Abi­gail Vieira will cre­ate his­to­ry when she com­petes for Trinidad and To­ba­go at the Win­ter Youth Olympic Games in Lau­sanne, Switzer­land, be­tween Jan­u­ary 9 and 22.

Based in Mass­a­chu­setts, Unit­ed States, Vieira has Trinidad and To­ba­go par­ents, which al­lows her to rep­re­sent the coun­try.

She was re­vealed as T&T’s first alpine ski­er at the T&T Olympic House in Port-of-Spain, on Mon­day, with T&T Olympic Com­mit­tee (TTOC) pres­i­dent Bri­an Lewis ex­press­ing de­light that the coun­try would be en­ter­ing a new area of sport­ing ac­tiv­i­ty at the event.

While the 17-year-old Vieira may not be one of the favourites to take the glob­al event by storm, she said she will not be go­ing to the Swiss cap­i­tal mere­ly to make up num­bers ei­ther.

“For my ex­pec­ta­tions, I’m not go­ing there to just ski for fun. I want to be there. I want to work hard. I want to be proud of the re­sults that I get and that may not be first sec­ond or third but if it’s some­thing that I’m proud of and I’m build­ing on the skills that I have then that’s good for me,” Vieira told the me­dia.

Hav­ing com­pet­ed in the Unit­ed States, Vieira said com­pe­ti­tions like these pro­vide a great op­por­tu­ni­ty for not on­ly net­work­ing but al­so for her to fly the T&T flag among a glob­al au­di­ence of com­peti­tors.

She said, “It’s re­al­ly fun­ny when peo­ple come up to you and ask where are you from but hon­est­ly com­ing from a place that is not seen on a start list fre­quent­ly, it’s just a time for peo­ple to come up to you and en­gage in con­ver­sa­tions.”

Vieira said she has been train­ing rig­or­ous­ly to get the best pos­si­ble re­sult in Switzer­land.

“Every day of the week, we’ll go out and ski for two or three hours. Dur­ing the off-sea­son, we’ll go to places like Chile, Nor­way places with snow and we’ll go train­ing there. It’s not some­thing that you can spend one hour do­ing, it’s pret­ty much a full in­vest­ment,” she said.