04 Feb 2010
At the very top level, it’s hard to judge an athlete until you’ve seen them up close, doing what they’re best at. You might think you know about football, but go and watch a Premier League game from pitch level, and suddenly you start to see nuances of movement that you’ve never noticed before. Same with anything world-class  – a top golfer’s perfect swing, the visceral pounding of rugby, or the speed and bounce that long-distance runners maintain for twenty or thirty minutes at a time.

Often we’re surprised because television can sanitise these sports and make them look too easy. Watch on telly, and anybody can race a car, or hit that backhand, or ride a snowboard. But, of course, we can’t. That’s why we’re watching, and they’re doing.

So today, I spent some time on the slopes of Calgary’s Olympic Park with our half-pipe snowboard team, watching how they go about their business. I wanted to know more about the sport, and about Team GB’s riders – Ben Kilner and Lesley McKenna.

First things – a half-pipe is big. I went down it – rather gingerly - on skis and felt like the sun had been blotted out. It’s 22 feet tall – in other words, it’s as tall as a house – and the compacted ice makes those walls as hard as concrete.

It’s also intimidating. At the top of the wall, it’s a sheer drop, rather than the smooth incline it resembles when you’re watching from a distance. Watching Ben and Lesley drop into the pipe, I was constantly amazed that they managed to keep control on a vertical drop. Needless to say that, despite requests, I didn’t give it a go. I know my limits and they are way, way too fragile for this.
Instead, I stood on the top of the wall, and watched the training runs. And that’s when I had that “close up, they are brilliant” moment. Within a minute, both Ben and Lesley came up the wall of the pipe right in front of me, turning in the air, their eyes completely focused on what they were doing, their balance perfect, the confidence allied to considerable bravery.

At one point Lesley came so near to me that I backed away and later apologised, assuming I’d put her off. Instead, the concentration required for the run had rendered her oblivious to the fact I’d even been there. I suspect she could have knocked my head off and only noticed when she saw the nasty marks on the board.

But traditions have to be followed, and it does seem that one of the rules of snowboarding is that someone always has to crash so, being the obliging guy he is, Ben wiped out on one of his runs, bounced off the top and landed in a heap. But a minute or two later, he was up and smiling again, a victim of nothing more than a desire to push the limits of his own ability.
And that’s what keeps these guys going. For a nation that has so little in the way of wintersport facilities, and where funding is so tight, Britain does have a remarkable crop of world-class wintersport athletes.

They’re here in Canada because they want to represent their country in the best competition of all, and because they want to judge themselves against the best in the world when the pressure is greatest. All they require of us is to cheer them on, and wish them well. And really, it’s not much to ask.