Aiglon College: Where Ski Racing is more than just a Sport

Nestled amidst the Swiss Alps, Aiglon College has long been synonymous with mountain sports, particularly skiing — as many alumni will no doubt fondly remember. Ski racing has always been ingrained in Aiglon life and this sport has come to represent an emotional connection with the school for many generations of students.

How, then, do you take something that is such a fundamental part of a school’s DNA and improve on it? That was the task assigned to Jamie Wilcocks when he started as the Head of High Performance Athletes and Innovation in Sports last January. “We’re trying to put sports, and particularly performance sports and skiing, into the limelight,” he explains of his role. To make that happen, he and a team of highly accomplished former athletes and trainers have been “thinking outside of the box to bring new ideas and new activities,” he says.

The approach they have adopted might sound counterintuitive, but it draws heavily on Aiglon’s guiding philosophy of balance: putting in place a holistic programme that focuses not just on the practical sport itself. “We don’t want our students to just learn skiing to only achieve medals,” says Caroline George, Snowsports Team Manager at Aiglon. Before joining the school three years ago, she had worked as a ski instructor as well as an Alpine educator and examiner at the national ski instructor governing body. “That’s not the point; in fact, that’s almost the last thing that comes.” 

Of course, the three programmes on offer for students from the junior school all the way up to senior school includes its fair share of skiing. “If you are a Junior Academy or Development racer — programmes we introduced just last year — you’re doing squad training three times a week, twice in physical education (PE) lessons and once at the weekend. Those on the performance programme ski four times a week,” Ms George explains. In fact, this year already, the ski team will have had 28 days on snow before Christmas, training indoors in Peer alongside World Cup athletes, and on Glacier 3000 in Les Diablerets, Zermatt and Zinal, part of the goal of making skiing at Aiglon a 10-month full-time programme.

But added to these practical, on-snow training sessions are a whole host of other offerings, covering everything from nutrition to ski tuning to high-performance psychology. “Someone on the junior academy or development programme will have at least one ski tuning and psychology workshop a week,” Ms George says. “So, for example, the students are responsible for maintaining their own equipment, because it teaches them to care for and respect what they have, and helps them learn the dedication that goes into being an athlete.”

It’s an approach that is familiar to Head Coach Marusa Ferk Saioni, a former Olympian who joined the school in August 2024, and whose expertise will help elevate Aiglon’s young skiers, instilling in them an athlete’s mentality and a love for the sport. Originally from Slovenia, she has represented her country at four Winter Olympics and finished third in the slalom at the 2009 Ski World Cup; in 2022, she started working as a coach with her former team. “I learned so much over my career, from ski tuning, to nutrition, to how to train off the snow, even how to rest,” she remembers. “It’s all these little pieces that come together and make a great athlete, and that’s what we’re doing with students at Aiglon, starting from the basics and building our way up.”

The coaching team of three full time Aiglon staff is supported by a wider support team, including David Mansfield (Belvedere, 1982) who has been an Aiglon ski coach for over two decades, as well the dedicated local Villars Swiss Ski School (ESS) instructors. 

More than just developing good — even outstanding — skiers, the goal of the programme is about helping bring about a mindset shift, so students understand what it takes to truly excel in a given field. “You can’t just say ‘We’re going to build a culture of high performance’ and then expect that people will automatically perform really, really well,” says Mr Wilcocks. Before joining Aiglon at the start of 2024, he had set up a High-Performance Academy in Truro, England, that offered specialist training to high-potential athletes. “It starts with changing attitudes and mindsets,” he explains. Aiglon’s ongoing collaboration with US Olympic skier 林赛·沃恩 is contributing to this. “She has interacted with students from our junior school all the way through to senior school to help them understand how to build a winning mindset,” Mr Wilcocks points out.

Of course, none of this should be confused with a myopic focus on only sporting excellence. “Our goal is not to produce Olympic level skiers at the expense of their education,” Mr Wilcocks says. “So we’re constantly looking at students’ calendars and making sure they’re not being overloaded, for example.” This attention to the importance of balance is why the school is aligned with the World Academy of Sport and has been accredited as an Athlete Friendly Education Centre. But the bigger hope is that by helping students develop a high-performance mindset, the benefits will trickle down and have an impact beyond skiing, Mr Wilson notes. “If we can do it with skiing first — and we’ve got the right team in place to make that happen — then it can start to drift out across other sports and activities as well.” 

The 11th annual Aiglon Cup Ski Race will take place from 10 -11 March 2025 on our local ski resort, Villars-sur-Ollon. Over 10 international schools with young athletes in the U10, U12, U14, U16, U18, and U21 categories will compete in Giant Slalom (GS), Slalom, and Combi races.