For Ted Yee, cross-country skiing training this winter involved roller blades or roller skis on the footpaths of Ashburton. Phtot supplied.Cross-country skier Ted Yee is used to having some of the best training possible at his doorstep, literally. But winter 2018 had been different.

Ted, who hails from New England in America (where snow typically covers the ground for the bulk of winter), has spent this winter living in Ashburton where the nearest competition cross-country skiing venue is hours away in Wanaka.

So he’s had to improvise, using roller blades or roller skis and hitting the footpaths of Ashburton to keep up the kind of momentum which had seen him make the Massachusetts under-16 team back home.

It has done the trick.  In September Ted headed to Snow Farm in Wanaka for the national secondary schools’ cross-country skiing championships where he finished third in the classic event, fourth in the skating event and third in the team event where he joined up with a couple of skiers from Dunedin.

It was a good result considering there had been few opportunities to actually train on the snow in New Zealand, compared to back home. Most of his training has been done on roller blades or roller skis, with the track around the Ashburton Business Park one of his favourite training grounds locally because of its smooth and flat surface.

Ted, a 15-year-old year 11 student at Ashburton College, came to New Zealand in July with his family, mum Mary, dad Ed and sister Peggy. Mary Yee, a GP, landed a position as a physician at the Moore Street Medical Centre for a year so the family packed up their lives for an adventure on the other side of the world.

Three months in, they are loving it, although it has felt a little odd to look out the window and see flowers in bloom in the middle of winter. For them, winter generally means piles of snow everywhere and endless snow shovelling.

The family hails from a town of about 7000 people, called Dalton. The town’s claim to fame is that for more than 200 years it has been the only producer of US currency paper.

In the summer it is muggy and humid, but in the winter it is cold, with snow generally covering the ground from Christmas through to the end of February.

Snow and snow sports are a big part of their lives. Ed Yee used to be a coach for the American junior Olympic biathlon team, a job which saw him help set up a programme aimed at seeking out some of the country’s brightest young future stars. That, Ted said, was probably how he got the cross-country skiing bug.

He skied for his school ski team for the past three years and was also on the Lenox Memorial Middle and High School athletics team.

In the summer, Ted runs. He is pretty good too, the fastest on his team and sixth in the league back home, which is about the equivalent of sixth in Canterbury here.

With the ski season finished, the New Zealand secondary school athletics championships is the next big competition on his mind.

There he is eyeing up the longer distances – the 3000m and the 1500m.

“I’m better at running, but skiing is a lot more fun because it’s faster and it’s fun to just fly over the snow,” Ted said. “And it’s not as harsh as running on your legs, so you don’t get the injuries like tendonitis and things like that.”

When it comes to the future, Ted doesn’t know where his future lies. In America, competition is tough when it comes to high performance sport, and spots at the winter and summer Olympics are hard to come by. So he is just taking things as they came.

For now, that means enjoying the experience of a year abroad and looking forward to telling his mates back home about his experience attending nationals during his year in New Zealand.

Ed Yee said while the nearest cross-country ski area that was regularly open in the South Island is in Wanaka, that didn’t mean it wasn’t possible to achieve great things.

“We have people who have made the Olympic team that live in New York, who practise in Central Park,” Ed Yee said.

By  Erin Tasker © The Ashburton Guardian - 3 November 2018