Pack your life into a couple of suitcases, fly from Calgary to Slovenia and use that as home base for 10 months every year.
Now, try that as a teenager who needs to finish her education and compete all over the globe on the World Cup ski jumping circuit against athletes who have the luxury of living and training at home most of the time.
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That’s a tall order for Canada’s ski jumpers, but Alexandria Loutitt has embraced the challenge forced upon the entire team after the closure of the jumps at Canada Olympic Park in Calgary. She just turned 19 and has been living on her own in Bled, Slovenia for a few years. Teammates Nicole Maurer, Abigail Strate and Natalie Eilers share an apartment in Kranj, about 30 minutes away.
“I feel it is sustainable. I have created a life for myself in Europe,” Loutitt said. “I have friends and people I’m close with. I do enjoy Europe as much as I do Canada, I just miss my family a little bit.”
She relies on technology to shrink the distance between them, something that her mother Tracy could have used back in the day.
“I lived away from home when I was her age. I think I spoke to my parents at Christmas time and maybe that was it,” said Tracy. “There was no FaceTime, there was no email, there was no easy way to communicate with each other.
“So for Alex and I, this works. We talk to each other every day, sometimes multiple times a day. Even if I’m at work, she’s on the corner of my desk, she’s cooking dinner and I’m at work and we chat. Sometimes we don’t even talk to each other, we just keep each other company on FaceTime. It makes it easier for her to be that far away.”
The Loutitts have always supported their daughter’s dream and found ways to work around the difficult logistics.
“She had those Olympic rings pasted on her door from the time she started ski jumping. Her goal was to be an athlete,” said Tracy. “She got a lot of laughs about it when she was a kid. Now the tables have kind of turned. She’s showing everyone that she’s getting what she set out to do.
“It’s easy to watch her be over there when she’s doing what she loves. And even before all these recent successes, it was wonderful to see her living a life she built for herself. Obviously we helped her along the way, but it makes it much easier for us to be apart when we know she’s doing what she loves. The success just makes it that much sweeter.”
Canadian women’s team coach Janko Zwitter said the long distance thing works well for the current team, but he wonders about the program’s sustainability.
“That’s one of the hardest parts of the whole thing, you’re far away from home. Washing clothes, cooking, whatever, all the stuff you used to have from your parents, you don’t get it here. I’m really impressed how these ladies do that. It’s fantastic working with them. I have to tell you, it’s amazing.”
dbarnes@postmedia.com
Twitter.com/sportsdanbarnes
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