33
Harvest & Holiday 2013
Escarpment Magazine
Philip Brown (aka Downtown Philly Brown)
from Craigleith Ski Club, at 2013 FIS Alpine World Ski
Championships, Team Event in Schladming, Austria.
Many of our Olympic hopefuls
call the Escarpment
their home and attribute their many international sporting suc-
cesses to growing up in this region. Although the official
Olympic Team has yet to be named, Escarpment Magazine has
rounded up 13 Olympic Skiing and Snowboarding hopefuls
from our area—young, dedicated, athletes who have worked
hard and sacrificed greatly, all for the chance to compete on
theWorld Stage and chase their dreams of Olympic glory. You
are about to meet them on the following pages as they share a
little about their sporting histories, sacrifices, training and goals.
Located on the northeast coast of the Black Sea, near the border
with Georgia, the greater Sochi area has a population of
around 400,000 people. Sochi is designated as having a
humid subtropical climate and therefore has mild winters, with
temperatures in February averaging a high of about 10
°
Cel-
sius and a low of about 3° Celsius at the lower elevations.
Sochi 2014 will be the most compact Winter Games in the his-
tory of the Olympic movement, with the possibility of traveling
from one competitive venue to another in a matter of minutes.
In total, eleven venues have been built for the Sochi 2014
Games, and are divided into two clusters—Mountain and
Coastal. Located within 48km of each other, travel between the
two clusters will take less than 30-minutes on the newly con-
structed Olympic railway.
Each cluster contains an Olympic Village, with travel time to
each competition venue averaging five minutes for the Coastal
Cluster and less than 15 minutes for the Mountain Cluster. The
central focus of the Coastal Cluster is the Olympic Park, which
will seat approximately 70,000 spectators. For the first time in
Olympic history, all ice arenas will be within walking distance
of one other. TheMountain Cluster will include Biathlon and Ski
Complexes, a Bobsleigh Track, a Ski Center, a Ski Jump Com-
plex, as well as a Snowboard Park and Freestyle Center.
*
STORY | CARA WILLIAMS
p h o t o | Z o o m A g e n c e
