Winter Olympics: Singaporean skier Basha trained on inline skates ahead of giant slalom debut

Singaporean Faiz Basha is the first competitor to represent his country in a snow sport at the Olympic Winter Games and his road to the frozen slopes from his tropical nation included unconventional training on inline skates.

Basha moved to Switzerland at the age of three and learned to ski from his Singaporean mother, who fell for the sport with her new proximity to the Alps.

"We were learning about things as we go along because we don't have the culture, we don't have the history in the sport," he said.

Singapore's only previous appearance at the Winter Olympics was in 2018 in Pyeongchang where short track speed skater Cheyenne Goh finished 28th in the women's 1,500 metres.

For Basha, living in Switzerland meant skiing during school gym classes, and he soon earned himself a reputation for being 'reckless' and 'unhinged' in his skiing, leading his coaches to recommend that he channel more of that energy into races.

At 14, Basha was competing in ski competitions, working his way up to international championships. The COVID pandemic and mandatory military service in Singapore, however, meant there were too many obstacles in his way for qualifying for the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing.

Now, at 23, he will make his Olympic debut on Saturday (Feb 14) in the giant slalom, in part thanks to his training on inline skates when he was far from any snow during his military service.

With only around five days of skiing a year during the two-year service, he had a lot of catching up to do when he came back in terms of ski basics, but his speed significantly improved thanks to the training.

He acknowledges that if he had not lived in a mountainous country for a large part of his life, his Olympic dream would have been much harder to reach.

"I wouldn't recommend my journey to other Singaporeans or other people from tropical countries because it's not very easy and it's also very costly," he said.

Basha has no illusions about winning a medal at the Milano Cortina Games, where he is competing in both slalom and giant slalom.

"I just want to be able to ski to the level that I've been skiing in training. Just to be able to look at the video and say, okay, that's how I ski and feel like I'm not holding back at all," he said.

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