobooth at annual awards banquets.

As I got older and started racing on the travel team, it wasn’t quite the thought of a grilled cheese that got me out of bed on training days, but a love for something new: pushing the limits of how fast I could make it down the hill. While there’s no such thing as a perfect run, the desire to make each turn a little bit better than the last—and ski faster than my friends—gave me a sense of purpose. With each passing year, my teammates and I took fewer and fewer hot chocolate breaks as we tried to fit as many runs into a training session as possible.

Anything is within reach if I’m willing to work hard enough.”

As a young adult, I often think about how the time I spent on the mountain quietly laid the foundations for the person I have become off of it. It was the first place I wanted something deeply and set out to get it, and the experience showed me that anything is within reach if I’m willing to work hard enough. Each time my coaches yelled, “If you’re not falling, you’re not pushing hard enough!” I learned to welcome failure, embrace it, and learn from it. Their words currently sit, scribbled messily on a sticky note, on the corner of my desk. Most importantly, however, ski racing taught me how powerful it is to show up, even when it’s hard—especially when it’s hard. Because that’s the only way we grow: day after day, run after run, drill after drill. Years later, the work ethic, tenacity, and discipline I first acquired in a pair of ski boots follow me everywhere I go. Even today, the first thing I do when I sit down to write an exam is close my eyes, take a deep breath, and smile—because every start gate in my life takes me back to the mountain.

Beyond the racing itself, my memories of the travel team are painted with our coaches’ tired smiles as we badgered them mercilessly for feedback (and just one more run), our team’s deafening roar whenever one of our own was called up to the podium, and our parents’ words of encouragement from the bottom of the hill as they dutifully videoed our training runs so we could pick them apart later. Like anything else in life, ski racing takes a village. And over the years, ours came together.

Ski racing is an individual sport… Yet amid the competition, I found a community in my team unlike any other I’ve experienced.”

Ski racing is an individual sport: we train together, but each time I step into the start gate, I race against my teammates. Yet amid the competition, I found a community in my team unlike any other I’ve experienced. Their wins were my own, and mine theirs. So we spent countless training sessions coaching one another, taking turns standing at the bottom of the hill to watch teammates’ runs and offer whatever pointers we could. On race days, if you weren’t in the start gate yourself, you were either at the top of the hill, scraping snow off of a teammate’s boots before their race run, or at the bottom, ringing a cowbell as they crossed the finish line. The knowledge that there would always be a friend waiting for you at the finish, whether you had a good run or a bad one, became a hallmark of our community. And there were moments when this support made all the difference. When I fell mid-race and broke my leg in 2023, my teammate (and best friend) was the first person to get to me—before ski patrol, my coaches, or even my parents. She had seen my fall from the finish area and ran halfway up the mountain, in ski boots, to help. As she held my hand on the side of the hill, I felt an overwhelming sense of gratitude for the people this sport had brought into my life.

These days, I’m not racing as competitively anymore. I ski for the first breath of crisp winter air in my lungs, for the feeling of fresh corduroy under my skis, for the bounce of a perfect turn, and, as I always have, to catch up with friends on a chairlift.

We spent the morning camped out at the bottom of a women’s North American Cup race; I watched, awestruck, as some of the biggest names in Canadian women’s ski racing charged down the hill.”

But if you asked me five years ago, I wouldn’t have told you that I would still be racing today. As I got older, I told myself, season after season, that it would be my last year racing. Spoiler alert: I never stopped. As I write, I’m gearing up for my third season with the University of Ottawa’s Alpine Ski team. But in the moments I thought about putting away my racing skis, it wasn’t for a lack of love, but rather because I believed I had to be exceptional in order to justify continuing in the sport as I grew up. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I wasn’t alone: Canadian Women in Sport estimates that more than one in five girls leave sport during adolescence, compared to one in ten boys.

So why am I still racing? At the age of fourteen, my dad signed me up for a workshop for girls in ski racing hosted by Girls Forward Foundation (then Fast and Female) at Georgian Peaks Ski Club. We spent the morning camped out at the bottom of a women’s North American Cup race; I watched, awestruck, as some of the biggest names in Canadian women’s ski racing charged down the hill. Later that afternoon, I listened raptly as they spoke to us in a panel. I don’t remember much of the conversation, but I remember this: when asked what advice they had for us, they didn’t talk about results. Instead, they spoke about the joy the sport had brought them. One said, “Whatever you do, just keep racing.” Each time I quietly wondered if it was time to transition to coaching in the years that followed, I found myself back in that creaky, dusty clubhouse, hanging on these women’s every word. And I kept racing.

Looking back, I realize that being exceptional was never the point. Ski racing has profoundly shaped who I am today, welcomed me into a community of people I love deeply, and fostered a love for the outdoors that I will carry with me forever. The light that this sport has brought into my life will keep me returning to my racing skis for as long as I can. To the girls who are in the same place I was all those years ago, wondering whether to step away from sport or physical activity, my message to you is this: keep moving. I promise that it will colour your life, as it did mine, in the most beautiful and unexpected ways.