Windsurfer Olga Raskina on the fight for the wave and sport camps
Sport has long been an integral part of our lives.even if at times his presence boils down to awkward attempts to introduce short workouts at home on a dusty yoga mat, or even wear leggings and comfortable workouts. That is why we have prepared a series of interviews with girls who are addicted to or professionally engaged in extreme sports: someone will inspire their examples to sign up for regular classes in the gym, others will be encouraged to ride their first wave somewhere on the African coast. All our heroines ride on different types of boards - from skateboard to surf - and do not think their lives without sports.
For me it all started with a snowboard, on which I rode from the age of thirteen, but because of a couple of fractures and a torn knee ligament I decided to try something more “soft” - water sports. Then, of course, I had no plans to do it professionally. I was immediately surprised by how friendly and caring people treated me, the girl, and the novice, the staff of the Five Squares windsurf station in Dahab. The guys helped with advice, brought equipment, found apartments, in general, sheltered-warmed-taught to ride. I was delighted. She found a job at the surf station, spent all her free time on the water - plunged into a new world with her head. A couple of years later, when I began to perform at competitions and travel a lot around the world, I noticed that everywhere girls are helped on the water and on the shore. Windsurfers in this regard are more gentlemen than surfers, although sometimes, of course, you have to “fight” for your wave.
I remember how I first arrived in Hawaii and immediately went to the most difficult spot of Hukipa. Some professionals rode there, and the access to the water was along dangerous rocks. While I was collecting equipment and shaking with fear, several people approached me, whom I had only seen in windsurfing cult films before, and told me how to go out into the water in this area, what to do if I break something. Robbie Nash (one of the first windsurfers who gained world fame. - Note ed.), passing by, said hello and wished a good day. I was shocked by how strangers, seeing a novice, showed participation and care.
My lifestyle gradually from a settled into a nomadic. At first I lived and worked in Dahab, Egypt for several years, and then began to travel around different countries, participate in a world windsurfing tour and train people. To ride cool, you need to be able to do it in different conditions, so during the year we change the situation several times. It was incredibly interesting to see the places about which the professional riders talked about and visit the windsurfing mecca of Hawaii. Traveling to different spots is always an adventure, meeting new people, sometimes “flying” to another planet - a place can be so unusual. I spent a couple of months preparing for competitions in a tiny village in Brazil - Jericoacoara, often visited Cape Town, and managed to visit Madagascar. This is only a small part of the wonderful places I've been to, thanks to windsurfing. As for physical fitness, of course, if you ride 300 days a year, the body becomes different - strong, healthy, flexible.
For ten years of riding in a hundred places on earth there were not so many ugly cases, and all of them were associated with extreme situations. For example, I take the biggest wave from the set, go to the collapse zone, and on the way to my wave another person “sits down” and is not going to yield to me. This is called drop in our language. For example, on the One Eye spot in Mauritius, one of the fastest waves in the world, such an act could cost equipment and health. I really do not like such situations, but they sometimes happen. In general, the stories when the guys, on the contrary, gave me their wave, because I was a girl, there was much more. I think this is gentlemanly - to give the girl a wave, because when there are fifty men and only one girl on the water, our chances are not equal. The girls are tidier, shy, slower than the guys, and we just have less power - many men understand this and sometimes give way to the waves. Of course, there are those who do not care at all on the water. But in our sport there are few such people.
Girls need more time to learn the trick. But we have such qualities as grace, lightness, smoothness of movements. Watching girls on the water is a pleasure. For more than five years I have been teaching girls in my windsurfing and windsurfing camps Windsurf Beauties Camp, and I see that in the early stages they learn much faster than the guys. We have a more developed instinct for self-preservation, so we learn to turn faster, we can always return to the shore, watch where we do what we do, and not just go a few kilometers at sea and come back half a day, as sometimes the guys do. Girls better analyze the situation, more accurately calculate their strength, share their feelings and ask questions, that is, they are more intelligent in their learning.
I participate in a world windsurfing tour. This year, at the most important stage on the island, Fuerteventura became the vice-champion of the world in freestyle, and following the results of the whole year she took the 4th place in freestyle and entered the top-10 in wave. This is my best result. I am also the only girl in Russia who skates for Red Bull, I really hope that there will be more of us.
Extreme sport itself is the same daily work, like many others, only with the risk to life. But everything connected with it: travel, adventures, those people whom we meet on the way, the nature with which we conduct a dialogue - all this takes us to another level. These are the simple joys that we sometimes do not see in the city. Waking up early in the morning at dawn and the first to scrape up on the spot, get into the snowfall and be the first to “blow up” the snowy forest, meet the sunset at the foot of Table Mountain and go down with friends on skateboards - these are the moments that we remember later in life.
The editors thank Studio Photoplay for their help in organizing the shooting, as well as Kuznetsky Most 20. In the shooting used items from the collection of Roxy and Walter Van Beirendonck.