Finley Melville Ives (right) and his twin, Campbell, will represent New Zealand in Milan. REUTERS
When New Zealand freestyle skier Finley Melville Ives pulled off a dream run to clinch his first World Cup gold medal in Calgary, Canada, over the weekend, his snowboarding twin brother Campbell was among the first to congratulate him.
The 18-year-old siblings have cheered each other's rise to the top level of their sports, and will do so again in a year's time when they compete at the Milano-Cortina Winter Games.
"It's going to be so sick. I'm so excited," Finley told reporters on Tuesday. "I've trained where it will be held at the Livigno snow park. It's an epic place."
Finley took the halfpipe gold in Calgary, a breakthrough for a self-described "fourth-place warrior", topping the podium ahead of a pair of decorated Americans.
Runner-up Nick Goepper medaled at the past three Winter Olympics in slopestyle, while Alex Ferreira took halfpipe bronze at the 2022 Beijing Games and silver at Pyeongchang, South Korea, in 2018.
Campbell is targeting a medal of his own when he competes in snowboarding in Calgary this week, a year on from taking a Big Air bronze at the Youth Olympics.
"It was pretty awesome, pretty inspiring, actually," he said of watching Finley's triumph in Canada.
"I'm hoping to follow in the same way."
Apart from their sports, not much separates the twins, whose parents are avid snowboarders and had their sons on skis when they were three.
The family live in Wanaka on New Zealand's South Island, an idyllic, lakeside resort fringed by snowy mountains in winter.
The logistics and costs of raising one child in snow sports is a huge challenge for New Zealand parents, given most elite competition is half a world away.
The Melville Ives' parents were flat out raising two, before the twins made their respective national teams and were able to enjoy support from sports authorities.
"It's all pretty intense," their mother Karen said.
"We always seem to make it work somehow. We do house-swaps, rent out our house in Wanaka sometimes.
"And they support each other quite a lot."
'Big dogs'
The twins may be relieved to no longer be juggling high school. Finley said his attendance rate at the local Wanaka college may have been less than 30 percent due to competition commitments.
"I wasn't in school very much, but I was just always in the library studying, just to catch up, keep up," he said.
He will have more time to plot his path to Milano-Cortina 2026 with Scottish coach Murray Buchan, who competed for Britain in freestyle skiing at two Olympics.
The pair make a good match, said Finley.
"I'd say me and Murray are quite OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder), so we like things pretty perfect," he joked. "He helps me to load the dishwasher correctly. I feel like that rubs off in my skiing."
Buchan would have found Finley's winning run in Calgary hard to fault, a highly technical program that the skier conceived with a former coach a year ago.
"To be able to have a plan, and one year later win a World Cup, it's totally nuts," he said.
"Fingers crossed I can land it more in the future."
The winning buzz lingered well after the event, as Finley spent hours replying to congratulatory messages from friends and his own heroes, including Olympic halfpipe champion Nico Porteous, the first New Zealand man to win a Winter Olympics gold.
"All the big dogs I grew up watching messaged me. I was just like: 'Oh my god, this is so crazy'," said Finley.
Reuters
