Zoe Gillings-Brier, Britain's no 1 Olympic snowboard cross athlete finished on the podium in an impressive 3rd place at the Cortina D'Ampezzio European Cup snowboard cross competition in Italy yesterday. ...
Gillings-Brier has spent the last 11 months off snow following her 9th place finish at the Sochi 2014 Olympic Games and only returned to the Alps a few weeks ago.  Even though Zoe has just returned, at present it is simply to focus on training freestyle snowboard techniques that will help her go for gold in snowboard cross at the 2018 PyeongChang Olympics in 2018. Â
With a strong field of competition, Zoe qualified into the heats in 5th place. Zoe then won both her quarter final and semi final heats. With no lane choice in the final due to her qualification time, despite being 4th into the first berm and racing head to head against an Italian athlete who just beat Zoe into the final of the Sochi 2014 Olympics by a matter of centimetres, Zoe managed to pass into 3rd place where she stayed for the remainder of the race.
Throughout the competition to aid her Olympic training Zoe used two Soloshot 2 robotic cameramen to automatically film all her runs on course and a DJI Phanton 2 Vision + quadcopter with HD camera was flown to capture her technique from the air, all the files were then transmitted via Zoes personal cloud using Filetransporter to her coach in Italy for analysis.
"I'm really happy with today's result, it was a real shock. It was a strong field and despite not being on snow for just under a year and not doing any snowboard cross training whatsoever, I was really happy with my performance. The shift in training to focus on freestyle techniques to help me in snowboard cross is paying off. Even though the result wasn't a target, Im happy I got on the podium" commented Zoe after the race.
Zoe now heads back to Aosta, Italy to continue her freestyle training with "Why Aint you Jibbin" owners Steve Addicott and Olympian/friend Kate Foster before returning back 100% to snowboard cross in June 2015.
Since losing UK Sport funding, Zoe has only been able to continue in the sport thanks to setting up her online razor delivery company - PoundShaveClub.com of which she recently received a significant amount of investment funding, and thanks to her loyal sponsors, Ski Team 4, Mitsubishi motors, Nutrition X, DJI, Bridgestone, Celtic Associates, Soloshot and Transporter.