Sam's blog: a term's skiing in France

Sam Gaskin in Year Seven is spending a term in France.  Here's his half-term report.

Well, I have now been in Les Deux Alpes for around 7 weeks and life is going well.  It took me a while to understand that I have to get down from skiing early for my schoolwork but now it's all going really well with my online tutor.  I went to a competition just after Christmas in Les Houches, didn't do as well as I had hoped in the GS but my slalom went well and I was pleased that from my slalom result I qualified to compete in the British championships in April in Meribel.

I joined the Les Deux Alpes race club as soon as I arrived and I train with them at the weekend and also on Wednesday mornings.  I've done a few French races with them and managed to podium a couple of times, today I had two good results, I came 14th out of 96 and first in my age group and also 9th out of 40 and again first in my age group.  I've now got some really good friends in the village, mainly French but one of the boys is Hungarian, In our downtime we go bowling, play basketball and climb on the huge indoor climbing wall. My freestyle is also improving and I'm working towards the British championships which are being held in Switzerland in March.

The weather has been really cold and there has been lots of snow so I've also done quite a bit of off piste skiing with my coach.  I'm coming back to the UK shortly before heading out to Austria with the England Schools Squad and then as soon as I return it's back to Les Houches for the Inter-Schools competition and then I head back up to Les Deux Alpes for some serious training before making my way to Switzerland for the freestyle comp.  Time seems to be going really quickly and soon I'll be back at Eltham for the summer term but for now I'll continue to enjoy my life in France.