By Marty Hastings / Kamloops This Week
Elli Terwiel misses competitive skiing, but she doesn’t miss concussions.
The 28-year-old slalom expert from Sun Peaks called it quits not long after she raced for Canada at the 2014 Olympic Winter Games in Sochi, Russia, realizing the risk she was running after suffering her fourth head injury and a compressed disc in her back.
“I didn’t want to have any more concussions,” said Terwiel, who retired in the spring of 2015. “I’d had enough. I want to be able to think critically for the rest of my life. My body needed time to heal.”
Terwiel graduated with a civil engineering degree from the University of Vermont in the spring of 2016 and is now working as a structural engineer in Bend, Oreg.
“It’s problem solving,” Terwiel said of her job. “It’s a chance to use my brain, something I’ve always liked to do. And I ski as often as I can. I’m living in Bend because it was an opportunity to be somewhere where the biking and skiing is great, near Mount Bachelor.”
Terwiel also helps out teaching at a nearby ski club.
It was hard not to cringe when she straddled a gate and recorded a did-not-finish result in her first slalom run at the Olympics on Feb. 21, 2014.
On that day, she chose to ski with unbridled ambition in appalling conditions after watching half the women racing in front of her crash out of the competition.
Warm temperatures, rain and a salty surface had wreaked havoc on the slalom course at the Rosa Khutor Alpine Resort.
“I could see it was really hard conditions, but I said, ‘There is no way I can go easy because this is the Olympics,’” said Terwiel, one of more than 30 women’s slalom skiers who failed to finish their runs that day.
Terwiel will be back in Kamloops in time for the 2018 B.C. Winter Games, which run from Feb. 22 to Feb. 25, as she will hold a dignitary role at the event.
There are no concrete plans for her future — and that’s just fine for now.
“The future holds lots of different things,” Terwiel said. “At this point, I’m enjoying the fact I don’t have to know exactly what my future is. I’m taking opportunities wherever they are.”