Newspaper Article: Check out Sydney’s Daily Telegraph (7th September 2013 p.99)
The Story:
IT’S only fitting that, in a life lived upside down, Stephanie Magiros chases a life of winter. Magiros has been doing things upside down all her life.
“That’s the easiest way to explain me,” she says.
“Ever since I was five I’ve been upside down. When you’ve been doing it every day of you life it becomes second nature to you.”
Magiros started as a gymnast but five years ago the 22-year-old switched to the snow-board, and is hoping to earn a trip to Sochi next year as part of Australia’s Winter Olympics team.
She was doing somersaults on the snowboard after five weeks, something many still can’t do after a lifetime on the powder.
Earlier this year she was backflipping her way out of the ANZ Stadium tunnel, upside down again, leading the Blues out for Origin I.
Magiros is currently the third-ranked Australian in the snowboard halfpipe with three qualifying competitions left. Four snowboarders will be chosen when the team is announced in January.
They could do worse than taking Magiros, who is about the toughest athlete to wear the green and gold. Earlier this year her appendix was about to burst and her doctor booked her in for surgery.
She was horrified. Recovery would take six to eight weeks and she had a competition in five.
Just weeks after the surgery Magiros was back on the board and going for a training session with fellow Aussie Alexandra Fitch in Sierra Nevada, Spain, when a whiteout rolled in.
“We took a wrong turn early,” she says. It didn’t turn bad until they heard a running river which didn’t show up on their map.
“We didn’t know whether we were going to fall into the river,” Magiros says. “It was scary at first, but we had to go into survival mode.”
They were lost for six hours, finally rescued in a gully 4km from where they were supposed to be.
Two days later she was competing again.
