Were they prophetic, or were the parents of West Vancouver’s 14-year-old freestyle ski sensation just honouring the family’s Scottish heritage when they named their daughter Skye?
“We liked the Isle of Skye,” says Louise Clarke, a native of Scotland who says she was thinking about the island, not the air when she and her husband named their middle child. “I guess it was for a good reason, because she likes being up there in the sky.”
Skye Clarke’s most recent trip to the clouds earned her two gold medals and a silver in the U16 division at the Canadian Junior Freestyle Skiing Championships held last month in Whistler, as well as third place in the overall standing for all girls competing in the U14, U16 and U18 divisions. That win followed a gold-medal showing in U14 slopestyle at last year’s junior nationals. With those results, young Skye has been making a name for herself in the Canadian freestyle skiing world.
“One of my coaches, the only thing he calls me is Skywalker,” she says with a laugh. “I’ve always heard jokes about my name. Not making fun of it, just funny jokes. A lot of it is around how I like trampoline and skiing and jumps and stuff.”
She also likes winning, it would seem. Skye won the slopestyle in Whistler with a clean run that included a switch 540, a tough twisting trick that involves skiing backwards into the takeoff.
“It was snowing pretty hard so most of the rails were sticky,” says Skye. “It was hard to do rail tricks, but the jumps were feeling really nice.”
Skye also soared in the halfpipe competition, winning gold despite the fact that it was her first time ever competing in halfpipe.
“It was a lot of fun, I really enjoyed it,” she says. “I tried to do a little bit of everything – some grabs, some spins, some switch stuff. It felt really good.”
Clarke missed out on gold in the big air competition after spinning out on the landing of her second attempt. “I went way too big, missed a lot of the landing. I was super far down. I almost landed it – I just kind of spun out.” The score from her first attempt, her easier “safety jump,” still was enough to earn her silver.
The Rockridge Secondary Grade 9 student is a member of the Whistler Blackcomb Freestyle Ski Club, which gave her a nice home hill advantage during the national championships, she says.
“It’s just nice knowing all the jumps that you’re hitting. Normally when you’re in a competition it takes a while to figure out the speed for the jumps, but when you’re at your home mountain you already pretty much know them by heart so you can get right into it.”
Skye may seem like she’s born to fly, but there have been some rough landings along the way. Adding to the risk factor is that at five-foot-one, she’s usually one of the smallest competitors on the hill.
“I’ve broken a few bones, had lots of bruises,” she says, adding that there was a particularly nasty spill while training on a slopestyle rail earlier this season that knocked her out of competition for several weeks. “I don’t really remember what went wrong, I just landed super hard on the ice. … I thought I had fractured my pelvis.”
When she returned to the slopes in January she took another hard fall, overshooting a big jump and crashing down full force onto the flats below the landing slope.
“It’s the worst feeling ever,” she says of the moment in the air that you realize a jump is not going to end well. “I took off the jump and I realized at a certain point in the jump I was going to miss the entire landing. … You’re looking down, and you know you’re about to have the worst impact.”
Onlookers thought Skye had broken her legs on the fall, but she managed to get up and walk away. The damage, however, was more mental than physical, her mom says.
“She walked away from it sore, battered and bruised, but what we didn’t realize at the time was it really messed with her head,” Louise says, adding that her daughter became tentative after the fall.
“I was really frustrated for a long time,” says Skye. “And then I just kind of had to make myself do what I was scared of. I just had to get over it, I guess.”
She shook it off just in time for nationals where she soared back to the top of the podium. Still a relative newbie who has been competing in freestyle for four years, Skye has the talent that can take her to events like the Olympics or X Games, her coaches believe. It takes a lot of hard work training and travelling, but it’s all worth it, says Skye.
“I sometimes miss hanging out with my friends a little bit, but I have some really great ski friends that I get to hang out, and do my favourite thing in the world, with them. That makes up for it,” she says. With a name like Skye, it makes sense that she was born to fly.
“I love being in the air,” she says, adding that she loves the freedom that freestyle skiing provides. “Ever since I was little I’ve always liked doing flips and stuff. I really like how creative it is, and how nothing is the same in it.
“With freestyle skiing you get to choose what you do. You can do it the way you want, which I think is really cool.”
