23 NOVEMBER 2007
MY PASSION
Jonathan McGuinness is the owner of stylish ski and tennis sports shop White Stone in Cold Bath Road, Harrogate. He worked as assistant coach to Olympic and World Cup skiers Graham and Martin Bell before realizing his dream of opening his own shop.
I was just a young lad when the skiing bug hit me. As a pupil at Salt Grammar School in Baildon, I was given the chance to go on a school skiing trip to a resort in the Itallian Dolomites when I was 11 years old. That first time on skis was just amazing – it was so exciting and so exhilarating, I will never forget it. I really was hit by the ski bug.
I was lucky enough to be able to go a few times after that, with the school again, to other resorts across Europe, and it was around that time that I got involved with the junior ski club at Harrogate. The Harrogate Ski Centre, which is no longer around, was a great place to be and I became really involved in racing and freestyle skiing.
As soon as it snowed, I was out on Baildon Moor, close to where I lived, with my skis and boots, building jumps and skiing whenever I possibly could.
After leaving school I hung around the dry ski slope in Harrogate until they gave me a job, and I worked there for around 18 months, completing all my instructors’ qualifications. It was a fantastic place to work – and it led to me getting a job with Graham and Martin Bell as an assistant coach. At the time, the brothers, both from Harrogate, were doing really well on the World Cup ski circuit, and they asked if I could join them.
I spent four years working alongside Graham and Martin as their assistant coach. We spent a lot of time training on Austrian and Swiss glaciers in the summer. The brothers were involved in technical training in the summer and speed training in the autumn before the start of the World Cup Downhill circuit in December for the Premiere Neige at Val D’Isere. It was just superb, spending all that time in the mountains and skiing. I felt very lucky and privileged to have been given the chance to work as an assistant coach. One season I was watching all the famous ski racers on Ski Sunday and the next I was setting training courses for them before a World Cup race as we often worked with the Austrian and Norwegian national teams.
But all good things come to an end, and I decided it was time to get a ‘proper’ job and started working in the finance side of car sales. But that didn’t affect my love of skiing.
Now I own my own ski shop and still meet up with Graham and Martin for skiing trips. Earlier this year I met with the brothers in Austria, where we spent a lot of time in the 1980s, to test out new skis with them and they were guests of honour at the opening of White Stone last year. It’s really a dream come true to be working in the ski industry as it still is my passion.
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