All Ski Instructors Are Not Created Equal

We meet Emil on a run down the mountain. Or, to be more precise, slightly off the mountain, where Z has landed in a half-arsed attempt at a jump, N has followed him, and both appear to be trying to eat their way out of the snow.

As Emil yanks N out of three feet of snow without either a by-your-leave or (more impressively) a squeak of protest from his victim, he seems like a chap who knows his stuff, and takes absolutely no crap from anyone.

Emil’s 20ish, Bulgarian, the best extreme skier on the mountain, has been skiing since he was three and is, quite frankly, the stuff of one’s Mrs (or, of course, Mr) Robinson fantasies.

Were one, of course, not only old enough to be his parent, but also capable of outskiing him on the mountain, rather than following saggily in his wake, back foot flapping duckwise over the choppy snow.

Would you like to guess which category I, umm, fall into?

Ahem.

Anywise, N’s ma, Tracy, clearly shares my view that Emil is, umm, a man one wants tending to one’s kids’ skiing needs.

We discuss. I bagsy Emil — I mean, who wouldn’t? — and she goes for lessons from another instructor from his ski school.

To be honest, skiing in Bulgaria has come as a bit of a shock to the system. I don’t know a lot about Bulgaria, so this may well not be true of resorts like Pamporovo, but the run grading here in Bansko seems a little hardcore.

You can read Z’s take on things here, but, frankly, after soft resorts like Andorra (a country, fact fans!), Yllas (in Finnish Lapland) and, ummm, Chamonix (the extreme skiing capital of France), the whole colour coding thing came as a shock to the system.

The standard Western European system has four grades of runs, green (beginners), blue (easyish), red (intermediate), black (advanced). Here in Bansko, they use blue (easy), red (middle), black (hard) and orange (ski road).

The runs aren’t signed well and the paper maps diverge widely from the grading on the slopes, which means you can get off a lift looking for the blue run to find only reds, and can spend a lot of time panicking at unsigned forks in the piste. That’s where you can see the piste, of course.

Not that there’s much difference between the two here. A blue run spans everything from something with patches so flat boarders have to walk and little patches of green run (1 and 1A, if you’re visiting) to savagely steep dropins with heavy, choppy snow leading into a flat runoff (route 5 and 11 take a bow!).

Which means we may have left it a little late for our first lesson with Emil. We haven’t skied for, pretty much, three years. When Z was three years younger, and so were my knees, and, more importantly, my mental attitude.

Which left me watching in mild awe as he bounced with the fearlessness and sinews of extreme youth while I quavered falteringly in his wake.

Emil put him in his place, though…

“Just because you go fast doesn’t make you a good skier,” he says, as I nod approvingly from 100 metres up the slope. “You need to control where you are on the mountain.”

“Stop eating snow!” he says, a while later.

“No Twix for you!” I chime in.

“No chocolate!” says Emil. “You last another hour without eating snow, and you get chocolate!”

“You know,” he says to me, as we turn studiously and painfully slowly down the mountain which Z has just descended at a 45 degree angle, “He’s very good when he concentrates. But half the time he’s in another place.”

This other place is something I’ve only come to appreciate since I took over Z’s schooling from his teachers, who were all-too familiar with the other place (he gets it, like his legs — of which more later — from his father).

“Weight FORWARD!” Emil says. “Listen to me! You want to go through the trees? You’re not going through the trees like that!”

Z sucks it up…

“OK,” he says. “Now we do a jump!”

Emil jumps.

Z jumps.

I start to think about jumping, and don’t like what I think.

“It’s OK,” Emil says, looking at the elderly lady quivering five metres from the trees. “You don’t have to do it if you’re scared…”

F*ck! I think. I’m old enough to be his mother.

Or, worse, I’m NOT old enough to be his mother, but he still thinks I am.

I pass on the jump.

Z and I learnt to ski together in Finland when he was six. I had tried some ludicrous approximation of the activity in Scotland as a pre-teen and as a teen, but, with all due respect to Scotland, there are a whole bunch of good reasons it’s not on the world skiing map, and I experienced most of them sliding backwards down the ice while attempting to side-step up to my five metres of almost-horizontal run.

Anywise, it takes under two hours for Emil to lick Z’s posture and turns into shape, and he doesn’t even have to unleash his Mars Bar stash. He also sorts out the funny thing with my back leg and a problem with my shoulders I wasn’t aware I even had (they need to face downhill at all times, fact fans!).

Afterwards, Z and I are cruising, relatively gracefully and (by my standards) fast, down a red run so choppy you’d count it as moguls in Andorra.

The snow’s hissing under our feet. The British and Greek “put your skis on and start at the top, who needs to learn, eh?” crew are out of the way, the pines are coated in snow, the run is pretty much empty, and life feels good.

“You know,” he begins.

“No,” I say. We pull over, for a fag (me) and some snow (him).

“Emil is a really good ski instructor,” he says. “But my favourite was Juul. Remember Juul? In Finland?”

“Of course,” I say.

Juul was in his 50s, sailing teacher in the summer, ski instructor in the winter, had taught his two sons and their kids to ski, and taught one nervous 30-something and one phenomenally confident 6-year-old to ski on solid ice in one of the least ski-friendly winters Lapland has had.

Sure, it was -10 rather than -30. But there was still no goddamn snow!

“Yeah,” Z says. “Juul was really nice. Do you remember when he towed me down that red run and fed me Snickers? He ALWAYS had a mini-Snickers in his pocket. And he got them out at exactly the right moment.”

“Mmm,” I say. “Do you think Juul would cut you that much slack now?”

He chomps on snow in a meditative fashion. “Probably not,” he says. “Race you to the cafe!”

Arriving at the bottom of the run to find my son leaning on his poles in the manner of someone about to take root from pure tedium, I book another lesson with Emil.

“Tracy,” I say, over one of the worst sandwiches I’ve experienced. “I think for N you should ask Pirin for the oldest ski instructor they’ve got. You want someone who’s taught their kids and grandkids to ski.”

Her back foot, incidentally, does not flap like a duck’s.