Whatever the outcome of Sunday morning’s giant slalom race, one record is sure to be set. Jamaica will be represented in Alpine skiing for the first time. Benjamin Alexander, a 38-year-old from Northampton, will be at the starting gate, becoming one of just 15 athletes to represent Jamaica at the Winter Olympics and following in the footsteps of the 1988 bobsleigh team immortalised in the movie Cool Runnings.
Alexander recently told CNN that, when he started to learn to ski, “being the only Black representative in the group, but on top of that being of Jamaican heritage, people kept throwing sideways jokes about Cool Runnings”. Dudley ‘Tal’ Stokes from that famous bobsleigh team is now one of Alexander’s mentors.
Having got the bug for skiing, he went on to attend the Pyeongchang 2018 Winter Olympics as a spectator and noted that, despite their strong summer Games presence, Jamaica sent three athletes to South Korea. He began to wonder if it was possible for him to qualify. “I thought the most likely outcome was death or at least a serious injury.”
The actual outcome was that alongside Jazmine Fenlator-Victorian he carried Jamaica’s flag into the Bird’s Nest Stadium in Beijing for the opening ceremony of the 2022 Games.
Alexander started skiing in 2015, when he was a DJ at the top of a Canadian mountain and gave it a go. Since deciding to attempt to reach the Olympics he has taken it much more seriously and trained with a number of coaches, including the American skiier Gordon Gray , who at one point told Alexander his technique was atrocious, “the worst I’ve ever seen”.
The child of a Jamaican father and an English mother, Alexander had a working-class upbringing in Wellingborough outside Northampton, and says nobody in his immediate family had skied before. He secured qualification by finishing seventh in the giant slalom at the Cape Verde National Ski Championships in Liechtenstein in January. “I would never have embarked on this mission had I not thought that was possible,” he says.
He is keen to take up a role as an ambassador for the sport – and for having fun on the slopes. In a recent interview with BBC Radio Northampton he said: “I hope to inspire people who have taken a bit of joy out of my story to go to Milton Keynes, to the Snozone or go on holiday to the Alps and give it a shot. There’s a place for everyone and, if I can get from zero to Olympian in six years, everyone can go from zero to having fun in a much shorter period of time. It’s going to be completely surreal.” “Sometimes you just have to keep going over the basics or you’ll get overwhelmed by the emotions of the competition.”
