Catching Up with Kjersti Buaas - Page 1
April 16, 2008 @ 7:34 AM
Interview: TC
Portrait: Matt Georges
Voted as Onboard’s Queen of Style back in Onboard’s 10th Anniversary issue, there is no doubt that Kjersti Ostergaard Buaas is one of the girls pushing women’s riding to new heights. Her bronze medal pipe run at the Olympics was beefcake, she’s well known for having one of the best air to fakies in the business and, more recently, she’s been focussing on slopestyle to which she’s also applied the silky Buaas steeze. Check the front 7 in her winning US Open run. Nothing short of a banger. Kjersti finished the season as the highest placed Euro-spender on the women’s TTR tour, so we hooked up with her to talk about contests, competing and women’s riding amongst other things.
Onboard: Hello, Kjersti. The last month or so have been pretty successful for you contest wise. First up, you won the US Open. How did that make you feel?
Kjersti Buaas: I had never expected to win there, so I was really surprised and off course very, very, very happy! It was my ever first international slopestyle win, and the only one [laughs].
OB: I thought it was something like that. You must have been double-stoked. And it was only shortly before that you’d dislocated your shoulder, right?
KB: Well, my shoulder popped out at the X-Games, but it didn’t take to long before it was all good again. I didn’t think about that at all.
OB: That’s cool. But what didn’t look so cool was the conditions at the Open. Was it as gnarly and bulletproof and windy as it looked?
KB: Yeah, it was pretty icy and very windy, so you had to use the good old “one finger in the air to check the wind” before you dropped, [laughs]! The jumps were pretty good though, just the weather that kind of sucked!
OB: But, despite the weather you, obviously, won. And won even though you only had one run which included one of the nicest fs7s in the contest – regardless of gender. When you had to pull out [Kjersti drifted off to the side of a kicker while spinning on her second run and landed on some gnarly death cookies] were you stressing because the first run was a banger but you’d not be able to do anything about it if someone scored higher, or was it more easy style, no stress, whatever type thing?
KB: I was just happy that I survived that nasty slam in to the ice chunks, because that could have been way worse than it was! I went inside the riders’ tent and iced my arm and my lip and I watched the rest of the runs on the TV there, but I was never thinking I was going to win, and when all the runs were done and everyone in the lounge went like “yeaaaaaahhhh, you won” I was thinking that I had hit my head and that I was dreaming.
OB: That must have been a great feeling. Not the gnarly ice chunk slam, the seeing you’d won thing…
KB: Yeah, it was the best feeling ever.
OB: Would it be fair to say you’re a pretty seasoned competitor though?
KB: Yeah, I have been riding contest forever, and it feels like I am finally getting some control over things.
OB: Cool, that kinda leads me to my next question… Do you still get the jitters before dropping in at contests and if so how do you deal with them? What kind of mindset do you get in when waiting at the top before you get the call to go?
KB: I get pretty nervous at contests, and I think I ride better when I don’t expect to do good at all, like when I kind of give up and don’t give a f..... But being a little nervous is always good though. It makes everything more exiting.
OB: Yeah, there’s a quote like that from some sports person, but I can’t remember it now. Damn.
KB: At the US Open I was actually going to pull out of the contest, because I didn’t get time to try some of the jumps before we started, and I was thinking that it really sucked and the wind was pretty scary, but then I talked to Stine [Kjersti’s Roxy team manager] and we decided that I should just do it anyways and maybe just do the smaller jumps in the qualifiers, and maybe make it in.
OB: No way!
KB: I even told the guy at the start that I was pulling out.
