Wanjiku’s downhill run keeps uphill Olympic ski dream alive

Not many Kenyans are aware that the World Ski Championships have been running at the Swiss ski resort of St Moritz.

Meaning that very few will have heard of a Kenyan skiing sensation hitting the headlines at these championships that are a build-up to next year’s Winter Olympic Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea.

Sabrina Wanjiku Simader, 18, finished 39th in the women’s ‘Super-G’ race on Tuesday as she continued her quest to represent Kenya in Pyeongchang where she will be the first Kenyan professional woman skier at a Winter Olympics.

Seven others failed to go past the first run in Tuesday’s gruelling competition.

Kenya has been represented three times at the Winter Olympics by Philip Boit (in 1998, 2002 and 2006) who competed in cross country skiing.

What makes Wanjiku’s quest more interesting is the fact that she has specialised in the fast alpine ‘Super-G’ competition.

The ‘Super-G’, or ‘super giant slalom’, is raced downhill with obstacles or ‘gates’ which competitors have to race through on a winding course in a race against time. It has been an Olympic sport since 1988.

Wanjiku, the only African in Tuesday’s competition, was over eight seconds behind Austria’s winner Nicole Schmidhofer, whom the former knows only too well as the Kenyan sensation is also based in Austria where she moved with her mother Sarah at the age on three.

With her stepfather Josef running a lift in the ski resort of Hansberg in upper Austria, Wanjiku was, naturally, bitten by the skiing bug and developed huge interest in the sport, representing Kenya at last year’s Lillehammer 2016 Winter Youth Olympic Games where she was ranked 26th in the ‘giant slalom’ and 23rd in the ‘super-G.’

She made her World Cup debut last month in the giant slalom.

“She is doing very well and we hope that by the Winter Olympics next year, she will be a dependable Kenyan representative,” National Olympic Committee of Kenya secretary Francis Paul said in Nairobi.

The Kenyan Olympics organisation is supposed to help finance Wanjiku’s programme with the Austria-based teenager having taken up the sport on a professional level, attracting sponsorship from, among others Sky Sports TV and Austria’s Planai Ski Resort.

Meanwhile, the unforgiving face of alpine skiing was shown off Wednesday with a handful of skiers at the world championships in St Moritz taken to hospital with injuries.

Austrian Mirjam Puchner suffered a horrendous crash in women’s downhill training, losing control over a jump and landing heavily.