Local skier Kara Siegle earned a silver medal at the 2012 Alberta Winter Games Feb. 10-11, doing her fellow Tawatinaw Valley Freeriders and Westlock-area residents proud.
Contrary to an incorrect report in last week’s Westlock News, she took second place in the girls 14-15 slopestyle event — although all local skiers struggled in the mogul event.
Siegle finished the event with a score of 73.2, slightly behind the first-place score of 79.2 and well ahead of the third-place score of 61.0. The medal is especially sweet, she said, because she had a rough first run.
“I was pretty excited,” she said. “It’s great because I fell on my first run.”
Her second run proved to be just what she needed, though, as she landed a difficult trick to earn the higher score.
“When I landed my 360 on the second run, it was a huge relief,” she said.
A 360, as the name implies, is one full rotation. Siegle said that in practice, she is able to land that trick about half the time, so it was a bit of a gamble to attempt it during the competition. That gamble obviously paid off, however, and she brought home the hardware to prove it.
To have earned a silver medal does not necessarily surprise the young skier. She said she went into the competition expecting to place relatively high, based on her knowledge of other skiers in the province from the many tournaments she has attended with the Freeriders.
The added bonus to the winter games competition, she said, is to be able to compete at the provincial level on her home turf, and to have other skiers in the province see what Tawatinaw has to offer.
“Lots of people said they really enjoyed the jump run,” she said.
The one shortfall of the competition space, she added, was the length of the mogul run.
“The moguls themselves are great, but everybody thinks the course should be longer — but we don’t have anywhere to put a longer course,” she said.
Nonetheless, the run worked well for the event and Siegle said she’s proud to have seen her home hill host such a big-ticket event.
“It was great for people I know from other hills to be able to see Tawatinaw, because nobody really knew where Tawatinaw was and now they do,” she said.
