Biography

At the FIS meeting in Oslo in 1930, the Norwegians finally voted to include Alpine skiing into the FIS championship program, and they would soon reap dividends. A number of youngsters living in the Holmenkollen area quickly took advantage of the steep slopes on the west side of the mountain. This biography focuses on one of them, the exceptionally talented Alpine skiing champion Andreas Wyller.

As Liv Wiborg documents, the emergence of Alpine skiing in the Holmenkollen/Tryvann area above Oslo was enabled by the extension of the “T-Bane” (municipal commuter rail system) to Frognerseteren in 1916. The improved access resulted in more residential development. Wyller’s family moved to the “heights” at Voksenlia. With his siblings he could ski from the front door. By the late 1920s the neighborhood included many youngsters who would make their mark in Alpine racing, including Wyller’s next-door neighbors Stella and Johanne Dybwad, his good friends Thorleif Schjelderup and Tomm Murstad and, down the road at Besserud, the Eriksen family (Marius was three years younger than Andreas).

In 1933 Tryvannskleiva, one of the relatively steep slopes on Holmenkollen’s west side, opened as a slalom hill. Wyller then focused on slalom and downhill. National championships and selection to the Norwegian FIS teams followed. The Dybwad sisters and the very precocious Laila Schou Nilsen also qualified. But war clouds were gathering. On the night of April 8-9, 1940, Wyller and a group of racers returned from the national championships, arriving in Oslo to a station in chaos. German troops had invaded Norway by air and sea. The royal family and the cabinet were desperately trying to escape northward by train.

Wiborg captures the confusion, uncertainty and isolated moments of heroism following the invasion. The young men gravitated to Nordmarka, the extensive forested part of Oslo that they knew so well. There, a number of huts provided temporary shelter as they discussed how to respond to German occupation. Gradually, networks arose to enable resistance, routes were established to assist those fleeing to the relative safety of Sweden or England, and connections were made to the British Special Operations Executive (formed to conduct espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance). After roughly a year Wyller made the dangerous escape to England via a fishing boat to the Shetland Islands, and from there went to London to join the RAF. He was quickly sent to Canada for flight training, at the base outside Toronto known as “Little Norway,” arriving there on June 11, 1941.

Norwegians stationed there wanted to ski. The camp commander, Ole Reistad, who was a noted athlete (Holmenkollen ski jumping competitions in 1916, modern pentathlon at the 1920 Summer Olympic Games, and gold medalist at the 1928 Winter Olympics in the military ski patrol), encouraged participation in civilian ski events. The flight school received invitations from a number of colleges and from both the Canadian and American ski associations. Reistad took a group of skiers, including Marius Eriksen, to the Winter Carnival at Dartmouth in February 1941. Wiborg explains how flying cadet Ola Gert Myklebust Aanjsen, of Trondheim, became the 1942 U.S. National Jumping Champion.

After finishing his training in multi-engine aircraft, Wyller was named pilot on a 10,000-mile tour around the U.S. to raise funds for Little Norway. He returned to London on February 11, 1943, and was assigned to RAF Coastal Command 333 (Norwegian) Squadron out of Leuchars, Scotland. With navigator Bård Karl Benjaminsen, he flew fast Mosquito fighter-bombers, attacking German shipping off the Norwegian coast. On February 23, 1944, they tangled with a twin-engine Ju 88; both planes crashed into the sea. In 1994, on the 50th anniversary of his death, a plaque honoring Wyller was installed at the base of Wyllerløypa, the longest, steepest run at the Oslo Winter Park.

This is a valuable book. Wiborg has appended a helpful list of sources by chapter. An index and better editing would have been appreciated.  

Andreas Wyller: alpinist, motstandsmann og krigsflyver by Liv H. Wiborg, John Grieg Forlag (2020), hardcover, 340 pages. In Norwegian.

Jess Bell’s lipstick racers dazzled the ski world.

Photo above: Jess Bell (center in hat) often entertained New York fashion editors, providing an opportunity to field test his skin-protective cosmetics. The late team captain Karin S. Allen is third from right in the yellow outfit.

Revlon or Estee Lauder or Helena Rubinstein can have their high-fashion models. Their runways. Their heavily purple–shadowed eyelids and rouged cheekbones. Cleveland businessman Jess A. Bell, Sr., had a different idea when, in 1959, he succeeded his father at Bonne Bell, the family cosmetics business.

As major stores and ski area shops slowly warmed to his line of ski lipsticks, sunscreens and high-altitude creams (an alternative to pasty-white zinc oxide), Bell tossed in the women, called “girls” back then. They would come to be known as the Bonne Bell Ski Team.

Reported Anita Verschoth in the November 22, 1971, issue of Sports Illustrated, “Bell’s beauties all look as if they had just dropped in from the wholesome house next door. … The emphasis is on a sort of dewy-cheeked outdoor look, complete with creamy tan and snowy teeth.”

Bonne Bell Cosmetics was founded in 1927 by Bell’s father, Jesse Grover Bell, who had been selling cosmetics door to door in Kansas. After moving to Ohio during the Depression, he made his products on a hot plate in his basement and continued door-to-door sales. The company was named after one of the elder Bell’s daughters.

Beginning in the 1950s the company actively pursued the outdoor market, developing sun blocks, heavy-duty moisturizers and lip protectors for skiers, hikers and joggers. While more elegant cosmeticians fought over big-city sales, Bell’s tagline resonated with resort-bound skiers: “Out there you need us, baby.”

In 1973, as its celebrity sales reps were storming ski country, Bonne Bell introduced a lip pomade called Lip Smacker, aimed originally at skiers, then later at pre-teens. According to Women’s Wear Daily, “Lip Smackers achieved cultural icon status as the first flavored lip item on the market.” Lip Smackers started with strawberry, green apple and orange-chocolate flavors. By 1975, the brand made news with a Dr. Pepper flavor.

Jess Bell, a graduate of Valley Forge Military Academy and Baldwin Wallace College, served as a paratrooper in both World War II and the Korean War. He defied the common image of a cosmetics industry giant. A fitness buff, he scaled Kilimanjaro, ran marathons, swam to keep in shape and served on the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports.

His Lakewood, Ohio, offices were smoke-free long before that became common, and he pioneered the idea of an office fitness center. He offered incentives to employees who exercised regularly, lost weight or quit smoking. 

Avalanche of Applicants

Georgia Lesnevich Haneke, a photographer and horsewoman from Heber, Utah, was on the Bonne Bell Ski Team from 1971 to 1974. She recalls that the selection process was fierce, with “thousands of applicants.” She asked her stepfather, a classmate of Jess Bell, to provide an introduction.

She flew to Bonne Bell headquarters, and 48 hours later Bell offered her a salary of around $12,000 per year, all expenses paid, and free ski equipment. She credits her acceptance to “good looks and skiing ability.” But it was no walk in the park. Her responsibilities included selling cosmetics, visiting retailers, straightening stock, filling out sales reports, going to ski resorts and pre-running NASTAR courses.

“It was 90 percent hard work, and 10 percent glamour,” she says. “Sure, it was a sales job, but I felt like a mini movie star. You’d walk into a retailer or hotel or ski resort and when the Bonne Bell Ski Team girl arrived, they treated you like royalty. Everyone knew who you were and what you represented.”

The late Karin S. Allen, team captain, told Sports Illustrated in 1971 that being on the team was better than being Miss America.

Allen moved to Woodstock, Georgia, following 40 years with the company in roles that also included international sales training. She passed away in August 2021, shortly after sharing her Bonne Bell experiences with us.

“Jess was brilliant,” she said. “The Bonne Bell Ski Team was made up of surfers as well as skiers, and was a great marketing tool for attracting new customers. The other cosmetics salespeople showed up in mink coats and high heels. Instead, our girls were athletes. There were about 10 of us at any one time, working across the U.S., and we were all skiers.

“Jess used to say, ‘You’re healthy and wholesome, toasty and brown, and you’re killing your skin,’ in reference to girls who went into the mountains or out in extreme weather with no sunscreen protection,” Allen said.

“When I look back on my career, I consider it to be the most amazing job you could ever have. Jess Bell was generous, loyal and supportive. We could not have had more fun in our working lives. There wasn’t a morning when my feet hit the floor and I wasn’t excited to do the job.”

“Sign Me Up”

Nancy Stofer Brehm, a retired schoolteacher in Saugatuck, Michigan, remembers what it was like being around the Bonne Bell Ski Team for five years, pitching the brand on campus. “As a young college student working at Bonne Bell part-time, I felt the members of the team were the epitome of cool,” she says. “I loved skiing as a sport and was envious they were getting to ski around the country. I thought to myself, ‘If this is a job, then sign me up.’”

Team member Bettie Simms Hastings, a retired Indiana horse farm owner now living on a ranch near Telluride, remembers, “It was a great job before skiing became so commercial and corporate. It was all fun. How many people are hired to go to different ski areas and be paid to have fun skiing with people?”

She especially liked her Captain America–like outfits and skiing in films by Willy Bogner, Jr. Another highlight was meeting Robert Redford while traveling through the airport in Denver. “He would look you right in the eye while he talked,” she recalls.

Mission accomplished, the ski team was disbanded in the mid-1970s. According to Karin Allen, the promotion saturated its target market. “We expanded to nearly every ski area in North America,” she said. “Our efforts eventually evolved to focus on international sales and the higher volume U.S. cosmetics retail business, which paid the bills.”

Jess Bell died of heart ailments in 2005, at age 80.

Bonne Bell Cosmetics was sold to Markwins Beauty Brands in 2015. Markwins closed the Bonne Bell headquarters, laying off 91 employees, according to Cleveland’s The Plain Dealer (Jan. 30, 2015). Those nostalgic about the brand’s 90-year run can still find Ten-O-Six astringents, moisturizers, and deep-pore cleansers (now known as Formula 10.0.06) on Amazon and at Walmart. Lip Smacker lip gloss and lip balm is sold on Amazon and in Dollar General stores. Lipsmacker.com invites kids to become “Balm Squad” artists.

Bettie Hastings adds, “The independence we had to do the job, the travel, and meeting people at ski areas, skiing everywhere, and having capital F-U-N. I don’t think sales reps today have the same freedom. Younger friends don’t know about the Bonne Bell Ski Team, but I’m proud to still be called a Bonne Bell girl … especially at my age. It was a wonderful chapter in my life.” 

ISHA board member Jeff Blumenfeld, a resident of Boulder, Colo., is president of the North American Snowsports Journalists Association (NASJA.org). He is author of Travel with Purpose: A Field Guide to Voluntourism (Rowman & Littlefield).

The Norwegian mogul champ is back home in Voss, raising kids and running a $70 million company. But she still flies through the air. 

At 14, Kari Traa started skiing moguls in oversized boots and on clunky 190cm skis. Three years later, she represented Norway at the 1992 Albertville Olympics.

“I think they chose me because I was young and fearless,” says Traa. Fearless, that is, until she heard that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) required female athletes to undergo gender verification. (The IOC’s blanket practice, called “femininity control,” was eliminated in 1999.) “I was like, ‘Shit! You have to be naked in front of people?’” she recalls. “I was 17. My coach drove [to the lab] so fast and it was so foggy. I remember thinking, ‘I hope we crash the car. Make this life over.’”

At the clinic were three guys in long white coats and one woman who “looked like a man because she had kind of a mustache,” says Traa. “I started to undress and they were like, ‘No, just sit on this chair.’ They put a Q-tip in my mouth, put it in a machine, and said, ‘You are a woman. Congratulations!’ After that, I said to myself, ‘Kari, for the rest of your life, don’t be nervous for something you don’t know anything about.’”

The Albertville Games would test her courage again.

In qualifying, Traa says, “I was super-ready. I started skiing. ‘Yes! This is going good!’ My first jump—super good! I skied down into my second jump and when I started to lift, I felt a whoops! All of a sudden, my boobs come falling out. My bra broke! It was not a sports bra; it probably had nature [scenes] on it. I landed, and then you have to ski bumps into the finish line. At that time, I was kind of a big girl. I felt like the whole world saw that my boobs were all over. You know, I hated buying my own bras, underwear, all that stuff, so I always grabbed it from my older sister. When I told her, ‘Your bra broke; it’s not strong enough,’ she was like, ‘That’s MY fault?’

“In the finish, I was bending over my poles. My eyes were not focused on the result [14th], they were focused on what to protect. All the cameras are on you, and it’s like, ‘Shit! It’s not the right time.’”

Traa went on to win Olympic bronze in 1998, gold in 2002 and silver in 2006. Now, 15 years after her final Games in Torino, Traa remains the most decorated moguls skier in Olympic history. She also won three overall freestyle World Cup globes and four world championship titles and was among the first women to perform a cork 720 (a double spin, off-axis).

“She never got stale, just kept improving with the times,” says Trace Worthington, an Olympic aerialist-turned-TV-commentator.

Two years after her Olympic debut, Traa missed her home Olympics, in Lillehammer, having blown out her knee in training five days before the opening ceremony. “I was lying in the course screaming,” she says, “but, actually, I wasn’t that frustrated” about missing the Games. In 1993, her brother, Arthur, had undergone surgery to remove a tumor in his brain stem. “The doctor said, ‘We don’t know if he will survive. You can say “bye” if you want.’” She adds, “We just said, ‘It’s gonna be good. We’ll wait for you to awake.’ After that, sports weren’t the biggest thing in my life.”

Arthur is nearly 51 now. He walks off balance, is deaf in one ear and can’t see well with his lone working eye, but he still has good humor. “He’s the guy I have most respect for because he never complains,” Traa says. “He was the wild one. He did so much cool stuff. Then, suddenly, when he was 22, it was different.”

After the missed Olympics in 1994, Traa’s new coach was Lasse Fahlèn, a giant Swede who was “built like a woodsman, cutting down trees and massaging bears,” Traa jokes. “People told me he doesn’t like girls skiing moguls. Ja, ja, I was just happy to get a coach. In the end, we were the perfect match. He taught me that we have to do difficult things. Jump longer and higher, do harder jumps than the other girls. Try and try, and one day, we will make it. We stuck to our plan.”

Traa scored her first World Cup win at Mont Tremblant in January 1997 and repeated three days later at Lake Placid. The following year, she took bronze in Nagano, her second Olympics. At the time, she weighed 180 pounds (82 kilos). “But no one told me I was big,” she says. “Only my granddad. But because of my knee problems, the doctors, Lasse, and I decided to change my training. I lost 15 kilos [33 pounds]. After that, it was so much easier to ski. When I landed, I was quick up again, instead of boof,” sinking into the troughs between bumps.

In 1999, Traa won her first world championship title and by the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City, she was not only dominant, but a massive media sensation. Prior to winning five of the six World Cup moguls events leading up to the Winter Games, Traa posed semi-nude for Ultrasport magazine. “Now I can show the people of Norway who love cross-country skiing, there is a different sport called moguls,” she quipped. The photos set the media ablaze.

In the Olympic final, American Shannon Bahrke led the field with one skier to go: Traa. Sixty to 70 percent of Norwegian households were watching, broadcasters would later tell her coach. Billboards all over Oslo had predicted Traa would win. The pressure was unbelievable.

“But Kari was never afraid of anything,” says Fahlèn. In 2000, Traa had even raced downhill in the Norwegian championships, finishing 19th. “She had no clue how fast she was and forgot to brake in the finish area,” adds Fahlèn about that race.

On her final run in Salt Lake, Traa nailed a 360 iron cross on the first air and an upright triple twister on the second. When she saw No. 1 on the scoreboard, her first thought was, “Okay! Easy press conference. If I had been number two or number three, they would talk about the pictures.”

And then?

“I was 28 and felt old because I hadn’t studied anything,” Traa says, but she was constantly creating. “I wanted to fix old furniture or build things. I traveled with wood-carving machines, knives and planks, so I always had young American guys in my room, like Travis Cabral, Jeremy Bloom, trying it out.”

She was also a chronic knitter. “I don’t think any athlete traveled with so much yarn and knitting pins,” Traa says. She began customizing her own skiwear as mainstream styles at the time, she notes, were “a sea of sameness on the slopes. Masculine, boring colors, and unflattering fits.” This was especially true of women’s high-performance athletic wear. Says Traa, “This was even before ‘shrink it and pink it.’ There was just shrink it.” 

In the spring of 2002, she approached Bula, the Colorado-based company that had sponsored her early on. The folks there knew Traa had been crocheting her own hats and slapping on the Bula logo, so they told her to continue making hats and they would sell them. According to Traa, “I said, ‘Great!’ There was no plan to sell 10 or 100 million kroner. We just tried it. The next year, we made pants, shirts and hoodies.”

By now, her eponymous women’s clothing company—renowned for its base layers—has become a juggernaut, with sales of $70 million in 2020. An all-female design team produces more than 200 styles a year. Today, both the Bula and Kari Traa companies are owned by the Norwegian firm Active Brands. Sixty-five percent of Kari Traa’s sales are outside of Norway.

Her ingenuity continued to serve her well on the slopes, too. In 2003, the International Ski Federation allowed moguls skiers to perform inverted tricks. That required new training, on trampolines and water jumps. “I’m glad I kept going!” Traa says, even if it meant “trying to be a gymnast at 28.”

That year, she lost the season-long points race for the World Cup moguls title to Bahrke at the final stop in Voss, Traa’s hometown, in front of a legion of Norwegians. Denied a third consecutive moguls globe, Traa switched disciplines, flew to Japan and placed fifth in a World Cup ski cross 10 days later. The extra points allowed Traa to claim the overall freestyle globe—her second of three.

“It kind of bummed me out,” Bahrke says of losing the overall championship. “But she was smart. She did something that I don’t even think I was aware that we could do.”

Defending Olympic gold was another story. In 2006 in Torino, Traa took silver behind Jennifer Heil of Canada. She ended her World Cup career at Apex, British Columbia, that March. “I was ready,” she says. “The next year, I missed it a lot, but then I found the perfect man, had kids and then, you know, it’s over. I stopped when I knew I could win. I think that’s a good ending.”

Traa has hardly slowed down, though. In 2011, she finished second on Norway’s version of Dancing with the Stars, an experience she called “fun and scary. I had never danced sober [before that].”

At 47, she can still rip a mad line through moguls and spontaneously flip off a two-story balcony into fresh snow—just for fun. Traa lives in Voss with her partner, skydiving instructor Lars Haukom, their two daughters, Hedda, 10, and Silja, 8, two pigs, a dog and, until recently, a slew of quail in their bathroom.

Ever fearless, she skydives on a four-woman team that does vertical [head down] flying and on Team Silverfox with three men who specialize in formation flying—even though she doesn’t have the requisite grey hair. “We’ll give you a couple years,” her teammates told her when she joined, but she still has no grey.

Sadly, despite Traa’s efforts from 2006 to 2011 to bring more girls into skiing moguls, Norway stopped funding its national moguls team in 2019. The last of Traa’s recruits, Hedvig Wessel, retired after the 2018 PyeongChang Olympics where, for the second consecutive Winter Games, she was the lone Norwegian woman competing in moguls.

In the annals of freestyle skiing, Traa might not have matched Hannah Kearney’s 10 crystal globes or Donna Weinbrecht’s winning percentage (41 percent), but she’s topped every moguls skier’s Olympic medal cache and left an indelible impression on the entire tour with her style and attitude.

“Kari was a total badass!” says Bahrke. “She always went bigger than everyone else. Nothing ever fazed her, nothing was going to stop her. The course could be scary, bulletproof, jumps not good, snowing sideways, and all of us would just be over it—and she comes out and goes enormous, landing it, skiing awesome. She always, always did that. She really taught me that to be the best, you couldn’t have any excuses.”

Says Fahlèn, who coached the U.S. moguls team from 2006 to 2014 after spending 10 years working with Traa, “Kari was one of the best athletes I ever met. Unbelievably strong, so tough. She jumped like the men sometimes, almost as fast as the men sometimes. She never went safe. She wanted to be better than safe.”

At Sochi in 2014, Traa made one last Olympic appearance, in a broadcast booth. Four years later, she passed on a chance to work in PyeongChang. “I don’t know the people anymore, and the whole judging system changed,” she explains. “The maximum score is 100. When I was competing, it was 30.”

But moguls skiing still holds a piece of her heart. “I really miss the time with Lasse when we were on tour,” Traa says. “I should just split all my medals and send them over to him in Sweden because they’re not only mine. They’re Kari-and-Lasse team medals.” 

Sportswriter Aimee Berg has written for the Associated Press, New York Times, USA Today, ESPN, Outside Online and dozens of other print and broadcast outlets. This is her first piece for Skiing History.

See Remembering Ski Pioneers.

John Allen did a great job with “What Might Have Been” (March-April 2021), describing the possible mega-resort up at Ashcroft instead of down where we ski today in Aspen. In characterizing Billy Fiske, the spark plug behind the proposed development, I would offer a few details. Fiske produced Hopalong Cassidy movies and was an adventurous flyer known for his island-hopping flights across the Pacific. When he saw the above-treeline terrain in Joe Flynn’s photographs, he flew into Glenwood Springs to take a look. There was no airfield, so he picked a field and landed but had to pay the local power company to drop the power lines so he could take off. Fiske was a figure in British Society, reportedly arriving at the RAF airdrome, white scarf flying in his Bentley convertible, to fight in the Battle of Britain. In those early days of World War II, there were more pilots than Hurricane planes. Knowing their scarcity, Fiske coaxed his shot-up plane back to the field, landing despite a cockpit fire that was roasting him alive. He was the first American to be officially killed in action fighting the Germans. Just the year before in Colorado, he and Ted Ryan, his partner in the Highland Bavarian Company, purchased the Ashcroft ghost town and thousands of adjoining acres. John refers to my 1981 interview with Ryan that I featured in the film Legends of American Skiing. Without Fiske, the plans for the mega-resort fizzled. HBC’s surviving partner, Ted Ryan, passed Ashcroft and all the surrounding land to the U.S. Forest Service.

Rick Moulton
Chairman, ISHA Board of Directors
Huntington, Vermont

Painting of Fiske's final landing by John Howard Worsley/Tangmere Military Aviation Museum.

Inside the Domes

Patrick Thorne’s piece on indoor skiing (May-June 2021) was informative but didn’t address a key question: What’s the skiing like? Fifteen years ago, I did an October tour of what I called the Rhenish Alps: Four ski domes in four days in Germany, France and the Netherlands. The goal was to test a new ski design on winter snow, something unavailable in either hemisphere at that time of year. We skied Amnéville, Neuss, Bottrop and Landgraaf and found edgeable firm surfaces—not ice but not packed powder. What impressed me most were the buses parked outside each venue, transporting ski-club kids and coaches for off-season slalom training. The terrain isn’t steep enough for FIS-level slalom racing, but the snow surface was appropriate. Under the mercury-vapor lamps, it felt like night skiing. Sounds echoed off the walls and roof. 

Seth Masia
President, ISHA
Paonia, Colorado

Skiing inside the Alpincenter Bottrop: Youtube video

Where are they now? The first American to win a World Cup race starts a new life.

Photo above: Kiki at the World Cup GS in Val d'Isere, December 11, 1969. Popperfoto/Getty Images.

Blasting out of her driveway onto River Road in Hanover, N.H., Kiki Cutter on her bike looks every bit the “Bend Fireball” that she was known as in her prime. Cutter is intent on prepping for her fifth knee surgery in as many years by riding up and down the Connecticut River from the home she shares with Jason Densmore, her friend for five decades, and husband of four years. Head down, focused, determined, this is the woman who, in 1968, became the first American, man or woman, to win on skiing’s World Cup Tour. Over a short three-year career, her five wins were a record until Phil Mahre surpassed it 11 years later.

OFF TO THE RACES

Cutter grew up in Bend, Oregon, the fourth of Dr. Robert and Jane Cutter’s six children. She rode her horse to grade school from their 1,000-acre property, and in winters skied for the Bend Skyliners junior race program. Coach Frank Cammack, lumberman and national Nordic combined champ, taught his charges first and foremost to ski fast. “Every morning we would meet at the top of the mountain and we would scream down as fast as we could,” Cutter says. In those two to three runs before the mountain opened, Cutter fought all the boys to follow first behind Cammack. Among those young Skyliners, who as a group became a force in junior racing, was futuredownhiller Mike Lafferty. “I was at the lift first and she was second,” says Lafferty. “I don’t know if she ever beat me.” The two rode the lift together often and Lafferty remembers Cutter as “a great competitor who did everything full-tilt.”

Tough, kind-hearted and devoted, coach Cammack assumed an important role for Cutter when she was age 12 and her parents divorced. Cutter, already outspoken and independent, was now filled with anger. “She was an ornery brat under some circumstances and I didn’t hesitate to tell her that,” recalls Cammack. “When push came to shove she could really perform.” Cammack also appreciated the bigger picture, and what skiing could offer kids, especially young Kiki. “He saw what was happening with my family and directed my anger into skiing,” says Cutter. “He changed my life.”

At age 14, Cutter remembers sitting on the rocks at Mt. Bachelor, watching her U.S. Ski Team heroes—Heuga, Kidd, Barrows, Werner, Sabich—and wanting to be part of it. When she was invited to train with the team, at age 15, she caught the eye of Rossignol race room legend Gerard Rubaud, who gave Cutter her first pair of Rossi skis and started her lifelong relationship with the brand.

After winning the junior nationals downhill at age 17, in weather so severe it was said she “skied underneath the storm,” Cutter was named to the U.S. Ski Team, but not to the 1968 Olympic squad. Seven women were named to that squad in the spring of 1967. The following season, however, they had a few nagging injuries, and fewer good results. After Christmas, coach Bob Beattie brought three youngsters—Cutter, Judy Nagel and Erica Skinger—to Europe, hoping to spark some pre-Olympic fire in his team.
A WHIRLWIND TOUR

“Ferocious,” “tough,” “ornery,” “in-your-face” are all words teammate Karen (Budge) Eaton uses to describe Cutter’s loud entrance. “She made me laugh, and she fought back,” says Eaton, referring to Cutter’s liftline assertiveness, and how the rookie famously chided French superstar Marielle Goitschel to speed up or get out of the way on a training run. “She taught me how to be tougher and more aggressive,” adds Eaton. “We all got better.”

Despite their inexperience and poor start numbers, the youngsters immediately made a mark, and none more so than Cutter. She scored two seventh place finishes, then a second and third place, earning a spot, along with Nagel, on the Grenoble Olympic team.

Cutter was the only U.S. woman to ski all three events, placing as the top American in downhill, despite a bout with measles that the press never confirmed. Later that season, Cutter became the first American to win a World Cup race, taking the slalom at Kirkerudbakken, Norway. At the awards ceremony she was congratulated by King Olav V, and came home to a caravan welcome in Bend.

In an era when news stories referred to women as “girls,” called one champion skier “a hefty lass” and referred to the “good looks of the ski damsels,” the press loved the spirited Cutter. Dubbed by the French team “La Dangereuse Américaine,” she was simply “Kiki” in the local Oregon headlines. Elsewhere Cutter was described as a “105-pound fireball,” “fiercely tiny,” “pocket-sized,” “pixie-like” and “no bigger than a bar of soap.” Sports Illustrated asserted that Cutter “belies her ladylike cuteness with a fighting temperament,” and called her “the embodiment of the American skiing spirit.”

Much of this lives in scrapbooks kept by Cutter’s mother, Jane, who then lived in Geneva, Switzerland. Also preserved are letters from Kiki to Jane, recounting her travels, conveying how much she missed her, and defending her choice to interrupt her studies at the University of Oregon to commit to ski racing. Racing in Europe allowed Kiki and Jane to reunite, and provided a home base that was a respite for Kiki and her closest friend, Judy Nagel. Traveling by train with all their gear, as ski racers did then, was “a blast, that never felt like a job,” but was nonetheless exhausting.

Cutter notched three more victories in 1969, two slalom and one GS. She finished that season fourth in the overall World Cup standings, and second in slalom, while teammate Marilyn Cochran won the GS title. The following season, despite struggling with early season injuries, she managed to score her fifth World Cup win (and 12th podium) in St. Gervais, France, and many assumed her best years were ahead of her. But she had different ideas: “I was pretty burnt out and it wasn’t fun anymore,” she says. She quit in 1970, at age 20. Nagel quit the following year, with three victories, at age 19.

EARLY (AND BRIEF) RETIREMENT

Part of Cutter’s decision was the tense atmosphere on the U.S. Ski Team. Created by Beattie ten years earlier, the team was still establishing itself. Another major factor was that, to her mother’s displeasure, she had started dating Beattie, who in April 1969 had been ousted from the U.S. Ski Team. They married in July 1970.

At the 1972 Sapporo Olympics, which might have been Cutter’s Olympic moment, she attended as a spectator, while Beattie commentated for ABC-TV. She remembers Barbara Ann Cochran’s gold medal–winning performance: “I watched from afar and she made every turn perfect--so low down to the ground. I remember watching her and how proud I was of her.” Cutter says she was not a bit envious. “It was over for me.”

Cutter started racing on the pro tour, Beattie’s 1970 creation. She described the women’s competition as “a frill to the men’s race,” where the women were “stuck in after the men made their big ruts.” Cutter suffered her first serious injury in a collision off the six-foot-plus bump at Hunter Mountain.

While Beattie was traveling, a group of kids from Aspen High School asked Cutter to coach them. She would later coach junior skiers at Sunlight, and tennis at Colorado Rocky Mountain School. Working with kids was rewarding—especially with the rebels. She could redirect their energy positively, as Cammack had done for her. “Those were periods of my life I absolutely loved,” she says.

Meanwhile, the marriage with Beattie, who was often on the road, was not going well. “What can I say about it? It happened,” Cutter offers. Their life in New York, where Beattie did much of his work, was especially chaotic. “I don’t think we ever had dinner alone together. I hated it.” They divorced after two and a half tumultuous years.

STARTING OVER

Cutter emerged with nothing but a condo in Snowmass (with two mortgages), and her name. She needed to make a living, doing whatever she could.

She soon teamed up with Mark McCormack of International Management Group, Jean Claude Killy’s agent and Beattie’s archrival. McCormack secured endorsements for Cutter with Nutrament, Ovaltine and Ray Ban, and was instrumental in getting her into the lucrative ABC Superstars competitions in 1975 and ’76. She excelled, thanks to months of intensive multi-sport training. In writing about that event for his 1976 book Sports in America, James Michener called Cutter “the best athlete pound for pound of the whole excursion, men or women.” When Martina Navratilova was heard to say “Who needs this?” of the grueling competition and training required to win the $30,000 purse, Cutter responded, “I do!”

Other endorsements she got on her own, including Busch CitySki, and citizen race clinics through the Equitable Life Family Ski Challenge. After her second knee injury racing on the Women’s Pro Ski Tour (started in 1978), Cutter reserved her competition for dominating the tamer celebrity events. She won the Legends of Skiing GS in 1987 and the initial Tournament of Champions series in 1990. Throughout, Cutter kept up her relationship with Rossignol, leading the women’s clinics they started. In 1994 she took on the role as Ritz-Carlton’s Ski Ambassador.

Cutter supplemented her promotional business by producing special inserts for SKI Magazine that doubled as on-site programs at World Cup events, and also hosted a monthly “Ask Kiki” column in SKI. She founded The Spirit of Skiing, a nationally televised fundraising event for People magazine, where the ski and celebrity world convened to raise money for ovarian and prostate cancer. Cutter was elected to the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame in 1993 and to the Colorado Ski Hall of Fame in 1998.

BACK TO BEND

After 30 years in Aspen, Cutter returned to Bend in 2000. There, she parlayed her publishing experience into her own magazine venture, Bend Living. The hefty quarterly averaged 160 glossy pages, filled with premium editorial, ads and photography, and became the top selling publication in central Oregon, winning awards for both design and editorial. It was a perfect fit for Bend, which was experiencing a spectacular real estate boom.

Managing the magazine and 14 employees was also an enormous amount of work, and all-consuming for Cutter, who took no time off. “It goes right back to why she was good at ski racing,” says Lafferty. “Her competitive nature is what carried her through.” In 2008 the financial crisis, and the collapse of the real estate market, hit publishing—and Bend—especially hard. As advertisers reneged on their agreements, and the magazine struggled for cash, Cutter scrambled to get loans and enforce contract payments. Eventually, however, the magazine folded, leaving her in substantial debt. “I had never experienced a loss like that,” says Cutter, who felt that she had failed her employees and her town. Once again, she faced rebuilding her life.

NEW LIFE AND AN OLD LOVE

It was just around then that Jason Densmore got in touch. The two knew each other from their days in Aspen, when Jason (former member of the U.S. Nordic Combined team) owned a woodstove store, The Burning Log. Then, each of them had been in other relationships, but they became friends and had stayed in touch. As her business was folding, so, too, was his marriage. While consoling each other they realized that rather than trying to resurrect a marriage and a business, they could instead try starting something new. They did, and it was a life together. Kiki moved across the country with Jason in 2010, to his home in Hanover, New Hampshire. The two have lived there ever since, marrying in 2017. After selling properties in Colorado and Oregon she is now debt free, and the couple has time to enjoy the outdoors with their shared menagerie of animals that match their demeanors. The terrier and cat are Kiki’s. The retriever is Jason’s.

Looking back on what she is proud of, there are the ski racing accomplishments, but what resonates more are the less celebrated products of her lifelong hard work, like the magazine and helping others, as when coaching rebellious teens. When asked what she is proudest of in her life, Kiki responds without hesitation: “Jason. I truly have been blessed, starting with Frank [Cammack] and then with Jason.” Whatever comes next, Cutter, now officially Densmore, will live by one of her friend Jimmie Heuga’s favorite mantras: “Keep on keepin’ on.” 

See https://www.skiinghistory.org/lives

ISHA's Board of Directors has elected a new chairman, three new directors and a new treasurer. They are:

Rick Moulton (Chairman), long-time chairman of ISHA’s Awards Committee, is an independent film producer based in Huntington, Vermont. His most notable films include the Vermont Memories series for Vermont Public Television, “Legends of American Skiing” (1983), “Spirit of a Classic” (Mad River Glen, 1988), “Ski Sentinels” (National Ski Patrol, 1983), “Thrills and Spills in the North Country” (New England Ski Museum, 1998), “Passion for Snow” (Dartmouth skiing, 2012) and “Voice of America: Lowell Thomas and the Rise of Broadcast Journalism” (2018). Rick studied mass communication at the University of Denver.

Henri Rivers (Director) was elected president of the National Brotherhood of Skiers (NBS) in March 2020. NBS comprises 50 ski clubs in 43 cities, with 3,500 members. A native New Yorker, he has been an avid skier since 1975. Henri is a PSIA-certified instructor and USSA official. He first became involved with NBS in 1996. In 2003 he became a coach for the NBS national team and in 2008 he was appointed the Olympic Scholarship Fund administrator. During his tenure as OSF administrator, he grew the national team to 15 athletes. In 2016 he was appointed national competition director and in 2018 was elected executive vice president of NBS. He served for two years before being elected national president. After 25 years managing large construction projects, including hospitals, dormitories and other municipal facilities, in 2007 he founded Drumriver Industries, which designs and builds renewable energy projects.

Christof Thöny (Director) of Bludenz, Austria, studied at the University of Innsbruck and teaches Catholic religion and history at the Bundesgymnasium Bludenz, while working as a project manager and publisher. Since 2005 he has been curating historical and cultural exhibitions. He is the author of more than 50 publications, mainly focused on regional history and the history of skiing. His projects include “Hannes Schneider, Pioneer of Skiing,” staged in the Arlberg and at the New England Ski Museum; “80 Years of Arlberg Kandahar” at the Museum St. Anton; “Wintersportarchiv,” funded by the EU and including ski museums and associations in Vorarlberg and Allgäu (wintersportarchiv.org); and the skiing-history website skispuren.com. His book “Skispuren” won an ISHA Ullr Award in 2020.

Ivan Wagner (Director) is chief editor of Der Schneehase, the Swiss Academic Ski Club (SAS) yearbook, which received an ISHA Lifetime Achievement Award in 2020. Born in Prague, he trained with the Czech national ski team. After the Russian invasion of 1968 he emigrated with his family to Switzerland, studied electrical engineering at the Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich), and joined SAS in 1969. He became a successful university alpine racer and mountaineer. Ivan earned a master’s degree in industrial management at Purdue and spent four decades in banking, retiring as chair of banking and financial services at Ernst & Young. He’s a member of the Kandahar Ski Club and received its Sir Arnold Lunn Medal in 2010.

Bob Soden (Treasurer) has been involved with ISHA for many years, as a writer/researcher and historian and as chair of the Museum Outreach Committee. He is working on a history of Jay Peak. A lifelong resident of Montreal, Bob studied engineering at Sir George Williams University and Concordia University. In 1963 he achieved certification from the American Ski Teachers Association of Natur Teknik. Though English is his mother tongue, he is fluent in French and uses both in promoting ISHA in Canada. For 40 years Bob was involved in engineering management and consulting. He has been a project manager for multiple large paper companies and has worked with Petro-Canada and the TransCanada Pipeline.

Other officers were re-elected. They are President Seth Masia, Vice Presidents Jeff Blumenfeld, Wini Jones, and John McMurtry, and Secretary Einar Sunde. 

2021 ISHA Awards Video Now Online

Due to Covid-19 restrictions, the ISHA Awards Program, originally scheduled for Snowmass, was held online on April 29. View a video of the program, with brief talks by the honored writers and filmmakers, at skiinghistory.org/events.

The Skiing Cochrans turned their passion into a Vermont institution. And they aren’t slowing down.

When Ryan Cochran-Siegle won the World Cup super-G in Bormio, Italy, last December, he ended a 14-year drought for American male skiers in that event. He also became the first Vermont-born skier to win a World Cup since 1973. That race was won by his aunt, Marilyn Cochran Brown. At home, nervously watching, was his mother, 1972 slalom gold medalist Barbara Ann Cochran—along with the entire Cochran clan which, including Ryan, boasts 10 World Cup skiers and six Olympians across two generations.

(Photo top of page: Ryan Cochran-Siegle on course at the 2019 US National Alpine Championships. Courtesy USSA/Jamie

Walter)

The Cochrans aren’t just Vermont skiers—they are Vermont skiing. To understand what that means, one need only take in the scene at Cochran’s Ski Area in Richmond, Vermont. On any winter day, the little hillside just off I-89, between Montpelier and Burlington, is buzzing. Race teams from youth through collegiate, plus school learn-to-ski programs and families, converge to lap the rope tow and T-bar and learn to ski “The Cochran Way.”

A Legacy Is Born

Cochran’s mission starts with a simple statement: No child will be denied the opportunity to ski or ride. This was the ethos from the start, in 1961, when Mickey Cochran installed a 400-foot rope tow behind his house. He not only wanted his kids to be able to ski after school, but also wanted, with his wife, Ginny, to invite the community. In so doing they created something more than a ski area. They created a Vermont institution that now provides year-round affordable recreation in a 100 percent home-grown environment that embraces Mickey Cochran’s philosophy of working hard and, above all, having fun.

The original Skiing Cochrans are, in order of birth, Marilyn, Barbara Ann, Bob and Lindy. Mickey coached them on the tow during the week, then at Smugglers’ Notch on weekends. “We had modest means, and did with what we had,” says Lindy.

The alchemy of Mickey’s engineering mind and teaching skills, along with his Depression-era work ethic and love for the sport, cultivated a kind of magic in the community, and world class talent in his kids. All four became World-Cup and Olympic skiers. Marilyn had three World Cup victories and was World Cup GS champion in 1969; Barbara Ann won three World Cups and Olympic slalom gold in 1972; brother Bob earned one World Cup win and podiums in all three disciplines; and Lindy scored a World Cup podium and was the top US finisher in slalom and GS at the 1976 Olympics.

All four went on to graduate from the University of Vermont, like their parents. Barbara Ann and Marilyn coached the UVM ski

team, as had Mickey. Bob and Lindy raced—Bob while on the US Ski Team and Lindy on a full athletic scholarship (one of UVM’s first to a woman). As the kids built their own families and careers, Mickey kept the tow running, adding a T-bar and a lodge, while Ginny continued running the learn-to-ski program she had started when Cochran’s first opened. When Mickey passed away in 1998, Cochran’s gained 501(c)(3) status to open up fundraising opportunities.

As the first generation of the Skiing Cochrans took over the area, the next generation made their mark on US skiing. In 2002 Lindy and Steve Kelley’s oldest child, Jessica, made the US Ski Team. Bob’s son Jimmy was next, followed by Marilyn’s son Roger Brown, then Tim Kelley. Jimmy, his younger sister Amy, plus Tim and Robby Kelley also raced for UVM, while Roger raced for Dartmouth and brother Doug for St. Lawrence University. In 2011, both Robby and Barbara Ann’s son Ryan made the US Ski Team, where they would compete together on two World Championship teams and enjoy the privilege of being teammates, competitors, best friends and family.

Robby would blaze a new trail in US skiing. When he and brother Tim were dropped from the team in 2014, they, with two fellow Vermonters, created a Vermont-based self-funded, self-coached independent team, Redneck Racing. With camo and red flannel/denim-themed racing suits, epic frugality and ample humor, the Rednecks built an enthusiastic fan base and broad community support. The following year, Tim and Robby regained USST nominations, but Robby declined, folding into

the US Ski Team at World Cups but otherwise going it on his own. “I enjoyed being liberated and free to do things how I thought they should be done,” he says.

Robby enrolled in Castleton University, adding college football to his resume while finishing up his studio art degree. Last season he raced as much as he could domestically. “Racing is great, but when you take it too seriously it can be bad for you. The whole thing with Cochran’s is, we always try to make it fun.”

He recently built a house in nearby Duxbury with help from his dad and YouTube, and he’s over at Cochran’s almost every day it’s open. Compared to the “one course, no snowmaking, no grooming, no lights” after-school training experience he grew up with, the area now is “turning into the real deal.” In addition to snowmaking in 2006 and lights in 2010, the area added a new beginner trail last season. Five years ago, Jimmy took charge of managing the area with, as Robby describes it, “more skills than any person I’ve ever met.”

Carrying the Name Forward

Jimmy Cochran represented the United States in two Olympics (2006, 2010) before finishing his mechanical engineering degree while coaching at UVM. As general manager at Cochran’s he is immersed in every aspect of keeping the resort running. With help from his employees, the community, and Mickey’s detailed notes on every piece of equipment, that may mean staying up all night making snow or solving any number of unexpected problems that come up. “It’s such a great job,” he says. “It’s a ton of hours. But it’s so fun.”

Jimmy was 16 years old when Mickey passed away, and while he missed fully experiencing his coaching genius, he remembers the joy on his grandfather’s face while watching kids ski at Cochran’s. That motivates his primary mission to get kids recreating. “You need to make it work so the kids can come skiing.”

Donations of money as well as equipment, time and expertise have helped keep Cochran’s afloat and growing. Jimmy credits support from the community as well as from bigger ski areas. He ticks off resorts like Sugarbush, Killington, Smugglers’ Notch and Berkshire East, as well as snowmaking giant HKD for generously contributing to Cochran’s success.

Last summer, in conjunction with Richmond Mountain Trails, Cochran’s added a pump track and beginner loop to its existing mountain biking trail network. The biking gets rave reviews

and, in keeping with the Cochran’s ethos, is a free community resource. Nonetheless, “We’ve benefitted as an organization from biking,” says Jimmy. Cochran’s also boasts its own community-accessible outdoor dryland training facility, the lush “Field of Excellence” (Robby’s playful alternative to the US Ski Team’s $24 million Center of Excellence). It’s sprinkled with barbells, tires to jump through and plenty of natural obstacles.

Branching Out: Slopeside and Untapped

Cochran’s sits on Mickey and Ginny’s original land plus two adjoining parcels acquired over the years. When doing a current-use study in 2009, a forester noted the potential for 22,000 maple taps on their nearly 600 acres. In 2010, Jimmy, Tim, Roger and Doug built a sugarhouse, and in 2011 Slopeside Syrup was born. Today, the sugaring operation is run by Tim and Jimmy while Marilyn’s sons, Doug and Roger, run UnTapped, selling maple products aimed at elite athletes.

Meanwhile, Barbara Ann teaches the Ski Tots program on weekends and Lindy coaches the U-16/U-19 program, though both have scaled back to part time. The extra time has allowed Barbara Ann to do more sports psychology work with athletes, combining her own training on mindset and process, with lessons from Mickey who advised his kids to “concentrate on the skill and let the results take care of themselves.”

The next two generations live locally for the most part. Only Jess and Bob’s daughter Amy, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, lives outside of Vermont. Ryan’s sister Caitlin and her two kids live in Jeffersonville. Jimmy, his brother Tom and Roger—with eight kids among them—all live on the land behind Cochran’s. Roger is a fixture at the ski area and Jimmy often makes his rounds with his infant son strapped to his chest.

Amidst Covid, Cochran’s manages to thrive. Last season, the lodge was closed, as were equipment rentals, but the snack bar served food through the former rental shop window and Jimmy kept the firepits lit for guests to stay warm between runs. A new beginner’s trail winds from the top of the newly extended T-bar. The $265 family pass is a popular bargain. Hundreds of kids from surrounding towns learn to ski in after-school programs, while Cochran’s Ski Club and seven high school teams train day and night. High on Jimmy’s wish list is an FIS homologated GS course, which is possible but would require significant work and expense. “It would be a huge undertaking,” says Jimmy. “To max our potential as a nonprofit area we need to get there.”

This One’s on Ryan

As the first Cochran of this generation to win a World Cup, Ryan assumes a new responsibility. As Lindy explains, the family joke

from the older generation was always, “You can buy us dinner when you win your first World Cup.” Unlike the older generation, which logged formative miles on bigger mountains, Jimmy points out that his cousin Ryan “truly is a product of Cochran’s. When he was little he just skied Cochran’s.” Ryan took full advantage of Cochran’s as a viable training venue and is the first of his generation to excel in speed events.

As Bob explains, ski racing is the second hardest sport in the world. Being a ski racing parent is the hardest. When Barbara Ann follows her son through livestreams and live-timing, she enlists her best mental imagery to handle the stress. “I call on the angels and ask them to keep him safe and healthy. What else can I do?”

The angels were with him in January when Ryan, who had won the final training run of the treacherous Hahnenkamm, crashed into the fences on race day. Ryan says he was “lucky to walk away with nothing more than a minor broken neck,” a description that would not bring much comfort to most moms. He had to sit out the 2021 World Championships, where he would have been a favorite in Downhill, super-G, and a contender in GS.

What Ryan will get when he returns to Cochran’s is a hero’s welcome. And the dinner check. 

Global Intrigue

When Marilyn Cochran won the GS title in 1969, neither she nor the US Ski Team nor K2—for which she scored the first World Cup win—made a big deal out of it. “I’d gotten second so many times that year that I didn’t think I’d done that well,” she recalls. She, Bob Beattie and Kiki Cutter (2nd in the slalom standings that season) went to Evian, France, to get the award, which, for her, was not a crystal globe. But she now does have one of Karl Schranz’s globes, thanks to a man she met through her property management business.

Schranz, who had won the overall and DH titles in 1969 and 1970, and the GS title in 1969, came to the States in summer 1971 for a PR tour with three of his globes. Rather than take the globes through customs on the return, he opted to leave them with his ski company representative.

The son of that man worked for a cleaning company Cochran met through her property business. They had contacted Schranz multiple times over the years about the globes, but Schranz never retrieved them.

Eventually the cleaning company guy offered one to her. It was for the wrong year, and the
bottom is broken but, as Cochran says, “I do have a globe—sort of.” Today, her official award lives at the Vermont Ski and Snowboard Museum in Stowe, while the globe lives in a Slopeside Syrup box beneath her desk at UnTapped. —ETM

For recent obitituaries please go to skiinghistory.org/lives