Cypress Hills ski club proudly watches freestyle skier Amy Fraser ascend to Olympics
CBC
Medicine Hat in the southern Alberta Prairies isn’t an obvious launch pad for an Olympic skier, but a small ski club in the nearby Cypress Hills is proudly watching one of their own on the slopes of the Milano-Cortina Games.
Amy Fraser will compete in her second Olympic Games this month, 20 years after she first learned to ski with the Elkwater Ski Club.
“I honestly think it’s the perfect place to grow up skiing,” Fraser told CBC News from Team Canada’s freestyle training facility in Switzerland.
The Medicine Hat-raised Fraser finished in the top 10 at the 2022 Beijing Games and secured a FIS World Cup win in halfpipe after the now 30-year-old took up the event in university.
Before that, Fraser was a ski-racing teen based at the little known Hidden Valley Ski Resort in the far southeast corner of Alberta — about 400 kilometres from the nearest major ski hill in the Rockies.
Now, flying up above the edge of a halfpipe, she credits weekends at the local hill learning fundamentals — and the camaraderie of a club — for keeping her in the sport.
“I was pretty aware that we didn’t have the same advantage as kids living in Calgary, training every night at [Canada Olympic Park] and going to the mountains every weekend and training on steep pitches,” Fraser said.
“We were skiing in the Hat. There’s only one slope remotely close to what we’d be racing on … but we were kids, and I didn’t care.”
Hidden Valley Ski Resort, a six-run, provincially operated ski hill, sits about halfway along the drive from Medicine Hat to the Montana border.
It only boasts one black diamond run, but it’s cherished by the local ski community and defended as a rare asset on the Prairies.
“If you can ski Elkwater, you can ski anywhere in Canada,” said Peter Roberts, who founded the racing wing of the local club and coached Fraser.
The goal was to foster and challenge young talent, he said, and in Fraser, Roberts saw a young athlete with a good mindset, great stance on her skis and a love of the slopes.
“She had that innate talent that I knew she was going to make something of herself,” he said.
Roberts, a British Army veteran, fell in love with ski racing while stationed in Germany. Deployed to Canada, he pushed to grow the club after the 1988 Calgary Olympics.
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