Jess Hotter holds the Freeride World Tour trophy aloft in Switzerland. Photo / Freeride World Tour Jeremy Bernard
Ohakune's Jess Hotter is now a freeride ski world champion. She talked to reporter Jacob McSweeny about the psychology of getting up after a big crash as well as how she got into the sport.
She might be a world champion at it, but Jess Hotter still has nerves when she's about to ski down a mountain face at high speed.
Hotter was crowned Freeride World Tour ski champion at the end of March after her winning rides in earlier competitions were enough to hold on to top spot.
Going into the final competition at Verbier in Switzerland Hotter held a solid lead over Danish skier Hedvig Wessel thanks to her wins in Fieberbrunn, Austria and Ordino-Arcalís in Andorra.
Hotter also came second in the Freeride World Tour event in Canada. There were five competition runs overall in Spain, Andorra, Canada, Austria and Switzerland.
Wessel could only manage a second place in Verbier, which meant she finished 2500 points behind Hotter, who had a big crash in the last competition.
"I got caught up as I took off on the main air I was doing in the middle ... I caught some rocks on the take-off and it pitched me forward over the cliff so I landed on my side and face," Hotter said.
"I hit my head pretty good ... it was fine later on. I hit my head hard enough on the side of my face that my eyesight went blurry for about a minute."
Hotter said the face she was riding at Verbier, the Bec des Rosses, was well known to her after checking it out two years ago.
"Going into the competition I was very, very nervous," Hotter said, reflecting she might not have been feeling herself on the day.
"I've always been quite scared of the Bec," she said.
"If you mess up, there are cliffs you could fall off and you know, kill yourself, or go to hospital with."
Hotter said being then declared world champion after a crash was a strange feeling.
"It still doesn't feel real. I don't really know how to describe it. It's like I've finally got to that point that I didn't expect to get to and ... I'm still processing it, that's for sure."
The fame that came with her title had also been a little odd for Hotter to deal with.
"I've had a couple of people come up to me and ask if I was Jess Hotter and it feels kind of unreal ... it's quite funny.
"It's really weird people knowing who I am."
She said while her sport was a niche one, it did not get the recognition it deserved in New Zealand, considering the success this country's freeriders had.
"You see the rugby on the news every single night but you don't hear about so many things that other athletes are doing around the world. And it's not only freeriders ... in other sports as well."
She said not long ago New Zealand freerider Sam Smoothy was winning competitions and he was not really mentioned in the media here.
"It is quite a niche sport but ... we have a really, really high percentage of Kiwis in the Freeride World Tour.
"Last year we had seven Kiwis out of 50 riders and if you think about the odds on that for the whole world to have seven athletes out of 50 from a country that has what ... five million people at the bottom of the world that doesn't get as much snow as other places."
Hotter is now in Fernie in Canada "skiing for fun" and getting ready for the next season.
"I just have a little bit of fun on skis without too much pressure.
"And give the body a chance to heal as well because it's definitely a bit achy."
The world title has been a long time coming for Hotter. She has been a skier since the age of 4 and has spent years working off-seasons, often every day, to give her the ability to train and compete during the season.
She thanked her parents for their support during tough times she went through trying to qualify for the world tour.
"To be fair, it was pretty hard on them as well. I'd come home in not a very happy state having left Canada to come back to New Zealand knowing that I was going to be working every day - as much as I can to save money."
"They were always there for me.
"They did question during that time whether this is something I should be doing or how much longer I should look at doing it for before deciding to give myself a little bit of a break."
She became interested in freeriding when she was 17 and heard about the Xtreme skiing event being held at Whakapapa.
"I wanted to compete in it and I wasn't allowed to because I was 17 - I was too young to do it.
"Then when I was 18 ... I had mock exams for high school in that week so I wasn't allowed to, my parents wouldn't let me go."
What ensued was travel and working in Canada for a year as well some trips home to work in her hometown Ohakune as well as frequent travel to and from Queenstown.
It wasn't until she was in Japan that she met a former freeride coach and he suggested she give it a go.
"That's what tipped me over the edge to competing in my first freeride competition."
She said it was scary then - "but it's scary even now".
"Part of it is taking calculated risk in relation to your experience and your ability and hoping that it works out."
She said she really enjoyed the adrenaline rush.
"I find it's kind of like a meditation I guess, getting into what we call flow state, which is where you're just running on automatic. Your brain shuts off and you do everything automatically."
Conquering freeriding for Hotter has been about building on the "nervousness" she faces when staring down a mountain face.
"Obviously you have a fear of crashing or a fear of getting hurt but it's all weighing up your ability versus conditions versus the size of things you're jumping off and deciding what your odds are essentially on whether you can land that.
"It's slowly, slowly pushing that further and further and that's what gets you to improve."
Hotter accepted the potential to have a serious crash - and she has had her fair share of those.
On those occasions she has had to work hard to build up her confidence again.
"You definitely have to get back up on the horse, you have to get back on your skis.
"You have to do it right on the spot there - you're in the middle of a face having just crashed you're not just going to say 'screw it I'm not putting my skis back on, I'm walking out of here'.
"You have to put your skis back on and ski down to the bottom and I think that's a really good thing about freeride - if you do crash, your skis do have to go back on, you ski to the bottom. That kind of helps get over that ... mental hurdle to start with."
She said her big crashes have usually come during backflip attempts.
Her competitions are funded by contracts she gets with Freeride World Tour as well as support from sponsors Head, Mons Royale, Pieps and Snowcentre in Auckland.
Hotter said she planned to come back to New Zealand in three or four weeks before building up for next season when she would try to defend her world title.
"I've got to try to defend that title and that's pretty scary.
"There's some amazing, amazing athletes that are coming up from the qualifiers this next year and it will be a pretty hectic competition I think."
Riders and spectators in Whanganui are anticipating the start of the last race.