To say that my best friend is not sporty would be to drastically understate the matter. He does not do sport, he does not do exercise and he has two left feet. It was, therefore, something of a surprise when he decided to join me in taking up skiing and on our first trip I discovered just how perilous the sport can be and I don’t just mean on the piste!

Starting Out

Our trip began with a private lesson which did not go well for my friend. He found it very hard to get the hang of things and had the instructor in a rage! He eventually got to the point where he could traverse a slope slowly and then took the foolish decision to try out the chair lift. Things went reasonably well when we got onto the lift but went literally downhill from there. On reaching the top of the lift my friend did not manage the dismount well. Actually he did not manage it at all and was knocked over by the advancing chair and shot along the ground taking out another skier at the knee caps. He came to a halt in tangled mess of body and skis narrowly avoiding two more skiers and a fence.

Drag Lift

Having come to grieve on the chair lift you would think he would confine his adventures to the nursery slopes below but he didn’t. He decided to try the drag lift and set off in that direction shouting “what’s the worst that can happen?” With raised eyebrows I watched him disappear into the entrance of the lift and then saw the system stop. My heart sank as I thought surely he hasn’t had a disaster again? My fears were confirmed later when he explained that he had got confused and tried to sit down but, of course, there is no seat on a drag lift and so he crashed in the station causing the operator to stop the lift. He had to be helped back to his feet before finally making it up the slope.

Carpet Lift

The next day we visited a different resort and decided to practise a bit on the nursery slope which had a carpet lift. I felt this would be a trouble free morning but I was so wrong. My friend’s first attempt at using the carpet lift ended in a nightmare. He fell over trying to slide onto the carpet and could not get up again. Another skier and the lift operator had to pull him off the carpet but by the time they had managed this and stopped the equipment one ski was half way up the hill! This was eventually retrieved and things carried on without incident until we decided to take the cable car to the top of the mountain to try out a couple of small slopes at the summit. After a bit of skiing we decided to return down the mountain only for my friend to forget to take his skis off to enter the cable car station resulting in him falling over the turnstile and getting jammed backwards in the gate. I pretended I wasn’t with him!

Horses for Courses

As things turned out my friend could manage skiing and was improving with every new day on the slopes but he just couldn’t use the various lifts without causing a major incident. The only saving grace was that in the final escapade on the cable car despite smashing his arm quite badly he had managed not to damage the Tarvisio and Sella Nevea would be quite happy never to see us again!

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Article by Sally Stacey