Sherri Koop

After 13 years on the circuit, Richmond’s Alexa Loo looks forward to competing in the 2010 Games at Cypress in front of a hometown crowd.

Veteran local snowboarder Alexa Loo recognizes that inner peace could help her take home an Olympic medal

Don’t blink. An elite parallel giant slalom snowboard competition, last staged locally at the 2005 World Snowboard Championships in Whistler, is headed this way. When that happens at the 2010 Winter Games, don’t miss the likes of Jasey-Jay Anderson and Alexa Loo in action. The odds of a repeat anytime soon seem slim; in fact, February’s races may well be the last time these two alpine-snowboard trailblazers pass this way. That’s a shame. The rest of the world has seen far more of their speed-suited bodies than most Canadians.

Snowboard racers are reputedly the hardest-working athletes in a world dominated by bad-ass halfpipe freestyle riders and snowboard cross racers. They’re more persistent souls, too. After seasons of training and rehab, coupled with more good and bad fortune than most pain thresholds could tolerate, come February 26 Richmond-based snowboarder Loo will make her sophomore appearance at the Olympic Winter Games. This time, she will be plummeting down old-growth-lined slopes on Black Mountain in West Vancouver’s Cypress Provincial Park, which is the venue for Olympic freestyle ski and snowboard events.

In the past month, the Georgia Straight spoke with Loo during early-season glacier training in Solden, Austria, and again while she was dealing with a leaky roof at her grandmother’s house in Richmond. Talk about typifying the challenges many athletes face balancing home and work. After a decade on the World Cup circuit, Loo sounded more than up for the challenge of dealing simultaneously with tradespeople and a journalist.

By her own estimation, since she began competing in 1997, Loo has entered about 100 World Cup events, seven world championships, and numerous Nor-Am Cup contests, in which she won three gold medals last season. Still, whatever plays out this year, the first Canadian woman to earn a World Cup medal in alpine snowboarding won’t ultimately be satisfied until she adds winning the Mt. Baker Legendary Banked Slalom to her roster of accomplishments.

Canadian women, including Squamish’s Maí«lle Ricker, who won the last three LBSs, have a lock on the classic race first staged in 1985. Owing to a scheduling conflict—the Washington-state event runs each year on February’s Super Bowl weekend—that’s not likely to happen in 2010 as both snowboard cross racer Ricker and her Canadian Snowboard Federation teammate Loo will be in the final stages of focusing on their Olympic events. “Still, I’m hopeful that, come 2011, I’ll get an invitation,” Loo said somewhat wistfully.

Meanwhile, the chartered accountant turned Olympian has got enough work cut out for her in the next six months as it is, including capitalizing on her bronze medal at the Sunday River World Cup in Maine last February. It was a hard-won accomplishment that she acknowledged as a defining moment in her recent career. Understandably, the 38-year-old found the lofty view from the podium most satisfying. “After a long wait [since her previous World Cup top-three finish in January 2006], the podium was a gratifying place to be. You feel this is where you belong. It validates everything I believe about myself and what I’m capable of achieving.”