Have you ever thought about skiing or snowboarding without leaving São Paulo? Snow here hasn’t been very frequent since the last ice age. But, if you can’t wear that beautiful colorful outfit that we see in videos from popular ski resorts, at least you can get a taste of what it feels like to go down a snowy slope, I mean, almost.
Born to Ski, a gym located in Vila Olímpia, west of São Paulo, is an installation dedicated to reproducing skiing or snowboarding movements on slopes that are nine meters long by five meters wide and offer various degrees of inclination to enhance the user’s maneuvers. Venture partner Marco Antonio Parizotto imported equipment from the Netherlands and offers classes in these two sports both for those who have never seen snow in their lives and for those who are already familiar with the activities but want to improve or, at the very least, not lose their touch.
According to Parizotto, the initiative was so successful that the unit’s schedule has 70% of its schedules occupied, even with each class costing R$350.00. But he says that at the beginning there were only doubts regarding an investment of R$10 million.
“Our first question was whether people would like indoor training, and the second whether it would really work when these people went to the snow”, says the businessman, who is already preparing to open another unit in the Pinheiros neighborhood.
To the relief of the enterprise, the feedback from students who took classes and went to ski resorts “was wonderful” and he points out the cost/benefit ratio of the practice, remembering that the average price charged for a day of skiing on European slopes is 800 euros (R$4,700 at approximate exchange rates). “And one hour of indoor track is equivalent to a whole day in the mountains”, he assures. He also highlights that, despite being a sport that involves some risk and several falls in nature, in indoor practice “there were only five cases of more serious falls among the more than 6,000 students who passed through” the unit.
“People who had never skied and trained with us for ten lessons, went straight to a blue slope, the instructors couldn’t believe they had never stepped on snow”, he adds. For the uninitiated, it’s worth remembering that ski slopes are classified by their level of difficulty, and blue is considered between easy and intermediate. It’s possible not to pay in layman’s terms at all, go ahead.
The main difference that Parizotto points out in the simulator — which he doesn’t like to call a simulator — is the fact that each student has an instructor monitoring their every movement at all times, in addition to a large mirror at the back of the room where they can check their posture. “In addition, you have all the safety equipment that gives confidence to those who have never skied to start slowly and progress, they won’t have to get to the mountain and ask themselves ‘and now, what do I do'”, he explains.
The person who agreed with him on the day the column went to see the gadget was Thiago Rolim, 45, CEO of a company that outsources services for the health sector and a snowboarder for seven years and who introduced his wife and two daughters, aged 4 and 7, to the sport. “Here it is much more difficult than in the mountains, it requires much more energy and the technical gain is considerable”, he stated.
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