Over the last few months I have been putting all my effort into trying to qualify for the 2014 winter Olympics in Sochi. To get the necessary points needed to compete in the games I have been following the FIS World Cup tour which has events in New Zealand, USA, Canada, Russia and Spain.

My campaign started well down in New Zealand where I got my first top 20 result, which is one of the criteria needed to qualify (see previous blog for pics). Now I just need one more top 20 result and as long as I am still ranked in the top 40 on the World Cup list I will get to ride at the Olympics!

Things took a bad turn in Canada where I broke my wrist whilst training. It didn’t stop me riding for long but in the next event in Utah I wasn’t on top form and got a pretty bad result there. I was feeling good for the next contest in Russia and it was awesome to go to Sochi and see the Olympic venue, but luck wasn’t on my side in the contest and two falls plus two broken snowboards meant I didn’t get the result I was hoping for.

I am now ranked 41^st so realise I have got some work to do to get back in the top 40. This is why I have headed back out to the States so I can spend three weeks training in a quality pipe before the next event in Spain. It’s nice to be back riding in the perfect halfpipe in Breckenridge. I am staying with all of the British team and at the moment we have the guys from Whitelines out here, so it’s been cool that they can get some shots of us training for the magazine as well as some filming for a team GB profile on www.whitelines.mpora.com

1st place in the Battle of Britain! Stoked! Once again the Freeze festival was an awesome weekend.  The ramp is still mega scary when you are at the top, especially when the 30 meter high scaffolding is rocking in the wind!  But once you get rid of your jelly legs the jump was nice and it was really fun to ride.

Props go to Billy Morgan though as he won the international Freeze event that was on later that night!

To be honest I wasn’t planning on coming to New Zealand this summer, but after finding out that the first qualifier for the 2014 winter Olympics was being held there I quickly booked flights and started on the long journey down under.

New Zealand is just stunning. The landscape varies from rainforest to huge grass plains and from snow capped mountains to unspoilt coastlines.  Here is a freezing cold rock pool we jumped into in the middle of a forest

Oh yeah and I did some snowboarding! There was a big crew of team GB riders out there and we all stayed together in a big house. We rode the super pipe up at the Cardrona resort most days to practice for the FIS world cup Halfpipe event which was to be the first Olympic qualifier. I finished up in 18th place so was super happy with that as it gives me a good world cup ranking and puts me in a good position for the rest of the season!

What a crazy few days this was! My friend Johno Verity was supposed to go on this trip but then pulled out and so I took his place. Here is what was written about it on www.wired.com

ZHONGWEI, China — Even in the depths of isolation under Mao, one element of Chinese culture allowed its people to travel abroad and glimpse an alternative way of life: sport.

As capitalism, albeit run under communism, has consumed Chinese life, sport remains a huge part of the national ethos and the country will field one of the largest teams at the 2012 Olympic Games in London. But China has of late increasingly had its eye on traditionally western sports like Formula 1, “extreme sports” and winter games. Four-time British snowboard champion Dom Harington has for example noticed more Chinese competitors on the slopes.

“There are more and more Chinese who are into snowboarding and other adventure sports,” says Harington, who lives and trains in Colorado each summer. “I’ve seen some Chinese guys training in America. They’ve got a really good half pipe team, and they’re really keen.”

“What I would say about the Chinese is that they’re really brave,” Harington says. “They’re not afraid to give something a go, or really go for something. There are lots of tricks in snowboarding which are quite scary to try, and they’re really keen to give it a go.”

Harington is on the slopes as we are talking. But we’re not in the Rockies. Or even on snow. We’re 900 miles west of Beijing, sliding down a piste of sand.

A half-mile-wide wall of desert dunes plummets 600 feet to the banks of the Yellow River. The Chinese have played on the sand for years, but the run at Zhongwei has been groomed as one of the highest sand-skiing slopes in the world. The big daddy of sand runs, at more than 1,000 feet, is Sossusvlei in Namibia, but Zhongwei remains impressive.

Harington is here for Land Rover’s 8,000-mile Journey of Discovery, an expedition from the United Kingdom to Beijing that’s allowed us to explore a secret Soviet submarine lair and hang out with an avalanche control team in Italy. Now the bosses in Gaydon want Harington to race a Land Rover LR4. So here we are, practicing among a crowd of avid sandboarders with Chinese adventure sports nut Simon Chen.

As a parasailer soars overhead and someone on a zip wire flies toward the river, Chen uses one of the toboggans you can rent for little more than a dollar to bat down the 50-degree slope. Harington rides an old snowboard, lubricated heavily to speed his descent on the hot sand. It’s midday on a Thursday, and the slopes are sparsely populated.

“I’ve not sandboarded anywhere like this,” Harington says. “This is incredible. It’s got steep sand dunes so you can pick up lots of speed. There is quite a lot of friction on sand so it’s not as fast as snow, but you can get some speed.

The transition from snow to sand is not tricky. Harington says the trick is to keep your weight back, kind of like surfing. Don’t lean too far forward, and don’t put too much weight on the edges or you’ll fall.

“The technique to sandboarding is really similar to snowboarding,” Harington says. “If you can snowboard, you can sandboard.”

Forget cute alpine cafes with hot chocolate and glühwein to warm you after a few hours on the mountain. Zhongwei is authentically Chinese. A sole parasol at the foot of the slope shields a mask-wearing woman selling warm soft drinks. A small army of men in quasi-military outfits collect toboggans and run the single chairlift. To a man, they all stop and stare as Harington blasts down the hill.

“One of the guys working here just said you are the fastest down this slope,” Chen tells him.

Everyone we see on the slope is using a toboggan, but Chen says the weekends draw a lot guys racing on sandboards. We’re due in Beijing and can’t stick around for that, so Harington races the Landie. The rules are simple. Harington takes position at the lip of the dune. The LR4 needs a running start to avoid bottoming out. Once the truck hits the lip, it’s on. First to the bottom wins.

As the sound of the V8 approaching breaks the silence, Harington is bouncing up and down like a coiled spring. The rest of us are down below, watching. As soon as the car hits the lip, Harington leaps into the air and zips headfirst down the dune.

The car weighs three tons and must churn through, not surf over, the sand. Despite its inertial advantage, Harington’s fleetness of foot quickly has them neck and neck. The driver and snowboarder eye each other for a moment as they barrel down the slope. In the end, horsepower beats manpower, but only by a couple of feet.

“It was awesome. Like a James Bond stunt,” Harington said. “I could see the Yellow River as I was flying down, so it was just incredible. Hopefully next winter I’ll some and snowboard in China. That would be amazing.”

Photos, video: Incworld.com

This is one of the 2 contests I did this year and one of the most fun events I’ve ever done. It was set up to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of Breckenridge mountain and some old school pro’s were invited to compete against some of the newer halfpipe riders. The contest was split into two halves, the first being in the 22 foot superpipe and the second in the 6ft hand dug mini pipe!  Unfortunately on my last run I slammed on my arm and fractured my elbow, but I had done enough before that to win the mini pipe and get 2nd overall, so at least the $1000 prize money took some of the sting out of my elbow!

The doctors say I’ll need 6 weeks to get my elbow heeled so that means my winter is over for now and it’s back home to England soon. But before that the Sun newspaper are paying me to go to China to teach a guy how to sand board down a huge sand dune (random but awesome!). Hoping I can manage to ride down a sand dune with my arm in a sling, we shall see…