Meet the Trailblazers Carrying the UAE Into Its Winter Olympic Debut

Alex Astridge doesn’t spend much time thinking about the enormity of the moment he’s about to embark on. When asked about what it all means, the 19-year-old alpine skier paused for a brief moment. He chuckled nervously, then responded with an apology and a gleeful smile.

“Sorry, I'm pretty speechless,” Astridge says. “I get pretty nervous because it is… it’s surreal. I couldn't be any more thankful.”

Few people can say they’ve carried their country’s colours on the world stage. Even fewer can say they’ve that as their nation’s first-ever Olympic Games athletes. Now, Astridge and fellow skier Piera Hudson will delve even deeper into uncharted territory as they bear the flag of the United Arab Emirates in Italy during the opening ceremony of the Milano-Cortina Winter Games.

“Being able to represent something that's bigger than the sport, I’m really proud to be pioneering this along with Alex and be taking UAE to the Winter Olympics for the first time and making history,” Hudson says.

Born in New Zealand, Hudson’s path to the ski hill developed early and continued to grow. Her parents met while skiing, and the sport has always been a regular fixture on holidays for her family. Hudson’s brother became a ski instructor. In her own words, however, she jokes that she was the sibling who took it too far.

“I made it into my whole identity, my whole career,” Hudson says.

Already a trailblazer in her own right, she first made waves in the snow sports world when she represented New Zealand, her country of birth, at the first-ever Youth Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria, in 2012.

Hudson went on to win numerous national championships and later made headlines in 2018 when she became the first New Zealand Alpine skier to score World Cup Points in 15 years.

After moving to Dubai permanently about six years ago, she realised she could be part of skiing in an even bigger way.

“Just because a sport is dominated by Europeans and North Americans, there should still be a place for other countries to be breaking into it and for it to be a space where these non-traditional winter countries take up space as well,” Hudson says.

It’s a sentiment that her fellow flag bearer Astridge shares, embodies, and has lived through while growing up in the desert nation. At the age of three, he learned to ski at Ski Dubai, later becoming part of programs and taking trips to other parts of the world where he continued to hone his athletic ability.

Being geographically limited, however, meant he didn’t have the same ability to take mountain trips as frequently as others in the sport. That limitation was also present through the lack of elite representation in his sport, with most people choosing other routes like football and equestrian.

As he paves the way forward for people to follow, he recognises the potential inspiration his journey could bring about for the future of skiing.

“It's a burden where I can't only do something for myself,” he says. “While I'm doing it, I also have to ensure that when it's done in the future, there's standards in place, and there’s guidelines,” adds Astridge. “It’s amazing for all the kids back in Ski Dubai because they can see that there's a pathway and there's an end goal that can be reached.”