Steve Gibb
Steve Gibb
Current city and state of residence
Bermagui, New South Wales
Year first introduced or joined the organisation now known as Disabled Wintersport Australia?
1980
Through who or how were you introduced to the organisation?
I was Superintendent at the Jindabyne Sport and Recreation Centre, later to become the Jindabyne Winter Academy of Sport. It was part of a government Department under ever changing names, mainly the New South Wales Department of Sport and Recreation. A friend Ron Rueben, a Jindabyne police officer, did work assisting with the Thredbo DWA golf day. He introduced me to Ron Finneran.
What roles or positions did you have within the organisation?
Life membership in 2001
Committee member - various committees
Chairman Joint Management Committee APC /DWA elite sport.
During your time with DWA what particular achievements are you proud of contributing to?
Initially Ron just bled us dry with donations for the golf day and providing storage for equipment for DWA. By the mid 80's, without realising it, we were providing subsidised meals, accommodation and ski lessons for 250 to 500 skier days per year for a variety of disabilities. Then for some reason we started donating specialised equipment, administration services and free lunches when he was in town. In the late 1980's Ron had by then infiltrated the entire NSW Department of Sport and secured grants and no interest loans to build "Finsko's Lodge". I supervised construction of the lodge.
In the background of this initiative, people like Ken Brown, the then Director of the Department, Terry Holt, John Kean and Neville Goldspring had provided the unmeasurable support to make everything happen. Not satisfied with this achievement in the mid 1990's, Ron then organised the whole thing again to provide extensions to the lodge to what it is today. By then I was General Manager of the Winter Academy and once again I supervised construction and managed the funding.
By 2000 the Department supplied office space and just about everything else Ron had dreamed of. Through all of the growing process of achieving Ron's dreams, unheralded in the background had been the NSW Ski Resorts Selwyn, Thredbo and Perisher. by the late 1990's they were providing upwards of 750 annual skier days to the programs run by DWA as well as first class training facilities for our elite athletes. Kim Clifford of Thredbo and Ashley Blondel of Perisher, in particular, remain the unsung true hero's of the story, slowly guiding the resorts to provide ever improving disabled facilities, opportunities and support for all programs and individual disabled skiers and visitors.
I retired in 2003, the rest of the story is still unfolding
