Meet Samo's Spanish snowboarder Sara Dones
By Elleanor Quist, Staff Writer
It’s 10 a.m. when Sara Dones (’21) calls in to our interview, but on her end, the sun is beginning to set. Dones lives in Europe, where she is an accomplished snowboarder. She speaks with a heavy accent, and to call it a Spanish accent wouldn’t do it justice. It’s a product of her region, Val d’Aran, which has three official languages: Spanish, Catalan and Aranes (its dialect of the Occitan language). Dones speaks all of these languages, in addition to English and a little bit of French. The Pyrenees mountains that isolate Val d’Aran from the rest of Spain, preserving its unique culture, are the same mountains that Samo student Dones goes snowboarding on regularly at the Baqueira-Beret ski resort.
Dones started going to Samo when she moved to Santa Monica last year. But because of quarantine, Dones had to move back to Spain, where she continues to attend Samo classes virtually and goes snowboarding about four times per week.
Dones started snowboarding when she was just 7 years old.
“It’s, like, a really simple town, so we don’t have a lot to do. So all the kids usually start skiing by age 3,” Dones said. “So I started skiing, and when I was 7—my mom’s a snowboarder, a snowboard teacher. So I switched to snowboarding, and since then I’ve been snowboarding. And then I got into, like, competition and stuff,” Dones said.
Back then, Dones wanted to grow up to be a professional snowboarder, so she was a strong competitor.
“I was good. I went, I won, uh, the Spanish championship for like three years, three, four years. And then the national team drafted me for a while,” Dones said.
Despite her success, Dones wanted to dial back on snowboarding.
“But then I wanted to go study in the U.S., so I said, ‘nah, it's not, it's not my type of lifestyle.’ It's really, like, hard to keep up... And I cannot be happy with just that. I need, like, different areas of my life to support my happiness, and snowboarding is not doing it. Just snowboarding. I love snowboarding,” Dones said.
Dones enjoyed her time studying in the U.S., and she was going to stay with a friend in Santa Monica for another year while her parents went back to Spain. Despite her best intentions, she ended up fully trading snowboarding for surfing while she was here.
Dones said she brought her snowboarding equipment to Santa Monica with plans to visit Aspen, Big Bear or Mammoth, but never made it to the mountains. Instead, Dones had a frustrating time trying to surf, especially with the aspects of surfing that don't map well onto snowboarding.
“I suck. Really really bad. I’m awful. I can, like, drop pretty easily, but I cannot spot all the waves that I’m supposed to take, so I take all the bad ones. And then my arms get really tired, so I cannot get the good ones,” Dones said.
Fortunately, Dones is back on her snowboard. She still does it for fun, but she also just started taking a course to become a snowboarding trainer. Rest assured, though, Dones isn’t done with the U.S. She says she wants to go to college in Santa Barbara and study to be a surgeon. She says maybe she’ll go to a university in Italy after (possibly making Italian her sixth language). After quarantine ends, the world is Dones’ snowball.