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Yukon alpine skiers reach new speeds at Silver Star

Yukon Alpine Ski Team’s Charlie Hawes has reached triple digits.
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Yukon Alpine Ski Team’s Charlie Hawes has reached triple digits.

Hawes and two teammates satisfied a need for speed at the Okanagan Speed Camp at Silver Star Mountain Resort near Vernon, B.C., Jan. 27-29.

At the camp, which included two days of training and one of competition, Hawes was clocked at 101 kilometres an hour.

In fact, all three Yukon skiers — Hawes, Shane Orban and Manas Sarin-Toews — surpassed 92 km/h on the radar.

“When they have speed events at that age group they always (require) you there for three days. You have to do training runs on the track because of the high speed,” said Alpine Yukon head coach Yves Titley. “They were averaging 96 km/h to 101 km/h.”

Triple digits translated into double bronze for Hawes. The 16-year-old placed third in both races on the long course.

Orban placed seventh and sixth in the two races while Sarin-Toews took ninth and 10th.

“Usually in slalom and GS it’s like fifty-something seconds (to finish). That track and at that speed they were finishing in 1:19,” said Titley. “So between third (at) 1:19.59, and seventh was 1:22, that’s less than three seconds apart.”

All three skiers represented Yukon at 2016 Arctic Winter Games in Nuuk, Greenland. Hawes won a gold in slalom while Orban sped to gold in parallel slalom and silver in slalom.

“The three boys who went down had never done a speed camp or raced on those long skis,” said Titley. “Every run they were getting faster and their times were getting faster, so they were getting used to the skis and the track, which was very good.”

The speed camp came two weeks after Alpine Yukon sent six skiers to the Teck Okanagan Race at Sun Peaks Resort in B.C.

In giant slalom races on Jan. 14, Wesley Vangel took 14th, Clayton Chapman 17th, Naoise Dempsey 27th and Orin Gladwin 32nd in U14 boys. Mollie Fraser placed 26th in U14 girls. Greta Gladwin was disqualified after missing the final gate but bounced back to take 14th in slalom the next day, two spots up from Fraser.

Vangel placed 19th out of 40 in the U14 boys slalom. His teammates didn’t finish.

“A lot of people were falling on that slalom course,” said Titley.

“Those are pretty big races for those kids. Clayton Chapman had never raced in an Outside race before. Naoise Dempsey is in just his second year on the team and managed to finished 27th in the GS, so that’s pretty good. Little errors here and there, but little errors can cost you five or six positions.”

Contact Tom Patrick at tomp@yukon-news.com