Olympic skier up to challenge
| • | Rare air for trampolinist |
By Stanley Lee
Advertiser Staff Writer
Her movements were sometimes awkward and her form was off at times.
Among a group of 10- to 12-year-old trampolinists at the Hawai'i Academy in Iwilei, Tae Satoya, a 27-year-old Olympic freestyle skier from Japan, definitely stood out.
For someone who had never really done flips in her life, Satoya spent the past three weeks learning all the flips and twists it will take to lead her to her fourth Winter Olympics and what she hopes will be a third medal at the 2006 games in Torino, Italy.
Satoya debuted at the 1994 Lillehammer, Norway, Games but failed to medal. In 1998, she won a gold at Nagano, Japan, making her a household name in her country. She also won a bronze at the 2002 games at Salt Lake City.
Satoya competes in the mogul event in freestyle skiing, where skiiers do flips and turns off a mogul — a small hard mound on the ski slope. Aerial turning makes up 25 percent of a skier's overall score, which is why her coach Stephen Fearing picked the Hawai'i Academy for Satoya to learn the necessary moves.
"She has to come out with new tricks because she's known on the circuit," Fearing said. "She's not known as a very good aerialist, so we're training to put her ammo together.
"From the last Olympics until now, we definitely feel we need to get a lot more inverted balance, broaden the air sense that we didn't necessarily need before."
Though she fell and stumbled more than those around her at the Hawai'i Academy, it was her determination that kept her getting back up after a spill.
"She's a tiger," said Dr. Max Vercruyssen, director of the Hawai'i Academy, who has been working with Satoya. "When you take 10 months off and work out, you're going to be sore. To be that sore that you can't walk and come in and do a full workout the next day, it's very encouraging and motivating. She falls down and gets up again and again everyday. She has never whined or complained."
"Very, very difficult," Satoya said of the practices. "This is going to be excellent for my jump training."
Fearing, who once skiied for the United States and coached the U.S. and Japanese national teams, found the Hawai'i Academy after researching different facilities in the states.
"For her, it's a good wakeup," Fearing said. "I've really wanted to wake her up to a new world. If we started with the same old training, she would've fallen into past bad habits of getting accustomed to this kind of training and knowing where she can be lackadaisical or where she can lay off."
At the six-day-a-week practices, Satoya trained alongside trampolinists such as Nani Vercruyssen, a 12-year-old who recently made the U.S. Junior National Team for trampoline and tumbling, and 10-year-old Keisha Padello, who is going to the U.S. Junior Olympics National Championships this month.
"Watching the young kids doing this makes me feel that maybe if I did this when I was young, I would've been much better off," Satoya said.
Vercruyssen thought it was fun to train with an Olympian and learned that "if you train hard and work towards a goal, you can accomplish it."
"Tae knows she needs special people around her," Fearing said. "She knows that there is no other freestyler skier hanging around a place like this."
Reach Stanley Lee at slee@honoluluadvertiser.com or 535-8533.
