Welcome Team HPC!

Welcome Parents and Athletes

We are excited to formally open our new training facility in Leogang Austria! We are equally excited to welcome the Australian families, athletes and coaches that are joining our HPC team this year!

We know all too well, as parents to young aspiring ski racers ourselves, far too many times, competitive athletes do not have access to state of the art training facilities, both on and off-snow. We have been pulling together many components for a top ski racing program using partners for many years, but each time we have felt that the level of service and product offering has been too fragmented, non-commital and ad hoc.

It is with this motivation and our on-going commitment to ski racing, that we invested in our own product development, both for on-snow training and off-snow ‘innovation’ – to develop what we are proud to call ‘High Performance Centre Leogang’.

Our Vision: To make HPC Leogang the home of Ski and Snowboard Australia (SSA) Alpine High Performance Northern Winter Programs and a key pathway to Australia’s Olympic Winter Institute (OWI), which will cater to all of the countries very best alpine winter sports athletes. Alongside our best, HPC aims to develop future Aussie champions of tomorrow, to nurture and grow in every aspect of character and skill to become the best racers they themselves aim to be.

Over our 13 years of northern and southern hemisphere race program development experience, we have taken ‘best practice’ and created the HPC Program.

What sets this program apart is threefold:

1. Dedicated Training Stadium in Leogang: We believe the most important foundation to superior ski race training is a dedicated and un-blocked access to state of the art training pistes. The Leogang lift company (Leoganger Bergbahnen GesmbH) is a strategic partner and behind the HPC Leogang training philosophy. The lift company believes in the future development of competitive sports. They have provided a dedicated training stadium to our race program. Along with this, we have continuous access to state of the art World Cup training slopes at HINTERREIT (where Marcel Hirscher, Ted Ligety, Lindsay Vonn, Henrik Kristofferson, Axel Lund Svindal to name a few) all train, this only 15minutes from Leogang.

2. High Performance Centre – the facility: A fully equipped ‘one stop training shop’ for athletes! Located right at the foot of the Leogang Gondola, HPCsservices include fully equipped strength and conditioning (S&C) gym, recovery bikes, skill mill and Olympic Lifting racks to name a few. HPCs Program philosophy places big importance on S&C, both on and off season. Although the program core and emphasis is on-snow training blocks, to be competitive in the European and international race circuit, our athletes will be placed under a tough and rigorous off-snow coaching program during the season.

3. S&C coach Markus Steiner: We have commissioned a fully certified Strength & Conditioning trainer dedicated to the Australian athletes for 3 days a week to focus on physical conditioning. Markus has over 20 years of experience working with elite athletes in the diciplines of alpine ski racing, triathlon, mountaineering, running, etc. His most successful alpine ski racing athlete has been Austrian Marlies Schild (4 Olympic medals, 7 World Championship medals with 2 in gold, 37 World Cup victories). Together with our coaches team, Markus is in charge of the daily S&C programming and implementation.

For SSA Childrens & FIS Program athletes as well as HPC Race Camp athletes, the program package includes all of the above with complete and daily access to the facility. From first hour morning prep to afternoon ski tuning and video analysis, the High Performance Centre is the hub for our Aussie racers.

To keep everyone in the loop, we will share our HPC Training Calendar to be visible to all parents and athletes on-line. You can click and log-on anytime to see what your kids will be training in the coming weeks so you can be part of their experience and progress. We will also be posting a regular blog to keep everyone in the loop with cool bits and bobs, achievements, challenges, wins, losses and bloopers!

Other regular updates you can view on Facebook.

I will end our first post with a warm invitation to share in our journey J. We thank you for being part of our family. Your continued support has been our driver to invest in being the ‘best’ on and off snow race training provider. We hope you will stay tuned on and off-line as we kick-off a very exciting and brand new 2017 season!

Take care and kind regards from Leogang Austria,

Stoffl

(& team Regi, Raf, Jakob, Marcel, Markus and Margarita)