Coming up ski racing with Justin Alkier

Not all paths are linear and the linear path isn’t for everyone. Justin Alkier is embarking on his first full season on the World Cup circuit for Canada after capturing one of two NorAm slalom spots from last season's tour. The 25 year old may be the oldest athlete to ever be named to the Canadian national team for the first time and it wasn’t until 23 that he raced for his provincial team, Ontario. But don’t these stats fool you, this long way around path was one of choice, fueled by an intrinsic motivation to always improve his skiing, get better and to one day ski race on the World Cup circuit.

Growing up in Toronto, hockey and skiing were his two sports of choice, both offering outlets for his budding competitive spirit. “My first two years of playing hockey as a kid, we didn’t lose one game. The Soccer team I was on didn't lose, and I was winning ski races. My first years of sports I didn’t lose. I loved the feeling and from these experiences, a super competitive part of me was born. My family likes to tell the story of how I would throw massive fits when I lost playing board games. I hated to lose.” 

Starting at the Georgian Peaks ski club, Justin quickly joined the racing program though at age eight, his parents took a year off and moved the family to Verbier, Switzerland. “That year was the first year that I can remember racing and getting to ski a lot. We skied the whole mountain as a family and it was a lot of fun.”

Coming back to Canada and into U14, Justin continued to find success in both hockey and skiing, being on the podium and winning, alongside a couple of his teammates and friends. It wasn’t until U16, when his friends started to grow, get bigger and mature, and he stayed his small size, that he started to struggle and fall back from his top of the pack ways. “I was still one of the stronger technical skiers but I didn’t grow and all… it was frustrating but I knew that I would eventually get bigger and this added to the hunger. I was determined to stick it out.”

Moving into first year FIS, at age sixteen, he hadn’t grown, weighing in at only 135lbs. “I knew right away that I was a good skier, but I wasn’t that strong and my results were nothing special.” Though it could be argued that scoring into the 70s in your first year FIS is pretty special, especially at that size. “My ranking for my age that year in Canada was maybe fifth for GS and Slalom, which is good, but being super competitive, I wasn’t that happy and I felt like there was unfinished business. 

As things worked out, Justin graduated a year early from high school, so at sixteen and for his second year of FIS, he chose not to accept an invitation with the Ontario ski team, and instead, joined Treble cone racing academy (TCRA). “This is really where I start to diverge from my peers in Southern Ontario. I was less inclined to join a program with guys my age who were still in high school… and in case the skiing didn’t go anywhere, I could get some experience outside of the province.”

While on TCRA, Justin gained a world of racing experience, traveling extensively throughout North America getting start, after start, after start. “We were really bouncing around, here and there, and that first year I got about 70 starts.” Not only did he have 70 starts, it was 74 and by the end of his two years with TCRA, he had a total of 152 starts, which in those two seasons, is the second most out of any athlete with a FIS card! The only one who had more than him was his teammate at 155. This could take someone with a more traditional path 4 or 5 years to tally this many.

Within these two years, one crossover back with the Canadian system was for the 2016 Youth Olympic Games (YOG) in Lillehammer, Norway. TCRA was training in Colorado at the time with the Ontario team and their coach told Justin about the upcoming qualifying event. “Tommy asked if I was going to Panorama for the qualifiers, which were based on 4 FIS races happening there. I had no idea about them because I wasn’t on the Ontario team and not on the long list of candidates. I went to Pano with my mom and ended up winning 3 of the 4 days for U18s and became the first qualifier for the Games. But because I wasn’t on the long list, I wasn’t cleared by the IOC so I had to wait a week before knowing if I was going or not.” Minor details when you live outside the system. 

These Youth Olympics served as a reignition for Justin’s dream of racing at the highest stage of the sport. “The Games were as big as it gets for a sixteen year old and so it starts spinning in your head about what it would be like to participate in the real Olympics. This was an important experience that has kept me going.”

When it came time choosing what was next, Justin always had it in his mind that the American collegiate route was for him. Therefore his focus was not on the national team’s criteria, but more on which schools were the best to pursue ski racing, how to connect with those coaches  and reaching a point profile to get him in. “When I knew that I was going NCAA and was trying to decide between a couple schools. Knowing that I was still having fun racing and I wasn’t done trying to push to be a better skier, I decided to go to the school that gave me the best chance to continue ski racing after college.”

Justin chose Middlebury college in Vermont, knowing that their program had had a few racers go through it and on to race World Cup. “Going to school, my thought process was that in four years, it would make sense to keep skiing, regardless of whether or not I would be on the Canadian team because I wanted to give it a go.”

It seems that Justin chose right because he found himself on the team with someone who shared his goals and some experience to match. “I was super fortunate because the other guy that came in with me in my class was Erik Arvidsson, someone who had been on the US Team for three years, World Junior champion and had won NorAm World Cup spots.” 
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Together, the two of them clicked in this goal of wanting to elevate the program to race and find success on the NorAm circuit. “In our first year, it was just Erik and I who went to a NorAm in Stowe. We both DNFd first run and were driving back to Middlebury to make our afternoon classes. We started talking and joking about how it sucked that we both didn’t finish but also that we were at a NorAm alone, with no coaches and just the two of us. We said to each other that we can make this better… and saw the collegiate experience as an opportunity to grow. Our coaches were super open to this but the responsibility was also on us. To tune our skis before every training day, to have our equipment dialed, to work out mid season, in the spring, and seek training opportunities in the off season when the coaches aren’t able to coach us, as per the NCAA rules.”

The following year, this momentum grew with a couple more athletes joining the program aligning with this vision. “Again, we got lucky. The class that came after us, there were some really strong skiers, one of them being Tim Gavett. Tim’s parents were coaches and organized summer camps for us, which included the likes of Ali Nullmeyer. We were all able to push ourselves and believed that we could do it.” All of this built towards Middlebury’s eventual success where that season the ski team won its first carnival in eleven years. 

By Alkier’s junior year, he was having his breakout season, finding success at NorAms and college races. Along with his teammates Erik and Tim, they were one of the strongest teams in the East, winning carnivals and having one of the strongest collegiate presences on the NorAm circuit. But then in March of 2020, during the NCAA finals, everything changed and the world shut down with the global pandemic. A little bittersweet to seemingly drop the hammer on what they were building, but the motivation to continue was still there. “My world ranking was now around 100 in slalom and top 150 in GS and there was no doubt in my mind that I was going to do everything I could over the next year to try and maximize everything. Now I have the world ranking to at least start a World Cup and to be in the mix.”

At the start of the next school year, collegiate sports were cancelled so he looked across the pond. Justin’s parents were living in Switzerland at the time and he decided to spend the winter over there, doing a mixture of online school and taking a semester off to race. He joined an Italian coach he had known from the National Ski Academy and made plans to pursue Europa Cups and the European FIS circuit. 

As they say, fortune's favour the bold and taking this chance on a secondary path from school, he found himself training beside the Canadian National tech team in Sass Fee that summer. “At this point I was nominated as a next gen athlete that summer and given that I was already training on the same glacier, the tech group invited me to ski with them. This was my first time ever training with the national team and the athletes knew me, but I wasn’t sure if the coaches had ever heard of me.” Justin shares with a bit of a chuckle. “But training with them went well and they were happy enough with my skiing that they extended the invitation to train with them again in the future if we found ourselves in the same place at the same time again.”

His skiing that winter had a lot of speed in it, but was inconsistent, making flips in Europa cups and then skiing out in the second run. It was good enough to keep the attention of the national team, who invited him to train with them in January of that winter and then a week later, he got the call to time trial for a World Cup spot in Schladming. With his dream so close, the nerves elevated. “Before this, I was always just trying to get better at skiing and trying to win whatever races I was in. But then all of sudden, there were a lot of nerves and I was like, I’m one good day away from skiing World Cup and I may never have this opportunity again. I started preparing for it mentally, started listening to a mental performance book, and trying to get in the right headspace.” he says with a little laugh.

For the time trial, it was an outside the box format. It was between Simon Fournier and Justin, the winner determined by the fastest of four runs over two days and if you DNF’d in any of those runs, you were out. “It was unique but I was new to it all so I didn’t ask too many questions. Maybe the coaches were trying to rattle me a bit.” he shared with a reflective giggle. “My first run was really good and when I saw the time of Simon, I’m thinking that I’m in a good spot. But then I was even more nervous. We both finished our runs that day and things were going well. That night though, Simon decided to head back to Denver for school reasons and the spot was mine. The way it all shook out, it didn’t feel real.”

Real it was and now Alkier was a few days away from fulfilling a major career goal and a childhood dream. “Schladming was really cool. I remember that run feeling pretty nervous the first half and thinking ‘oh wow, I’m skiing a World Cup! This is crazy.’ At the end of the course, I was able to let my skis go a bit and immediately thought in the finish that this was amazing. I wanted to go right back up and do it again!” 

Justin finished 37th on the day and a week later, got the chance to race two more World Cups, back to back events in Chamonix, France. 

After getting his World Cup debuts, he went back to Middlebury for the next season to finish school and his collegiate skiing career. “Middlebury was always a safety net in a way for me. I had incredible teammates and coaches who helped me become the skier I wanted to be. When it was time to leave, it was tough because I had to figure out how to keep racing without all of this support.” 

In a full circle kind of way, the season after college, Justin decided to ski with Ontario, his provincial team, and set his sights on winning a NorAm World Cup slalom spot. “Selection criteria in Canada is tough and this was my only way of making the next step.” This reunited Alkier with one of his U16 coaches and brought him on a team with athletes five to six years younger than him. “This was an unusual mixture of ages for sure, but I enjoyed it and brought forward some new success.” A couple of these big milestones were getting into the Europa Cup points and achieving his first NorAm victory.

Fast forward to the NorAm finals last season in Whistler, BC and Alkier came into the final slalom race ranked second, a World Cup spot in hand. But in racing, anything can happen. “It was a crazy day. I started behind the two guys who were ranked first and third. I went out of the gate and straddled the fifteenth gate and thought it's all over, but then I looked up and saw both of them on the side of the course as well. I ended up getting the spot, which was a huge relief.”

After this result, Justin was nominated to the Canadian team for this upcoming season and grateful to have the support of Alpine Canada to continue his dream “A lot of things could have happened, it’s just the way the sport goes and it’s nice to have it go your way at times. It’s definitely been a long journey, but I’ve enjoyed every bit of it and wouldn’t change a thing.

On the eve of the first World Cup slalom of the season, Justin is keen to make his mark on the circuit but tries to keep a healthy perspective. “I like to look at my life backwards, to picture myself at 80. What do I want to remember my life as? What do I want my family and friends to remember me for? If I didn’t give this whole thing a try, I would regret it.” He paused for a bit as if practicing this exercise for a moment. Then continued, “I keep pushing because the Justin right now likes it, I push for myself when I’m old and I push for a younger Justin who’s dream was to be where I am right now.”

Follow Justin this winter as he races the World Cup slalom circuit. Catch the action on TV, streaming and visit his website, www.justinalkier.com. 


Written by Michael Janyk

To Purchase Michael's first book "Go To The Start. Life as a World Cup ski racer" Click here.
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Photo sourced from www.Justinalkier.com