Skiing: Engineering an Olympic feat

Ben Koons proves it's possible to be a high-performance athlete and have a social conscience. Photo / Getty Images

Cross-country skier Ben Koons ticks most of the boxes when it comes to being a high-performance athlete.

Long hours spent training - check.

Determined goal setter - check.

Develop and implement a micro hydro-power system to provide power to Rwandan villages - check.

Whoa. Back the bus up. Without being too facetious, elite athletes with big brains and a social conscience are sighted as commonly as polar bears on the savanna.

"It helps to keep things in perspective," says the 23-year-old Koons. "Being an athlete can be quite a self-centred endeavour and it is easy to lose track of what really matters. What is more important: that 1.7 billion people live without electricity, or my shin angle and how it relates to my skate skiing? Right now I am working more on the latter, maybe after Vancouver I'll try to do more for the 1.7 billion."

Koons will represent New Zealand at the Vancouver Olympics in cross-country after a number of outstanding performances this Northern Hemisphere winter. Koons was the first New Zealand male cross-country skier to have achieved the sub-100 International Ski Federation point standard, which he did in Finland in November.

Nordic skiing is increasingly popular in New Zealand but it is still not a conventional interest for one so young, but Koons is far from a conventional Kiwi.

Born to a Kiwi mum, Jean, and American father Peter, Koons was raised on an Otago sheep farm in Waitati before his parents moved to Maine when he was 14.

"My father moved to New Zealand in the late '70s to do a masters in geology and climb in the Southern Alps. He continued on as a professor at Otago University and became a New Zealand citizen. In 2002 my family moved to Maine temporarily for a number of reasons - education opportunities, career move, taking care of aging grandparents - and in time, the temporary move became permanent."

A skiing scholarship to Dartmouth College, a prestigious New England university, followed but there was never any question over which country Koons would represent.

"I have always felt like more of a Kiwi than an American though I was born with dual citizenship," he says. As if to confirm he is not a true New Englander, Koons confessed he did not follow the Boston Red Sox, has not read any Stephen King novels and would take a Speight's over a Budweiser.

"In '05 and '06 I took time off my studies at Dartmouth to ski for NZ. I became the first Kiwi to ski at the World Cup level in my attempt to qualify for the 2006 Turin Games. I was pretty young [19] and didn't make the cut but learned a lot about competing at that level."

As for the choice of Nordic over alpine skiing, Koons was left with little choice. A bad downhill crash during his second year at Otago Boys' High left him with a torn kidney and a two-week holiday in hospital.

"That put an end to my short-lived downhill racing career," Koons says. "Convenient timing really, because it is about the same time I was getting introduced to cross-country skiing."

Koons chose Dartmouth because of the ski programme but it is in the engineering school, and the environmental engineering department, where he has discovered true inspiration.

"I was drawn to environmental engineering for a number of reasons," Koons said. I am interested in the environment, but also the havoc that we humans, especially engineers, have wreaked upon it. Much of today's green design goes into incremental improvements in developed western nations - ie. slightly more efficient gizmos. I think there is huge ground to be made in developing countries that have the potential to leapfrog the mistakes and inefficiencies of the industrial countries and thus alleviate poverty on a huge scale. In my limited experience, doing engineering work in Rwanda is much more appealing than work in the States.

"As well as being much more pertinent, the issues, and solutions they demand, are much less cut-and-dried, have many more layers, require greater creativity, and perseverance, and have more tangible benefits."

Yes, you're still reading the sports pages.

Koons and younger brother Nils, also a promising cross-country skier and budding engineer, have a well-developed streak of adventure. They hitchhiked across Uganda to kayak the White Nile before many of the rapids became submerged under the Bujagali Dam project.

But by far their most ambitious undertaking was cycling from Kunming in China's south, into and across Tibet (not strictly legal), before finishing in the Urumqi province. The brothers called this adventure "autonomous cycling".

It begs the question, with all this going on, does it have an adverse effect on Koons' skiing?

"It is important to see the long-term picture," he says. "Obviously returning from Rwanda with internal parasites and jigger worms [worms that burrow under the human skin] coming out of my toes does not correlate directly to skiing faster. But at the same time, I doubt I would still be skiing if all I had done for the last five years was over-structured ski-specific training at the expense of everything else.

"Being an athlete also requires being a human, you cannot just be a robot about training and expect not to burn out. Well, maybe some can - Michael Phelps, perhaps - but I can't.

"Like all things, it's a balance. In skiing, everyone is looking for an edge but for the most part training is pretty standardised. Although I do plenty of text-book training I like to change it up. It's great to be standing on the start line and know that no one else in the race spent months cycling at 4000m eating only instant noodles."

When he takes to the start line in Vancouver his only declaration is to "represent New Zealand to the best of my ability and maybe a little more". Given that the average age of your top cross-country skiers is nearer 30 than 20, it is Sochi in four years' time when you can expect to see the best of him.

In between times, there is a another thought tinkering away at the back of his mind.

"I like mountainbiking too," he says. "Maybe I'll give that a go after Vancouver, and if I'm any good, aim for London or Rio."

Immediately after Vancouver, however, he will join his girlfriend in Colorado. Not a bad spot considering one of the things he misses most about here is the mountains.

He also misses "the Pacific, steak and cheese pies, Kiwi lollies, good roast lamb, fish and chips and the people".

The one thing he doesn't miss: "Hmmm, saveloys."