Colourful ski show

Press, 22 July 1989, Page 34

Colourful ski show

Dave Valenti, of the Volvo Ski Show, believes that this year’s performance by the world-renowned stunt team at Coronet Peak could be the most impressive yet. Valenti, an American aerials specialist, is the first team member to arrive in Queenstown for next week’s show.

"It’s certainly a very interesting theme this year — Modern Times. It’s definitely the best year for costumes, and we’ve introduced a lot of new music so all in all it’s going to be a very colourful show,” Valenti said. The two performances on the final week-end of the Kiwi Lager Queenstown Winter Festival (July 29 and 30) will be a reunion for the Volvo performers. The team disbanded at the end of the Northern Hemisphere winter after a dozen shows in the United States and Europe, which attracted crowds of between 5000 and 15,000. "We all go our separate ways to train or do our own shows, so it's great to get back together again for an occasion like this. It won’t be that hard to learn the routines again, but we’ll have

to work on the choreography,” Valenti said.

The American is also excited about teaming up again with two of the best known names in freestyle ski-ing, Dan Herby and Bob Legasa. The pair performed only once with Volvo last year as they travel with their own stunt ski-ing show, but have rejoined the team for this one-off Southern Hemisphere visit.

An innovative twist to the show this year is the introduction of snowboarding. Valenti professes to having “a litle fun” doing snowboard jumps off one side of the main jumping ramp.

A rookie member of the team this year is Chuck Bass, who is from Valenti’s home town in Washington State. “Chuck’s got some of the hottest ballet tricks around.”

Bass and Valenti also perform together in a travelling show which includes trampolining, ski jumps on to an air bag, and tricks on a revolving carpet ski simulator.

Meanwhile, the Winter Festival will begin today with a number of downtown events including an underwater

treasure hunt, jelly wrestling and a precision coach driving contest. The on-mountain events begin tomorrow with a “ski down” by the instructors of both Coronet Peak and The Remarkables. Also at Coronet Peak tomorrow will be a children’s day while the Peak-to-Park relay starts from the halfway point of the main chairlift.

Among the main mountain events during the rest of the week are the Mountain Bike Downhill biathlon at The Remarkables on Monday, the Sno Board slalom at Coronet Peak on Tuesday, the Dog Derby at Coronet on the Thursday and the Boogie in the Bumps moguls contest there the next day. The Volvo Ski Show’s performances will be at 12.30 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday. The downtown programme next week includes a Mardi Gras on Tuesday evening, the waiters’ race, cow chip tossing and birdman competition on Wednesday, the annual dog barking contest on Thursday, a spaghetti eating competition on Friday and the Snow Queen Ball on the Saturday evening.