Emma Cairns

FP Flying High After Successful Skiing Business Soars To New Heights

Meet Emma Cairns, she’s a Former Pupil from the Class of 2000, but also a ski instructor in Verbier, Switzerland. In fact, she became fully qualified in the British, French and Swiss systems by the age of 30. She’s also a BASI Trainer, which means she’s qualified to train and examine other ski instructors as well.

Emma’s work has given her a fascinating insight into the physiological factors that influence athletes, especially female athletes. Take British track and road cyclist, Laura Trott, who won four Olympic gold medals at the 2012 and 2016 games. Or 72-year-old Gwyn Haslock, Britain’s oldest surfer, who still tackles the Cornish waves every week. And professional snowboarder Jenny Jones, who became the first Briton to win an Olympic medal on-snow at the 2014 Winter Olympics. But for every amazing success story there are too many stories about women somehow held back in sport. Emma became acutely aware of this trend in alpine skiing. When she was training for her final exams, she noticed the biggest contrast between the number of male and female instructors. There are about 400 ski instructors with the highest BASI Level 4 qualification, yet only 60 are women. That’s only 15% and an even lower percentage of BASI Trainers are women. So, why are there fewer women reaching the top? After years of coaching, Emma believes that the difference in psychological approach is quite often at the root of the problem. She began to see a big difference between the genders, not technically but in terms of motivation and belief. It wasn’t just in advanced skiers training for ski instructor exams, she saw it across the industry. To her this seemed somewhere she could make a difference. So, Emma set up a ski school in Verbier called Element and runs unique Women’s Ski Camps in the winter. The aim was to create an all-female environment to help women improve their technique and push their boundaries. Female skiers need to approach skiing slightly differently, so the Camps have biomechanics presentations and advice on sports science.

But crucially, they build a sense of belief in the skiers, with confidence stemming from really understanding how to overcome the physical and psychological barriers. Emma said “By tailoring how we teach women we can encourage more of them into the sport. This in turn will lead to more women enjoying skiing, achieving more goals and I hope more women believing they can become ski instructors. And it all starts with really believing you can go all the way.” The courses have become really popular and hundreds of female skiers are now skiing off-piste and exploring the mountains with the technique and self-belief to push their limits. But Emma hasn’t stopped there, because she now runs Peak Leaders, ski instructor training programmes in Argentina and Switzerland that help both male and female trainees on the qualification pathway to BASI Level 4. And she’s determined that the next generation of BASI Trainers will be a representative mix of male and female. “To be able to inspire and motivate others to achieve their goals in sport is an amazing job and I feel very lucky to be in a position to make a difference and to make sure that the female skiers that I work with have the self-belief to achieve their own goals.”