Hilary Lindh Leads by Example
The Olympic and World Championship medalist now coaches at Whitefish Mountain
When Hilary Lindh moved to Montana and enrolled her daughter in the ski program at Whitefish Mountain Resort, her daughter’s coach got the vibe that she wanted to be “just a parent.” The 1992 Olympic silver medalist and 1997 downhill world champion had just moved to the area from Alaska and taken a job in the City of Whitefish Planning Department. She figured the most she’d do is coach Masters racers on weekends for the club, Flathead Valley Ski Education Foundation (FVSEF), to defray some program costs for her daughter. That was in 2016. In 2021 Lindh stepped into the roles of head coach and executive director.
Since then the program has grown steadily, driven both by an influx of families relocating after Covid and Lindh’s energy. Maddy Williams, lead development team coach, had come up through the program herself and has coached there since 2013. She’s known Lindh as a parent, fellow coach and boss. Of the leadership and energy Lindh has brought to the program she says simply, “It's been huge.” In recent years Williams saw the program grow from 60-70 kids to 260 kids, from all mountain skiing to development to FIS racing and freeride. “It’s wild to see that exponential growth, and to see how well she's handled it.”
To anyone who knows Lindh well or even tangentially, her ability to rise to this challenge comes as no surprise.
Early Days
Lindh grew up in Juneau, the only child of Craig and Barbara Lindh. Barbara, a Juneau native, ski raced in high school. Craig, an avid outdoorsman and skier though never a racer, came to Juneau from Montana to work for the Forest Service. The couple got Hilary started first on Nordic skis with occasional Alpine adventures at Juneau Ski Club’s rope tow in Douglas Ski Bowl, accessible by a three mile hike.
When Lindh was six, the city opened Eaglecrest Resort on Douglas Island, on a site Craig helped to select. Eaglecrest soon had a ski racing program which Lindh joined, often as the only girl chasing the older boys. She recalls watching her early heroes Ingemar Stenmark and Annemarie Moser Proll in the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics, but in remote Juneau she had no personal access to ski racing stars. Racing involved flying to Anchorage, made easier because Barbara worked for Alaska Airlines.
By age 14, as she started high school, Lindh was beating most of the Alaskan college girls and over the Christmas holiday made the move to Romark Ski Academy in Salt Lake City. There she came under the leadership of Olle Larsson, who encouraged her to believe in herself and to do things her own way.
Steep Trajectory
Lindh quickly established herself amongst the country’s top junior skiers, earning a spot on the National Training Group that spring. By the next season, in her first year of FIS racing, she finished 11th nationally in downhill. The next year, at age 16, Lindh launched.
She spent the bulk of the winter on a long Europa Cup trip, running a new downhill every week, and returned to the States to win the U.S. national championships downhill title. In February, she went on to win the 1986 Junior World Ski Championships downhill in Bad Kleinkirchheim, Austria, the first American racer to win a junior world downhill title. She started in her World Cup career that spring and finished 13th in the downhill at Vail. The teenage rookie, it seemed, was on the express route to the top.
Lindh, however, calls the years from 1987 to 1991 “brutal.” She notes that she went from doing competitions appropriate for her age and level, to racing World Cup full time at age 17. “I had no opportunities to do anything that I could feel good about.” She cracked the top ten a couple times but consistency and breakthrough performances remained elusive. “I don't know how any of us [on the US DH team] hung in that long, because it was not fun.”
The Breakthrough
In her first Olympic appearance, in Calgary in 1988 at age 18, Lindh did not finish. The American skiers left Calgary with no medals for the first time since the 1968 Grenoble games. She came into the 1992 Albertville Olympics armed with a new mindset gleaned from the book Psyching for Sport by Canadian ski team psychologist Terry Orlick. “I would say that was the single biggest turning point for me because there were things that I was getting too wound up about,” says Lindh. The perspective allowed her to escape the pressure of high expectations. “Instead of being defensive it freed me up to be as proactive as I could be and not worry about the negative.” Part of that agency was breaking her Rossignol contract to ski on Raichle boots, which were more suited to speed and to her style.
In the season leading up to the ’92 Albertville Olympics she had only one top ten result, but she had consistently finished around the top 15. She had learned to stay focused on her skiing and not mentally obsess on results. “If I felt any twinge of thinking about what was going to happen, I just was like, ‘Nope, I have to go back to this.’”
It worked. On downhill race day Lindh stunned herself and the world with a silver medal, the first U.S. women’s speed medal since 1976.
The Transformation
In one respect, nothing had changed in Lindh’s skiing, but she had found a system of self-reliance. “I had this shift in perspective that started working for me. Everything was a struggle up until that season, and then I figured out how to keep things in perspective and had tools that worked to help me on track.”
The following year brought big positive changes, including a switch to Völkl skis— and a big new challenge named Picabo Street. Two years Lindh’s junior, Street broke into the spotlight by winning silver in the combined event at the 1993 World Championships. The two stars had polar opposite personalities. Their mutual passion for the sport manifested very differently: Lindh’s with quiet persistence and discipline; Street’s with a loud, ask-for-forgiveness-not-permission attitude. Denver Post journalist Charlie Meyers nicknamed Lindh and Street respectively “Mother Earth” and “Planet Hollywood.”
While Street thrived on the spotlight, Lindh preferred to do the work without the fanfare. Lindh, still the team leader, nabbed her first world cup victory (a downhill) in Sierra Nevada in February 1994. That summer, the U.S. Ski Team got a new head coach, former Austrian women’s coach Herwig Demschar. At his first summer camp Demschar saw the friction between Lindh and Street and sat them down. “You guys don't need to get married,” Demschar recalls saying. “Just leave each other alone and use the energy to ski fast.”
Finding the Groove
Lindh set the tone the following season by winning the opening downhill in Vail. From there the team headed to Lake Louise where Street won the first downhill (and her first World Cup) and Lindh placed second. The following day Lindh won. The two would win seven of the eight DH races that season (five for Street, 2 for Lindh) and finish 1-2 in the downhill standings.
The unlikely pair posed for features in Sports Illustrated and elsewhere as America’s latest ski stars. Beyond the headlines and success, they had figured out a way to operate without impeding each other. Says Lindh: “The challenge for me was to figure out how to operate and get what I needed when all that [distraction] was also going on. It was really putting that whole perspective thing into motion all the time.”
The following year at the1996 World Championships in Sierra Nevada, Street claimed downhill gold and Lindh won bronze. Lindh had expected that to be her last season, but Demschar intervened and convinced her to ski one more year.
In Lindh, Demschar saw a hard worker who had an uncanny feel for keeping speed through the turn. “At that time, the person that slid the least and still made the direction changes and followed gravity was the fastest person. She had a real eye for the line,” he notes.
In Demschar, Lindh found something she’d been missing: belief. “He just had confidence that I knew what I was doing,” says Lindh. “I didn't have a lot of coaches that were like that.”
Rocky Start
After Street’s season ended in knee injury in December, Lindh carried the hopes of the ski team into the 1997 World Championships in Sestriere. Lindh’s new challenge was equipment. Over the summer she struggled to adapt to Raichle’s newly designed, more responsive boot. Her skiing was technically cleaner, but grinding and slower. Additionally she was nursing a bad back. At the opening World Cup in Lake Louise she finished 32nd, outside the points for the first time ever in downhill.
Demschar ordered up her old boots from home. Slowly, steadily she worked up the results—17th, 9th and, in the last DH before the championships at Laax, 4th place. Heading into the break before the World Championships Demschar asked her what she needed. Athletes often take that opportunity to escape to a beach or resort. Lindh asked if she could hang out with Demschar’s family at their farmhouse outside Salzburg. There, she went for long walks in the forest and read bedtime stories to his kids in the evening. Quietly, she recharged.
Upon arriving in Sestriere, Demschar recalls the two of them standing on the hotel porch looking out at the race hill. “I said, ‘You’re ready for this s---?’, and she said, ‘Yeah, I think I'm good.’”
A few days later, Lindh won downhill gold. She closed out her career with another world cup podium, then national titles in downhill and super-G. At age 27, in her prime, with lucrative contracts heading into an Olympic season, she retired. “To have anyone racing in their 30s at the time was pretty unusual,” Lindh recalled. More than that, she simply knew she was done.
The Next Chapter
Lindh was eager to complete her education, and two years later earned her undergraduate degree in biology from the University of Utah. From there she went on to grad school in Vancouver for her masters in conservation planning. She met and married her husband and stayed on in Canada working for an environmental consulting company. When their daughter Raiya was born in 2006, Lindh transitioned to motherhood seamlessly.
The family moved to White Horse in the Yukon for a few years then ended up back in Juneau, close to family. Lindh worked for the state of Alaska as an environmental analyst.
Back to Racing Roots
After a few winters of grim snowfall the family did an exploratory move to Whitefish. They fell in love with the place, both the mountain community and its recreational bounty. Lindh got a job in the city planning office and did a little coaching on weekends. She hadn’t considered herself for FVSEF executive director and program director jobs when they came up as a single big position. But she was tired of desk jobs and made the jump. This would bring both her knowledge of skiing and administrative skills to the table.
Long time program director Roy Loman had retired when Lindh came on board, but she soon talked him into rejoining the program. One of the things Loman enjoys most about Lindh is that she cares about all the right things. “Not necessarily about trophies or medals, it's just about all those things that are good for people,” he says. Those are values she captured in FVSEF’s mission statement to “instill a lifelong love of skiing” and “become better skiers, better students, and better citizens.”
As important is what the program does not emphasize, namely winning at all costs, chasing max ski days and focusing primarily on results. Lindh notes that an athlete in the program qualified for U18 Nationals last year, having never skied in the off-season: “He skis four months a year, that's it. It's pretty amazing what you can do with hard work.”
She’s also realistic about the limitations of a program that runs from early December to late March with minimal snowmaking. Lindh is quick to note that “the local clubs can do a job until a certain point,” adding that the limitations are not from inferior coaching. “It’s all the other things,” which include longer periods of quality training and regular access to higher level competition.
Covid-19 brought a new population base to Whitefish, many of whom had not grown up in ski culture. When Lindh took the reins in 2021 her reputation as both athlete and coach built on the resort’s long racing history. Her ideals and energy drew families and kept them by driving home what’s important about the sport— challenge, personal growth, team camaraderie and healthy, fun, outdoor family time.
Best Part of Coaching
When Lindh is not needed for coaching duties she’s off freeskiing, which is another huge part of the program, particularly skiing trees and powder. If there are 6 inches or more of snow, training pivots to freeskiing.
Lindh’s duties off the hill mean she doesn’t coach that much, but when she does, her favorite part is witnessing the self-confidence and development of the young racers leap ahead. “It’s so cool to see kids have breakthroughs and see them be really excited about what they're doing and just discovering that they're capable of so much more than they ever thought.”
Two-time Olympian Edie Thys Morgan has written regularly for Skiing History since 2015. She wrote about Sarah Schleper in the January-February issue.