Former Cardrona HPC skier making his mark on Uni Snow Games

Press Release
(for immediate release)

Former Cardrona HPC skier making his mark on Uni Snow Games

Tuesday, August 30: Stefan Calder has seen the Uni Snow Games in action for more than four years – now he’s competing in it, and loving every minute.

The Auckland University student spent four winters training with the Cardrona High Performance Centre before he started university, where he saw the Uni Games every year.

Click for big version

“I used to come down to Wanaka for three and a half months every year, training at Cardrona, and before that trained at Treble Cone with a race team, so I saw the Uni Snow Games every year and it always looked like a lot of fun,” he said.

Calder, 19, entered the Uni Snow Games for the first time last year, and is certainly making his mark on the results table this year. The skier won the Giant Slalom on Sunday, and placed second in the Skier Cross on Monday. Tomorrow (August 31) he’s looking to continue that form in the parallel slalom.

“There are about four or five people competing this week who have all done race training before so it’s quite competitive between all of us,” he said.

“The four or five of us are all posting times within .3 of a second of each other so it’s a really small gap.”

“I’ve been really happy with my times and everyone from Auckland is going well. It’s fantastic, I’m really happy.”

Calder is studying bio-medical engineering at Auckland University and, with today (Tuesday August 30) a day off the mountain, he has been stuck into the study.

He is one of 25 Auckland University students who have made the trip south for this week’s Uni Snow Games in Wanaka, and he said the team was loving the competition and the chance to meet up with fellow snow lovers from other New Zealand campuses.

“It’s been a great week so far, everyone gets on really well and all the campuses get on and interact with each other,” he said.

University Sport New Zealand National Events Manager Peter McDonald was looking forward to the Uni Snow Games action resuming tomorrow (Wednesday August 31), with the parallel slalom at Treble Cone.

“After two days of events, the week is going really well. The weather is holding out and hopefully the predicted snow will make for even better conditions for the rest of the week’s events,” he said.

ENDS

© Scoop Media