Mackenzie at the NZ Open

Between the NZ Open, Winter Games, training, and food poisoning I’ve been pretty busy!  I did well in the NZ Open, and am satisfied with my performance.  My goal down here is progression, not so much as competition results, so I did well on the things I wanted to during the competition.  Pnut was awesome and I celebrated with her on the chairlift as she and Lynn Neil felt the rush of adrenaline still in them after both of them putting down amazing runs.  We knew one of them was going onto finals and made all of us stoked.

The men’s finals at the NZ Open were one of the most exciting finals to watch.  It was amazing to see the riders push each other and battle it out for the podium spots. There were huge and I mean HUGE airs by Luke Mitrani and back to back corked 10’s by Shaun White was nothing short of amazing to watch.  A group of us gathered in the Noodle Bar including a mix of both slope and pipe competitors (Clair Bidez, Kimmy Fasani, Torstein Horgmo, Dylan Bidez and many more) watching on the GO211 live webcast as well as out the windows.  We were all glued to the monitor in suspense and feeling anxious for each rider to drop.  We crowded in around the screen cheering, wincing at falls and occasionally grabbing an arm in excitement.  After it was all done and finished we all agreed our minds were blown away by the riding we had just witnessed.  If this is the first competition of the season and this is the level of riding being thrown down then I can’t wait to see it just before the Olympics.

Today, I went to the coast and saw how the writers of Jurassic Park came up with such scenery for dinosaurs to live in…meaning it looked like Jurrasic Park.  Megan Ginter was with me and we got some great photos from it, so we’ll send them along once we sort through every one’s cameras… and now I’m off to bed to get ready for some shredding at Treble Cone tomorrow morning.

Posted by Kelly Vance on 09/04