He lives in Britain, but competes for South Africa, and at just 16 Alexander Heath has qualified for the world cup skiing competition
SKIING: Julian Drew
ALEXANDER HEATH’S parents probably rue the day when Odibe Mfenyana gave their eight-year-old son a pencil case at his farewell party in Cape Town back in 1988. That innocent gift from his Bishop’s school mate has nearly put his family out of house and home.
The pencil case in question had a picture of a skier on it and it aroused young Alexander’s curiosity. ”I didn’t know what skiing was and I’d never seen snow before. I just said to my mum I wanted to do that,” he
A few days later the family left for England and Heath kept pestering his mother to take him skiing. Seven months later they discovered a dry ski slope about 10km from their home in Folkstone on England’s south coast. Today, at the tender age of 16, Heath is the top skier in Britain and South Africa and has already qualified for this year’s world cup series.
Sixteen is the youngest age that a skier becomes eligible to compete in the world cup, but this is a mere stepping stone towards Heath’s real goal which lies in Nagano in two-and-a-half years’ time. That is when the next Winter Olympic Games will take place.
While the thought of a South African skier at the Olympics creates an incongruous image at best, Heath is in fact a remarkable talent who has so far defied all accepted norms in his rapid rise and with the right opportunities could become a worldbeater.
In the beginning it wasn’t easy. The dry slope near his home, and all the other slopes in England, are made from a mesh of plastic with holes large enough to get your fingers caught in. After a year of on-off visits to the slope Heath competed for his primary school’s B team in a small inter-school meeting and his team won.
”After that I thought, yes, I’m going to do this and I became competitive but then I started to fall in nearly every race,” says Heath. That was because the club’s coach started to show an interest and he told Heath to ski at 60 percent speed in order to make fewer mistakes on the slalom course.
Heath found he couldn’t keep his balance when skiing slower and he had so many broken fingers and thumbs over the following three years that he’s lost count.
Heath’s big break (no pun intended) came when he went on a summer camp to Harrogate in Yorkshire with the Bell brothers who were Britain’s two top Olympic skiers. ”They were the first people to tell me to go faster and not hold back. From then on I started getting down races without falling and I just got better and better,” says Heath.
That was in July 1992 and that winter he went on a school skiing trip to Austria and skied on snow for the first time. His school coach was not very good at coaching on snow and Heath decided to apply to join Britain’s top snow skiing club, the rather quaintly named Down Hill Only Ski Club (DHO) based in Wengen, Switzerland.
”They wouldn’t accept him at first. We got a letter back saying that at 14 he was too old and that he would be wasting his time starting racing then. They said we would be wasting our money and he should rather just do it for fun. Then a month later they sent him another letter saying they would give him a chance at the British championships at Easter,” says his mother.
Heath went to those championships at Alpe d’Huez in France in 1993 not knowing what to expect. ”It was my first time to race on snow but one of the DHO coaches, Michael Drexler who’s an Austrian, put me on the right track and I ended up doing very well. I was in the top 10 for all three events (slalom, giant slalom and Super G) and I came eighth overall in the under-15 age group which was the highest placing by a DHO skier,” says Heath, whowas immediately snapped up by the club.
When his 60-percent coach found out he kicked him out of the Folkestone Ski Club and he had to join a club in Sandown more than 130km away. That just meant extra expenses and travelling time but it couldn’t stop Heath improving quickly, and during the 1993 dry season in Britain he started winning races for the first time.
Heath never really felt comfortable under his flag of convenience, however, and when, one day early in 1994 at Geneva Airport, he saw somebody with a Springbok Ski Club jacket on he introduced himself and decided to put his allegiance where his heart lay. That saw him return last July to compete in the South African National Snow Skiing Association (SANSSA) championships at Tiffindell in the Eastern Cape after becoming the top under-17 skier in Britain during the dry slope season. ”I was more nervous than before most of my races surprisingly enough. I won alright but it wasn’t a whitewash,” remembers Heath.
Perhaps the most important step in his career to date was when he spent five months at the Waterville Valley Ski Academy in America from November to March of this year. There Heath spent half his day studying and the rest of the day plus weekends skiing with around 30 residents of the college who include members of the United States and Canadian teams.
Just how good Heath really is can be gauged from the fact that he competed in several International Ski Federation (FIS) competitions while in America and he scored 96 points in one of them to qualify for this year’s world cup circuit for seniors. To qualify you must score under 120 penalty points in an official FIS
Unfortunately for Heath’s parents it is now costing them a fortune to finance their son’s skiing. A term at Waterville Valley costs R45 000 and they have mortgaged their house in England twice to raise money for him. In February this year he was invited to compete for South Africa at the world championships in Sierra Nevada, Spain, and they had to sell a plot of land in Kleinmond near Hermanus and his older sister sold her car to help
Unfortunately the world championships were cancelled through lack of snow but they had already incurred the costs and now sit with a return air ticket from Boston to Madrid which runs out in December. Money in fact is all that is likely to hold Heath back from becoming a world-class-skier, because his family and SANSSA are finding it difficult to raise sponsors and they have no money left.
They need to find R60 000 this year to send him back to Waterville Valley and get him to the world championships in Sierra Nevada, snow permitting, next
For now though Heath will concentrate on retaining his South African titles at Tiffindell this weekend and then he will spend three months at Hex Valley High School in De Doorns outside Cape Town, as he has done for the past two years.