Winter Olympics beckon

16/10/2009

Ben Koons (1999-2000), New Zealand’s fastest cross-country skier, is cut from Kiwi cloth but little is known about him here in his country of birth.

Ben is a member of the national cross country ski squad and is in line to qualify for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada. He missed qualification by just half a point at the Winter Games in New Zealand in August.

Ben Koons

The squad will contest a series of races in a number of northern hemisphere locations over the next three months in an effort to join Katie Calder, who has qualified for Vancouver and who is now an automatic selection. Calder will be the first New Zealand cross country skier at an Olympic Games since Madonna Harris completed an amazing double in 1988 – competing at the summer Olympics in Seoul as a road cyclist and then as a cross country skier at the winter Games in Calgary.

Ben first experienced skiing on snow-covered farmland at Waitati and had dabbled in cross country skiing on school trips to John and Mary Lee’s Snow Farm at Cardrona.

When he was 14, he moved to the United States with his family with the life style there giving him the opportunity to taking skiing further. He won a scholarship to further his tertiary education at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, where he trained with a top coach, Ruff Paterson, and his team-mates included Olympians and national champions.

He graduated in March and this winter worked as a Snow Farm ski instructor, teaching high school pupils the basics of cross country skiing. Ben has held a similar job in past seasons but didn’t work in New Zealand last winter because he was in Rwanda, on a volunteer United Nations programme, building small hydro systems for villagers.

Before competing at the Winter Games, Ben and his brother Nils cycled 3,894 kilometres through mountainous Tibet in 54-day trek.

During that time they took just three showers, shared 284 packets of instant noodles and each lost about seven kilograms in weight.

‘‘It was an incredible thing, a wild country, a tough country,” Ben said.

“We were by ourselves, camping the whole way. The toughest part was in West Tibet. It was a long, long way between villages. Getting enough food was a problem,’’

There were many issues with bureaucracy and permits and the Chinese authorities shut down their blog. Ben was also bitten by a dog, resulting in another trip highlight: a visit to a rabies clinic in Lhasa.