Aleisha Cline: First Female Skier to Win Winter X Gold

It’s hard to believe, but skiing wasn't contested at the first Winter X Games, in 1997. And when skiing was added a year later, women weren’t even invited—until 1999.

Aleisha Cline didn’t care about the lag.

That January, Cline showed up at the host resort, Crested Butte, Colorado, and the minute she saw jumps, rollers and banked turns carved into the snow, the Canadian Cline said, "What is that?!” It was the ski-cross course and competitors had to be invited. “Then you need to invite me,” Cline demanded. Not possible, she was told, unless another Canadian athlete withdrew.

“Lo and behold, she blew her knee,” Cline recalled, laughing.

So Cline slapped random wax on her skis, won every heat and made history as the first female skier to win Winter X Games gold. She even beat Lord of the Boards champ Darian Boyle. “Apparently, she was the goddess of everything,” Cline says. “I had no idea.”

Cline won three more Winter X Games golds (consecutively, from 2001–03)­­—not surprising for the former speed skier who once hit 133.6 miles per hour. She generated even more headlines when she won the 2010 Olympic ski-cross test event at age 38—nine months after having her second baby.

Overall, Cline’s life has been an intense, scrappy tale of athletic talent, steely nerves and painful near misses.

First Turns

Cline grew up in Kelowna, in south-central British Columbia. Her mother, Kris, put her on skis when she was 18 months old.

Soon, her mom was taking her up the T-bar at Big White ski resort between her legs. She’d drop Cline at tower 5, and the tot would ski to the bottom. Next, Kris would drop her daughter at tower 7. By the time she made tower 9, Cline was on her own.

Next stop: the Nancy Greene Ski League, at age four. “You had to be five to race,” Cline recalls, but when she won the year-end competition, they said, ‘Who's this Aleisha Cline?’”

“I absolutely loved skiing—loved, loved, loved skiing,” Cline says.

On the B.C. development team, she excelled at downhill and slalom, but money was tight. To afford summer ski camp, Cline worked night shifts at Tim Hortons right after her high school graduation, bought a $200 car, moved to Whistler and loaded skiers onto the T-bar up the glacier. She moonlighted at a restaurant to get a staff meal and leftovers. It was a nonstop cycle of work-ski-work-repeat.

In 1988, after a year of racing at Whistler, a coach told her to quit. “You’re too old,” he said. “Leave room for the younger girls.”

“I was freaking 18!” says Cline. “I had to learn who I was. I was still paying for all my own skiing. But I took that to heart, and I quit.”

She admits, “If I had just been nurtured, who knows?”

A Most Indirect Path

So Cline found another job: planting trees in southern British Columbia.

“It was so freaking fun because I was a maniac when it came to fitness,” she says. “I’d put the trees in my bag, start my stopwatch and see how fast I could put in 400 trees. I made 17 or 25 cents per tree. It was like picking up quarters, and I loved it. Plus, I love the forest. The forest is my everything. It still is.”

About a year later, says Cline, “I met a boy and moved to Sun Peaks” (called Tod Mountain at the time), about 30 miles northeast of Kamloops.

In 1989, a few adrenaline-crazed locals at Tod created a speed-skiing track and raced down the headwall. “I showed up in regular Alpine gear like, ‘Doodle-loo. This is cool. What’s going on?’” Cline says. “Everybody else had rubber suits, fairings, the [specialized] helmets, the whole bit—and I won the run.”

That year, the International Olympic Committee announced speed skiing would be a demonstration sport at the 1992
Albertville Winter Games. Intrigued, Cline flew to a real speed course in Vars, France, and hit 206 kilometers per hour (about 128 miles per hour), which was about 5 miles per hour short of the women’s world record at the time, held by Tarja Mulari of Finland.

Cline thought the mark would qualify her for the Olympics, but she went to Albertville as an alternate and never raced. “It sucked. It was bitter,” she says, especially because the next year, Cline hit 215.054 kilometers per hour (133 mph) in Les Arcs, on the 1992 Olympic course—a speed that would have placed second at the Winter Games, where Mulari re-set the world record.

Speed skiing never returned to the Olympics, but Cline was driven to compete at the Games.

In the early 1990s, she raced mountain bikes (a discipline that would make its Olympic debut in Atlanta in 1996). Again, she trained in the woods—this time, while working for the Ministry of Forests as a research assistant to Suzanne Simard, who discovered that trees communicate with each other through a web of underground fungus, sharing energy and information about disease and drought.

Cline would bike to the work site and, again, time herself. “We were hardcore,” she says. “Everything was heavy. It was so fun.” But Cline overtrained, quit mountain-bike racing and learned to snowboard, entering a few races near her home. A year later, she knew she wasn’t good enough to qualify for snowboarding’s 1998 Olympic debut in Nagano, Japan. She tried boardercross, too. “It was weird; I didn’t like it,” she says.

Ski cross, however, was another story. In total, Cline won five medals at the Winter X Games: four golds between 1999 and 2003 and a silver in 2004 when Karin Huttary of Austria snapped Cline’s attempt at a four-peat. Still, Cline was nominated for a Best Female Action Sports Athlete ESPY in 2004. (She lost to wakeboarder Dallas Friday.)

She also competed in big-mountain skiing events, as well as ski-cross races every other week and 24-hour endurance ski races, including the 24 Hours of Aspen twice. In 2001, she won the Aspen event with Anik Demers Wild and, in 2002, she raced it alone—an insane undertaking. Cline also did a 24 hour race at Coronet Peak in New Zealand with Demers Wild, then came back and immediately entered one of the first TransRockies mountain-bike races which covered 700 kilometers (435 miles) in six days. She followed that with a 24-hour mountain-bike race in Laguna Seca. “I was pretty full-on,” Cline says. “Everything about it was freaking amazing! I had tons of energy.”

“Both of us,” Demers Wild says, “fueled ourselves on winning and finding all the intricacies of skiing as fast as we possibly could. We blended absolutely perfectly. Because I’m barely 5-foot-1 and she’s 5' 10", we figured out such a wicked-fast tactical way of doing the course—and kept doing it all night long. I think that’s when we got to know each other the best.”

But in 2005, Cline had to stop. “My body was wasted,” she says. By then, she had married pro mountain bike racer Shaums March, and their son, Isaac, was born in the spring of 2006. Still, the Olympic rings beckoned.

Olympic Ski Cross at Last

Finally, in November 2006, the International Olympic Committee announced that ski cross would make its 2010 Olympic debut in Cline’s backyard, Vancouver.

Once team funding was secured (reportedly with a $1 million annual budget from Canadian nonprofit Own the Podium and the Canadian Snowsports Association), Canada’s next task was to find athletes. Coach Eric Archer knew Cline from the X Games and thought, “Aleisha’s still probably pretty capable.”

Cline was both receptive and candid. She says, “I told him, ‘I have to have another kid first—chop-chop.’” Soon, Cline was pregnant and gave birth to a daughter, Asia, in May 2008.

Three months post-partum, Cline flew to Australia and won the Australia New Zealand Cup. “She was one of those rad girls that could do everything,” Archer says. “She’d look at [something], figure it out, then just go for it. She knew how to win. She was confident. Unafraid to try. And she didn’t like to lose.”

Cline trained like a fiend that fall and winter and won the Olympic ski-cross test event at Vancouver’s Cypress Mountain on February 6, 2009. She was elated, but Canada’s Olympic qualifying criteria stipulated that only one woman could secure a spot that season. Ashleigh McIvor not only took silver behind Cline at the test event, but she also won the 2009 world-championship ski-cross title. Cline’s victory was moot. McIvor was in. Everything would depend on the next season.

At the same time, Cline’s marriage was falling apart. The process of separating, seeing counselors and trying to qualify for the Olympics left her emotionally and physically exhausted. Her teammates couldn’t relate. “I was almost 40,” she says. “How do you express to a 20-year-old that your husband just left you and you’re a single mom of two kids? You don’t. You’d be crazy. So we’d train, come home, everyone would rest, but there’s no rest when you have a one- and three-year-old. Plus the turmoil of getting separated, right?”

When the World Cup resumed, Kelsey Serwa won three races, and Julia Murray had two podiums; both placed high enough to lock up their own Olympic spots. Only one Canadian berth remained.

In late January, Cline recalls, “I just had to win this one [ski-cross] heat at Blue Mountain in Ontario and I would have moved on and qualified. In my normal world, I could have easily done that. But I went out of the gate and left, like, a foot and a half [open]. Ophélie David [of France] scooped right through it. And then it was done.”

The last Olympic berth went to Danielle Poleschuk, who was consistent but had never podiumed. “It was brutal,” Demers Wild remembers. “I had so much pain for [Cline]. She was such a phenomenal glider and such a good ski-cross competitor. I think she could have done so well.”

Cline was the first alternate. In Vancouver, she’d watch GoPro footage of the course every day on a big screen, get in her tuck and ski the course with the video in case she was needed.

That year, the Canadian men’s team churned through its alternates. Dave Duncan broke his collarbone on the first training run. The first alternate, Brady Leman, then re-broke his leg in training. The second alternate, Davey Barr, arrived the morning of the race, got in only one training run and finished sixth.

But Cline neither raced nor foreran in Vancouver.

McIvor won gold; Serwa placed fifth; Murray (who had blown out her ACL and MCL a month before the Olympics) finished 12th. Poleschuk? Nineteenth.

Two weeks later, in Sweden, at Cline’s first post-Olympic World Cup race, she placed second. Too good, too late.

That fall, Cline broke her ankle and never raced another World Cup or Winter X Games—yet she contends that if she had continued to Sochi, “I could have been there in 2014.” Instead, she watched those races at home in Canada in the middle of the night. “I cried, and then I was over it,” she says. “That's when I let it go—like, I don't need to compete. My role is support now.”

New Support Role

Cline became a private ski instructor at Whistler Blackcomb, a job she still holds. Now 55, she also has a side career doing neuropathic healing using advanced reflexology, fascia release and Raynor massage, which, she says, uses body heat and pressure to release bands of tension that hold trauma.

She also started advising young athletes how to get into the right mental state to access flow, a skill she first learned as a 13-year-old at the Big White Ski Club. “I didn't realize what a gift that was, but it impacted my entire life,” she says. “If they could drop into flow, their quietness in their body, then they can access where the magic happens.”

Looking back at her athletic career, Cline says, “I did all this with the intention of competing at the Olympics and potentially make a huge difference for the family.” Her fearless, all-in approach wasn’t lost on her daughter. “She worked hard, but also lived hard,” says 17-year-old Asia. “She’s the kind of mom who doesn’t just tell you to go after life; she’ll show you how it’s done.” Fifteen years ago, Cline told the Vancouver Sun after the botched race at Blue Mountain that the future “scares the pants off me. Everybody says there’s life after ski boots. Well, I've seen life after ski boots, and that's why I'm scared.”

That answer hits her deeply, even now. “It’s the transition, your identity,” she explains. “I competed until I was 40. I was an athlete since I was four. Now I have to transition again. My son is 19, so he’s essentially gone, and my daughter's graduating high school next year, so she’ll be gone.”

“Holy sh**,” she continues. “Who am I now? It feels like I’m in a gap year. I’m still just working it out.” 

Aimee Berg, a sportswriter based out of New York City, caught up with Czech aerialist Aleš Valenta in the July-August 2025 issue.