It was another clean sweep for the Vernon Ski Club K1 girls division at the TECK sponsored Sun Peaks Giant Slalom race last weekend.
Amelia Smart took home three gold medals and won the overall weekend race points.
Winning each of her Saturday races by close to one second, Smart put the hammer down on Sunday to win the combined time race by a huge margin of 3.53 seconds.
Smart is the overall No. 1-ranked K1 girl in the Okanagan zone, which qualifies her for the K1 Western Championships at Silver Star Mountain Resort, Feb. 18-20.
Smart will be joined by teammates Ravinder Vliet, the No. 1 Okanagan slalom skier, and Katie MacGillivray. Both girls also posted top-10 results at Sun Peaks with Vliet placing fifth and seventh, and MacGillivray earning an eighth and the two fourths she needed to qualify her for westerns.
Despite most of the K2 team battling the flu all weekend, four K2 girls posted consistent top-10 finishes.
Noemie Petit grabbed fifth place in all three races, Scout McWilliams an eighth and ninth, Siobhan Clancy a ninth and Lauren Armstrong a sixth and eighth. Armstrong also had the crash of the weekend. Sitting fifth after the first run on Sunday, Armstrong was charging the course to advance her position. Soft snow conditions caused her to loose a ski and sent her into a tumbling crash.
With only hundredths of a second separating him from the medals all season, Alex Roehrig finally claimed his place on the podium.
In both races on Saturday, Roehrig took fifth and sixth places respectively. In second place after the first run on Sunday, he was determined to stay in the running and laid down a clean second run to make it his day with his first K2 career bronze.
Teammate Matt Kreutz took home three top-10 finishes. Hamish Dunlop also took his first K2 top-10 of the season with a ninth Sunday.
“With two Okanagan zone race series completed so far this season, the December slalom races has been our most successful so far,” said Vernon Ski Club program director John Armstrong.
“I attribute some of this to the colder and firmer snow conditions that we trained slalom early season. Over the last few weeks there has been a lot of new snow and warmer than normal temperatures making the conditions too soft at times to safely train giant slalom.
The Vernon Ski Club K2 team is now focusing their training toward Super G and downhill to prepare for their provincial series starting Feb. 10-13, in Whistler. The K1 team will be training at Silver Star in preparation for the K1 Westerns.
