This week, the Clarion sat down with alpine skier Sebastian Brigovic.
Q: How did you start skiing?
A: I was skiing with my parents until I was 10 and they sent me to a camp with a ski club. Then I got onto a national team and went on and on and everything went well for me.
Q: How did you come to DU?
A: I heard about college skiing in America, and, since I was no longer a part of the national team, it was the only opportunity for me to keep going with skiing. College provided me with a scholarship. It’s a great opportunity to finish school and keep skiing.
Q: How does ski team work in regard to practice and competition?
A: We start our prep season in May, we start doing weight lifting in the gym and we go to skiing in Loveland two to three times a week. In summer, Denver doesn’t have any ski camps but individually we’ll go to New Zealand or Switzerland to work on technique. In September, we come back to school and we only go to the gym. In mid-October we hit the slopes: Three days of skiing per week and two days of gym. We start racing for international races and North American or World Cup races in early November. In January, we start the college season. We have college season until the NCAA championships, which are in March. After that, there are a couple more races, the spring series and whatever else in March and April.
Q: How often do you have competitions against other colleges?
A: College competitions aren’t every weekend. We don’t only have invitationals either. There are qualifiers too. There are three races per invite and we have four invites: Utah, Colorado-Boulder, New Mexico and Alaska.
Q: How was your Olympic experience?
A: I did well in January and I was invited for the Olympic games. During winter quarter I flew over; I missed six weeks out of ten of school. I went there for four days so I could come back to school. The racing experience was great and it was something special. It was totally different than any other race or the world cup or anything. I only did one event, the giant slalom.
Q: Do you see yourself competing in the Olympics again?
A: I sure hope so. That’s my goal.
