Patmore, who has has Erb’s palsy – paralysis of the arm caused by injury to the upper group of the arm’s main nerves – admits he knew little about snowboarding before his switch in 2015.
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Former Olympic coach Lukas Prem was able to help him, however, even though Patmore had the benefit of a background in skateboarding.
“He’s an Olympic coach. He was on the Great Britain team. He was on the Australian team,” Patmore.
“The knowledge that he had and was able to provide us, but also have the knowledge to know what his athletes are doing and how to drip-feed it to us in a way.
“It was the situation where [in the] first two years we didn’t really know what we were doing, but then the idea came together in the last eight months – it was like ‘Oh yeah, I see what you’re trying to do here. I can actually snowboard’.”
Patmore saved his best performance til the third of his three runs – pushing the boundaries on the tricky layout to stop the clock in 51.99 seconds – but had to endure an agonising wait to ensure he stayed on the podium.
“The first run, because we had no training run, was straight get out and get down a time as fast as possible,” Patmore said.
“As soon as I did that and walked away sitting in second, I was just like ‘OK, this is what it’s going to be'. The course is going to slowly disintegrate and not be as fast.
“In the second run I did exactly the same thing but cleaned up the things my coach wanted me to clean up, and got a faster time because of that.
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SYDNEY MORNING HERALD
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