Ghost Of The Slopes
At 15, Takeshi Morin was the future of alpine skiing. 16 Now, he’s just a ghost, a shell of his former self, can he make a swift return to the competitive scene.
Born in the heart of the French Alps to a Japanese mother and French father, Takeshi Laurent Morin was raised on snow and speed. A prodigy in alpine skiing—slalom, giant slalom, downhill—he was ranked number one in the world for his age. His destiny was carved into the mountain itself. But when his mother, a world champion skier, dies in a tragic training accident, everything unravels. Days later, his father takes his own life, leaving Takeshi behind in a silence too heavy to bear.
Stricken with grief and guilt, he withdraws from competition. What once felt like freedom on skis becomes suffocating. He drops from the national circuit, isolates himself in the mountains, and devotes himself to caring for his grandmother, the last remaining piece of his fractured family. But even that slips away when a heated outburst leads to her sudden death—another loss he believes he caused.
Takeshi quits skiing for good. Though he remains one of the most gifted alpine racers on the planet, the sport has become a graveyard of memories he can’t outrun.
When he’s sent to live in Japan with his aunt—a stern but kind headmistress of an elite international school for winter athletes—Takeshi is thrown into a new world of rigid schedules, elite training, and old rivals. The school operates across five countries, with each branch competing every year. Takeshi is to enrol in the Japanese branch, with its winter campus nestled in the mountains of Nagano. It's built to shape champions in alpine and freestyle skiing, snowboarding, and more. It’s everything he once wanted—except now, he wants nothing to do with it.
Forced into competition, Takeshi is haunted by the very mountains he must conquer. As the international interschool alpine circuit approaches, hosted by the French branch in the very region where he grew up and classmates from his past reappear on rival teams, he must confront the trauma, guilt, and pressure. They have buried his love of skiing.
To heal, he’ll have to descend into the past—before he can climb back toward the future.
Set against the icy precision and breakneck speed of elite alpine skiing, Ghost of the Slopes is a powerful coming-of-age story about loss, survival, and rediscovering who you are when everything you loved is gone.
