It’s close to 6:30 on an October evening in Hintertux, Austria, where the world’s serious ski racers have descended to train ahead of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing; in this travel-restricted pandemic present, it’s one of the only snow-covered options available at this time of year. From his hotel room, Benjamin Alexander checks the time. We’ve been talking for hours and he has plenty more to tell me. But right now, Jamaica’s potential Olympic ski team of one needs to catch a bus to keep a promise: he’s been invited to dinner with a passel of teenaged ski racers to tell them about what’s possible.
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This 37-year-old Englishman is a little out-of-the-box as an Olympic skier, outside of an insane drive to accomplish whatever goal he sets for himself. Benji, as he introduces himself with a contagious energy, didn’t grow up geographically gifted with a nearby ski resort or financially gifted with the means to travel to one. And he’s not white, as ski racers almost exclusively are.
Almost. Way before Alexander, there was the indomitable Seba Johnson, the first Black female ski racer in the Olympics in 1988, representing the Virgin Islands—at age 14, she was also the youngest female athlete to ever compete in the Winter Games. And among those on the short contemporary list, in 2001, Andre Horton made the U.S. Alpine Team as its first Black skier. In the 2018 Olympics, Sabrina Simader alpine raced for Kenya and Mialitiana Clerc raced for Madagascar. And there’s Errol Kerr, the American ski-cross athlete of Jamaican descent who was the only member of the Jamaican ski team at the 2010 Olympics, finishing ninth overall.
Alexander stands at the precipice of joining their Olympic ranks. Although he’s ranked 4,236th in the world—that’s not a typo—in his event, the giant slalom, under…
Source : time
