Why I’m so crazy about skiing?

To understand ma passion about skiing, one has to understand the many moments in my life when my skiing was so frustrated and so repressed that it built-up a pent-up desire that turned into an obsessive intensity inside my mind. 

Just look at the events that peppered my life: 

As a kid, I was longing for good equipment as I only had to make to with the skis my Dad hand-carved for me and that made me very self conscious and put me at a disadvantage with other kids. 

Shortly thereafter, I got my “real skis” made by Duret which were a step in the right direction, but image-wise couldn’t quite compete against the most fortunate kids’ Rossignol 41, Soupless our Dynamic skis. 

Just after that, as I was working as a liftie during school vacations, I was intensely envious of the kids from the racing team training, wearing racing stretch pants, tight jackets and buckle boots. 

Then in boarding school, I wasn’t unable to go and ski with the few skiers lucky enough to spend their Thursday afternoon skiing while I had to stay. 

The military was also a catastrophe for my skiing, I found myself near Marseilles, far from my mountain, missing two winter of skiing, and to make things worse, missed a chance of teaching skiing to pilots at Méribel, by missing a more propitious entry time by just two months. 

After this, things got much better until my desperate search for a year-round career got me out of the mountains starting in 1974 while I was still skiing a bit, to places where skiing frequently wasn’t an option (Nevers and New York) and that exile lasted through 1985. 

During all that time, I always promised myself that “one day”, I’d ski more, I’d even ski a lot, “when, I’d finally get a chance”. That day, I’m grateful to say arrived and it’s now!