Scottish Women & Girls in Sport Week - Sandra Caune Interview

Our third Team Snowsport Scotland athlete featured for Scottish Women & Girls in Sport Week is Sandra Caune!

A talented freeskier on our Park & Pipe Team, Sandra brought home Gold and Bronze at last year’s European Youth Olympics! After some time off with injury, she’s gearing up to get back on the slopes - and we can’t wait to see her flying high again!

1. What inspired you to pursue your sport at a high level?

The drive to continuously achieve new goals and to experience freestyle skiing from the competitive side of the sport.

2. What’s the biggest mental challenge you face in competition, and how do you overcome it?

Managing to compose my nerves and to stay happy and just enjoy it when it didn’t go right was a massive challenge for me going into my first competition on snow and it being the European Youth Olympics, thrown straight into the deep end but managed to stay afloat.

3. What’s the most underrated aspect of training for your discipline?

I would say training the mental side of the sport is quite undervalued, everyone focuses on the physical aspect trying to stay in shape and perfecting the tricks. But i believe that working on your mind will help you improve physically as well and it think it’s quite ignored sometimes.

4. If you had to describe your sport to someone who’s never seen snow before, how would you do it?

Imagine you’re on a smooth, slippery surface; a frozen version of soft sand and you’ve got long flat sticks on your feet that help you glide quickly over it.

Freestyle skiing is a sport where people use those sticks (skis) to slide, jump, spin, and do tricks—kind of like dancing or doing gymnastics, but on snow. It happens on specially designed mountains or courses, with ramps, jumps, and rails.

5. What’s the wildest or most unexpected thing that’s happened to you on the slopes?

During The European Youth Olympics, we had to hang fire on the competition as there were dogs on the course and features who seemed to also wanted to compete.

6. If you could change one rule or aspect of your sport, what would it be?

It’s not an official rule it’s more seen as a unspoken rule. But the spin to win in competitions has to go, we need to bring back the real aspect of freestyle skiing, the expressive nature back.

7. What’s your go-to excuse when you totally mess up a run/lap?

There’s not really an excuse for messing up al run/lap, just human error , mistakes, muck-ups happen all the time, we just have to learn how to prevent it from happening.

8. If you could add one event to the Winter Olympics, what would it be?

I would bring back ballet skiing. Looking back at old videos is always so interesting to see, ballet skiing was so expressive and beautiful to see.

9. If you could compete in any other winter sport for a day, which would it be and why?

I would compete in freestyle snowboarding, I’ve recently taking an interest for snowboarding as well and I would love to be able to do it at good level.