Three N.Z. women skiers in C.S.A. top team

Press, 1 June 1989, Page 39

Three N.Z. women skiers in C.S.A. top team

Three New Zealand women’s A team members, Adele Coberger, Annelise Coberger and Juliet Johnston, feature in the Canterbury Ski Association teams for 1989, announced yesterday. All three represented New Zealand in the world alpine ski-ing championships in Vail/Beaver Creek, Colorado, last February with Johnston scoring the best result. Her twenty-first placing in the women's slalom came in bitterly cold conditions from a start number of 51. In the sun at the top of the course the temperature was minus 18 degrees.

For the rest of the northern season, Johnston was based in France where she had spent two months training on the glaciers in October and November. When she comes home this month she will train at Mount Hutt with the French coach, Christian Vigezzi. Another top skier nan.cd in the Canterbury A team is Juliet Satterthwaite who com-

bined tertiary studies with ski-racing during the northern winter.

She was a sports science student at Colorado Mountain College in Steamboat Springs and her college ski team was the women’s champion team at the U.S. Collegiate ski-ing championships. In the process, Satterthwaite was twice named to the All-American team.

Satterthwaite will be spending two weeks at a summer ski camp at Mount Hood, before returning to New Zealand for August and September and racing for the Canterbury team. The Coberger sisters were based at Radstadt, Austria, Annelise arriving there with Queenstown’s Janey Blair on December 2 and Adele four weeks later. Both significantly reduced their F.I.S. points over the seaons and Annelise now has a world ranking about No. 159 for slalom (46 points). The other Canterbury skiers training and racing

overseas included the New Zealand B team member. Guy Davies, who spent two weeks at Mammoth Mountain, California, • before moving on to Europe where he raced downhill for the first time.

Two Canterbury members of the national development team, Stefan Coberger and Andrew Gooding, were in a training camp at Red Mountain, British Columbia, while Hana Coberger, aged 14, had a month’s training with the Mammoth Mountain race team.

In releasing the C.S.A. ski teams for the 1989 season, the convener of the racing committee, Jenny Shiel, said the teams showed the strength of club coaching programme when there have been two scarce snow seasons.

At present the racing committee is looking at a proposal for a change of direction in the C.S.A. scholarship programme, aiming at skiers aged 10 and 11.

In the past the programme has catered for 13 and 14-year-olds which Jenny Shiel regards as too late to start racing. The teams are: Canterbury A team: Girls: Adele Coberger, Annelise Coberger, Juliet Johnston (Mount Hutt); Juliet Satterthwaite (Porter Heights). Boys: Guy Davis, Stefan Coberger, Andrew Gooding, Chris Knight, Guy Saxton (all Mount Hutt). Canterbury B teams: Girls: Hana Coberger, Alice Gilroy, Gabriel Satterthwaite (all Porter Heights); Anna Tipping (Mount Hutt); Jacqui Matheson (Mount Cheeseman). Boys: Connell Burke, Toby Buxton (Mount Hutt); Bryan Davies (Cheeseman). Canterbury development team: Boys: Dominic Adams, Fraser Brown, John Quirke, Marcus Saxton, Samuel Saxton (all Mount Hutt); Greg Diaper (Cheeseman); Daniel Rogers (Broken River). Girls: Emily Rudkin, Julia Walker (Mount Hutt).