The first Roxy Ride Days event with Tess Ledeux took place last weekend in La Plagne, France, giving girls from the region the chance to ride with one of the best freeskiers around.
The multiple X Games and World Cup champion welcomed local girls to the park last Saturday, 18 February for a taste of freestyle skiing and maybe to inspire a future champion. The girls all met at the local Roxy store before heading up the mountain. Tess told Downdays all about the event.
Tess and Roxy took the lead in introducing young girls to freeskiing. Photo: Brendan Le Peru
Better pay attention, it's not every day that you get to ski with a star like Tess. Photo: Brendan Le Peru
Matt Masson: Hi Tess, it looked like everyone had a great time at Roxy Ride Days. Was it your idea to have an event like this?
Tess Ledeux: Yeah, since I was small I have always wanted to do an event like Ride Days, but I didn’t really know how to put it into action. For about six months now Roxy wanted to do an event, but didn’t know exactly what. We discussed this idea, they liked it and Ride Days were born.
what was the age range?
The girls were between 11 and 18 years old. We chose those ages because if they were too young it gets complicated and we wanted them to be kids, so under 18. I had the idea because growing up, there weren’t many local female freeskiers to look up to.
Tess leads the charge into the La Plagne snowpark with a gang of girls in tow. Photo: Brendan Le Peru
I had the idea because growing up, there weren’t many local female freeskiers to look up to.
Girls from the La Plagne ski club and the Les Arcs freeski academy took part in the event. Photo: Brendan Le Peru
What was the program for the day?
We all had breakfast together, nice and early, to get to know each other and chat before we headed up. We skied for two hours and I gave them all advice to progress as freeskiers. I showed them two or three tricks and showed them how to ski switch and stuff. Then we went for lunch together, talked about the day and had a couple of surprises.
for the surprises, Some girls got prizes. What were they for?
We chose three girls at the end of the day. We wanted to reward the three girls who made the most progress on the day, not necessarily the three best skiers. We thought that the girls that won had gotten the most out of the day.
We fully expect to see some of these faces on podiums soon! Photo: Stella Amiez
The three girls who showed the most improvement over the day were rewarded with Roxy gift certificates. Photo: Stella Amiez
It looked like a fun time! Will this become an annual event?
Hopefully. I think we’ll do it again next year because this year was really good. We actually had to turn some girls away, because we had a limit of 20 participants. Next year, we want to develop the project and make it even bigger, with more people.
Were all the girls French?
Yeah, this year they were all French. The idea was to keep them all pretty local, so we contacted ski clubs of the region (Tarantaise, Savoy) to find girls who are interested. Next year we’ll open it up to all of France and why not, in years to come, the rest of the world!
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