Where are they now?

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

The first American to win a World Cup cross-country race, this pioneer has remained an advocate for women for five decades.

Photo above: Alison at the U.S. Nationals in 1977. Courtesy Alison Owen Bradley.

Trivia question: Who is the first U.S. racer to win a FIS cross-country World Cup?

Kikkan Randall, or maybe Jessie Diggins? Nope. The answer is Alison Bradley (née Owen), who won the first-ever women’s FIS World Cup in December 1978. A member of the U.S. Ski & Snowboard Hall of Fame Class of 2020—to be officially inducted at some point in a post-pandemic world—Bradley is only the second female cross-country skier to be inducted into the Hall of Fame (her former teammate Martha Rockwell was in the HOF Class of 1986).

“Having spent so much of my life devoted to excellence in the sport of cross-country skiing, and then to be recognized and honored for it by the Hall of Fame, is icing on the cake!” Bradley said by phone from her winter home in Bozeman, Montana. She lives with her husband, Phil Bradley, on a small hobby farm near Boise, Idaho, during the summer months.

It’s been a long time coming for Bradley, a pioneer of women’s cross-country skiing in the United States. Since retiring from competition in 1981, Bradley has coached and promoted women’s cross-country skiing. Most recently, Bradley, Randall, and 1984 Olympian Sue Wemyss started U.S. NOW—U.S. Nordic Olympic Women—a group of all the American women who have competed in cross-country skiing at an Olympic Winter Games.

“There are 53 of us, and we’re all still alive,” Bradley, 68, said. “How can we pass on what we learned to upcoming skiers?”

As a way to support current skiers, U.S. NOW has a “grit and grace” award.

First called the Inga Award—named after the unheralded mother of Crown Prince Haakon Haakonsson who was carried to safety by Norwegian Birkebeiners in 1206—Bradley presented it to Rosie Brennan at U.S. NOW’s first reunion in 2019.

“You always see the two Viking guys carrying the prince,” said Bradley, explaining the birth of the award. “You never hear about the boy’s mother. That’s kind of like women’s skiing. It really spoke to me that she would be a good example for us to persevere and be strong.”

Bradley’s aim is that U.S. NOW continues to inspire upcoming generations of female cross-country skiers. “We have a lot of passion for skiing and ski racing, but there hasn’t been a real big way to put ourselves back in,” she said. “Now we have a structure to work within.”

The Early Days

Bradley had no female role models when she began cross-country skiing in the mid-1960s. Born in Kalispell, Montana, and raised in Wenatchee, Washington, Bradley was the second of five children in the Owen family, and like her father, she loved the outdoors.

One day, her father saw an ad in the Wenatchee World newspaper for a cross-country ski club. Herb Thomas, a Middlebury graduate and biathlete, had moved back to Wenatchee to work in his family’s apple business and wanted to teach area youth how to cross-country ski. Bradley, the only girl on the team, loved it. The next year, she beat several boys and qualified for a meet in Minnesota. But she was not allowed to compete.

“I couldn’t go because I was a girl,” she recalled, recounting an era in which female athletes were often ridiculed for competing, which was considered unattractive and even dangerous. “I was devastated.”

The next year, when she was 13, Bradley was one of nine Pacific Northwest Division skiers to qualify for the 1966 junior nationals in Winter Park, Colorado. This time, they let her go. But once she arrived, officials were not sure what to do with her. They finally allowed her to compete, but an ambulance was ready in case she succumbed to the effort (she didn’t).

Bradley does not remember the hoopla (she made laps on alpine skis at Winter Park while the race jury was deciding her fate), nor much about the race itself. For a 13-year-old, it was “just fun to be out of school and to have made the team.”

But Bradley had opened officials’ eyes. The following year, 17 girls qualified to compete at junior nationals, and they had their own race. By 1969, 40 girls participated in junior nationals, and the first senior national cross-country championships for women were held that year. Bradley had shattered her first glass ceiling.

‘First’ World Championships and Olympics

In 1970, the U.S. Ski Team sent its first women’s team to a FIS Nordic World Championship. A junior in high school, Bradley qualified for the team and left school for several weeks to travel behind the Iron Curtain to Czechoslovakia. Again, she remembers little from the 5k race, just that she was wide-eyed at the sights, so different than rural Washington.

American women made their Olympic debut in cross-country skiing at the 1972 Sapporo Winter Games. Galina Kulakova, a 29-year-old Soviet skier, swept the 5k and 10k individual races and anchored the Soviets to the relay gold medal—finishing more than five minutes ahead of the Americans, who crossed the line in last place. Bradley had just graduated from high school the previous spring and finished far back in both races.

Bradley asked U.S. women’s coach Marty Hall if she could just go home and taste success at junior nationals. “He would say, ‘Do you want to be a big fish in a little pond, or do you want to be a little fish in a big pond?’ I was getting eaten by the bigger fish, but it did wake me up to what I was working towards.”

Hall gave Bradley a training journal with Kulakova’s picture on the cover. “Someday you’re going to be right there with her,” he assured her.

But after 1974 world championships, Bradley had had enough. She was only 21 but felt as if her progress had stalled. She earned a scholarship to Alaska Methodist University (now Alaska Pacific University) and moved to Anchorage. She continued to compete domestically. But she was done with racing in Europe.

Then in 1978, the national championships were held in Anchorage. After winning the 7.5k and 20k races and finishing second in the 10k, Bradley found herself on another world championship team. “I’m not going back into that, I’m going to get my education,” she firmly told Jim Mahaffey, AMU’s ski coach.

Mahaffey persuaded her to try international competition again. She was good, he assured her. “Kochie had won an [Olympic] medal, ‘You know, maybe Americans can do well in this sport,’” she recalled thinking.

Physically and mentally more mature, Bradley was finally skiing near the front. In Europe, she finished top 10 in four races, including seventh at Holmekollen. It was like catching a touchdown pass in the Super Bowl.

In December 1978, Bradley made her mark. She had a good feeling at the Gitchi Gami Games in Telemark, Wisconsin—considered as the first FIS Cross-Country World Cup won by an American woman or man, though the FIS classifies it as a “test” event. “I knew in my heart I could win it,” she said. She just had to convince her body to go through the pain of racing. At that moment, Marty Hall walked into the lodge where Bradley was sitting. Hall was no longer the U.S. coach, but he looked across the room and pointed at Bradley. She looked back and thought, “Yes! I’m ready.”

Bradley won the women’s 5k that day and the 10k as well. With a handful of other top 10 finishes that season, she finished the World Cup ranked seventh overall. It was the best result by a U.S. woman until Kikkan Randall finished fifth overall 33 years later, in 2012.

The 1980 Olympic year was the best yet for Bradley. She won the Gitchi Gami Games again and finished on the podium in several World Cup races. In all, she made $35,000 in prize money—unheard of riches in a relatively unknown sport in the United States at that time. But at the 1980 Olympics in Lake Placid, she fell ill and finished 22nd in both races (5k and 10).

A year later, she won the last of her 10 national titles, then retired. “I was so discouraged by how up and down results would be,” she explained. “I could be right in there for some races, then people I had beaten were beating me at the big events. We wondered why our coaches couldn’t get us to peak.” She now recognizes the impact of performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) on the sport. In 1979, five of the six women ahead of Bradley in the World Cup rankings were Soviets and are strongly suspected of PED use.

“In hindsight, I give myself a lot more credit,” she said. “The doping scenario was confusing for racers like us because we had this attitude that we weren’t that good. But we friggin’ were that good!”

After Racing

Bradley moved to McCall, Idaho, after she retired and started a family. Her son, Jess Kiesel, helped the University of Utah ski team win an NCAA title as a freshman in 2003. Daughter Kaelin Kiesel was a two-time All-American and student athlete of the year at Montana State University (class of 2011).

After moving to Sun Valley in the mid-1980s, Bradley coached both Jess and Kaelin with the Sun Valley Ski Education Foundation, where for 14 years she helped several young skiers reach the world junior championships. Coaching at the world juniors, she once again confronted dominating males who weren’t good listeners. She knew more than most about training, ski prep, technique and, unlike her peers, had an impressive World Cup record. But she liked to concentrate on the mental approach to competition, and all the complex factors that lead to speed. “My style was very much about the person,” she said.

Then in the late 1990s, she saw a need for a program to help collegiate women make the national team. She founded WIND—Women In Nordic Development. Several WIND skiers competed in the world championships and made Olympic teams. But balancing the burden of fundraising, coaching, and raising her own kids, Bradley could not keep the WIND blowing for long.

In the mid-2010s, Sadie Maubet Bjornsen called Bradley out of the blue. The U.S. women’s team, led by coach Matt Whitcomb, wanted to learn more about the pioneering skiers who had laid tracks for the current women’s program. “I was in tears when Sadie emailed me,” said Bradley. “Really?! Someone remembers me?”

Bradley, Randall, and Wemyss ran with the idea, founding U.S. NOW. When Rosie Brennan received US NOW’s first award—and $1,000 to go with it—she was shocked. “I’ve had a lot of challenges in my whole career,” said Brennan, who was dropped for the second time from the U.S. Ski Team after she contracted mononucleosis during the 2018 Olympic year. “To be awarded this award from this group of people who have also gone through their own challenges means more than any race could ever mean to me.”

Two years after Randall and Jessie Diggins won America’s first Olympic gold medal in cross-country skiing (Team Sprint) at the 2018 PyeongChang Olympic Winter Games, Bradley was nominated to the U.S. Ski & Snowboard Hall of Fame, and several women on the 2018 U.S. Olympic team, plus Coach Whitcomb, penned a letter in support of her nomination.

“We are thankful for all Alison has done to further our sport, which gave us all something to dream about as young women,” read the letter. “The gold medal this winter has not only been an achievement for our team, but for the larger ‘team’ that Alison truly championed… all of (this) started with a leader who wouldn’t take ‘no’ as an answer.”

The hurdles Bradley-Owens and her colleagues faced in a male-dominated sport—and world—are in sharper focus now, but she’s pragmatic about the quest: Don’t blame the men, who deserve credit for organizing all the sports in the first place, she says, but step up yourself instead. “It’s been a slow change, but it is changing,” she says. 

Peggy Shinn is a senior contributor to TeamUSA.org, has covered five Winter Olympic Games and is a regular contributor to
Skiing History.

US Ski Team training at Aspen, 1967. Karen Budge is front center, Gordi Eaton far right.

Team Players: Gordi and Karen Eaton made skiing a living and a life. 

As senior supervisors of “Team Chaos,” Gordi and Karen Eaton juggle many roles. Helping shuttle and care for three active grandchildren, ages eight to eleven, all learning remotely while pursuing the available sports and activities in Hood River, Oregon, including ski racing, is logistically daunting.

Dealing with team dynamics, however, is familiar territory for the couple, both two-time Olympians and Hall of Famers. Now retired from careers that ranged from athletics to coaching to sales reps to restaurants, it’s best to catch them when the grandkids are on vacation and the powder isn’t too deep.

In The Beginning

Gordi Eaton calls himself “a beneficiary of rope tows in small towns.” His tow was Eustis Ski Hill in Littleton, New Hampshire, where he and his friends walked to the hill in their Levis and spent 25 cents for a hot chocolate and a day ticket. Inspired by skiers like Brooks Dodge, Bill Beck and Tom Corcoran, Eaton took his ambitions to bigger mountains, like Cannon where his father worked, and then to Middlebury College in 1958, skiing for Bobo Sheehan. Over the next seven years Eaton would juggle racing for Middlebury on the NCAA circuit and for the United States in Europe, before there was a U.S. Ski Team or a World Cup.

To prepare for the 1960 Olympics, Eaton took a year off school and went to CU Boulder to train with Bob Beattie. “I loved the guy,” says Eaton of Beattie. “He was so passionate about skiing. Everything was focused on ski racing, on us—raising money, training, films. This football kind of approach was new to us, and we all bought in because we were so eager for that kind of feedback.”

The following year, Eaton won the 1961 NCAA DH title racing against Olympic teammates Chuck Ferries (DU) and Buddy Werner (CU). “It was delightful,” Eaton, 81, recalls of skiing both circuits, and learning to manage the pressures of team and individual skiing. “As soon as the race was over, we had a great time together.” They’d come together again as teammates for FIS Worlds and Olympics “We gathered in New York, got a uniform and went to Europe. We competed and then came back and went to school the next year.”

Building Team USA

Eaton competed in the 1962 World Championships, made the 1964 Olympic Team (but did not compete due to injury) then graduated from Middlebury in 1965. Beattie immediately recruited him to coach the U.S. Ski Team on the newly formed World Cup circuit. Because the national team had little money, Beattie made Eaton a coach at CU. With athletes like Billy Kidd, Jimmie Heuga, Spider Sabich, Moose Barrows and Jere Elliot, CU was the national team. “Typical Bob,” says Eaton. “He got CU to pay my national team salary under the auspices of coaching the NCAA team.”

The team trained at CU in the fall, competed in Europe in the winter, then gathered for summer camps at Mt. Bachelor, where Beattie had started bringing the top young athletes from across the country. He hired his older athletes as player/coaches, thus creating the first ecosystem for U.S. Ski Team development.

Karen Budge was 13 years old at her first U.S. Ski Team development camp, in 1963, when Gordi was still competing. “We got to be intimidated by everyone!” she remembers. “I probably met her at that camp,” says Gordi “…but he didn’t remember me,” Karen, now 75, finishes the thought. Eaton shifted seamlessly from athlete to coach, leading his former teammates at the 1966 World Championships in Portillo and the 1968 Grenoble Olympics. Robert Redford shadowed this team to research “Downhill Racer.”

Budge, then 18, was also on the ’68 Olympic Team. She grew up in Jackson Hole, where “there was nothing to do but ski,” she says. By age 16 she was racking up Junior National titles and traveling with the U.S. Ski Team. Budge would go on to score two podiums and 30 top 10 results on the World Cup. Though she was on two Olympic teams (’68, ’72), a freak race-day on-hill accident prevented her from competing in 1968.

With Beattie setting the team’s tone, Chuck Ferries coached the women’s team, and Eaton the men’s team. US slalom racer and two time Olympian Rick Chaffee (’68,’72) enjoyed one of his best seasons with Eaton. “We worked hard but he made it fun,” recalls Chaffee. He also bolstered the shy Chaffee’s confidence: “He’d say ‘Stand up straight and carry yourself as the athlete you are.’ He was a gift to me.”

Off the hill, Beattie nicknamed Eaton “the Phantom” for his tendency to slip away unnoticed. ”When it was time to go, I just left,” says Eaton, whose coaching had a similar straightforward simplicity, heavy on action and light on talk. “There is lots of wasted time talking. We spend way too much time on technique.” He recalls watching the Americans and Austrians skiing an icy mogul field at a training camp. The Austrians danced down it while the Americans made perfect, controlled technical turns. Head Austrian coach Franz Hoppichler told him: “You have better technicians but I have better snow athletes than you.” Eaton encouraged his athletes to freeski, and to find fun while going fast.

In 1969, Beattie and Eaton were ousted from the national team in a regime change. Beattie would go on to organize and run the World Pro Tour. Eaton transitioned into working for K2, both in R&D testing and developing skis, and in building their race program.

In addition to assembling talent for the Pro Tour’s Team K2, led by Spider Sabich, he prepared skis for downhiller Mike Lafferty on the World Cup Tour. He also brought on new young skiers, including Phil and Steve Mahre. K2, which had started out building fiberglass cages for animals, was now hiring engineers and production staff and converting their Quonset hut on Vashon Island into a full-blown factory to keep up with growing market demand.

At the 1972 Olympics, Beattie was commentating for ABC, Eaton was preparing skis for Lafferty and Budge was competing in her second and final Olympics. Budge retired from ski racing after Sapporo. The couple married in October of that year, in Jackson Hole, and Team Eaton was launched.

The Work Of Making It Work

When it was time to start a family, the Eatons moved to Middlebury and together with Charlie Brush coached the Middlebury ski team from 1975-1978. The couple soon realized it was time to start figuring out how to make money at the sport, and it wasn’t through coaching.

In addition to ongoing ski testing and product development with K2, Gordi and Karen started repping Serac skiwear. “I knew a lot of people in the rep business,” explains Gordi. “The people were a lot like ski racers—they liked risks and fun times.”

In the mid-Eighties they took on Spyder as reps, just as the Boulder, Colorado, based company was expanding from mail order and needed to break into the New England market. “They were the perfect pair to get it done,” says Jeff Temple who ran Spyder with founder Dave Jacobs. Karen’s expertise in both racing and soft goods also helped Spyder develop its women’s lines. “They were a 1-2 punch. I saw several times where Gordi and Karen would actually write the order for the dealer. That is trust!”

In the midst of this run, in 1986, they also started a restaurant. “When you’re in the ski business you have to be doing a lot of things to make money,” Gordi explains. Partnering with Gordi’s childhood friend Bob Copenhaver and his wife Muffy, they opened Gordi’s Fish and Steak House in Lincoln, New Hampshire. The 5,000 square foot restaurant at the base of the scenic Kancamangus Highway is in the heart of the White Mountains summer and winter recreation region. The family spent each summer working long hours at the restaurant, then driving 40 miles home to their camp on Parker Lake. When Spyder sold, in 2004, Gordi and Karen thought they had retired from sales, but then took on Sun Ice for another few years.

The K2 Family

Throughout, K2 was a constant in their lives. Gordi’s ski testing required travel throughout the year, from late March in Europe, to Mt. Hood through the summer, to the southern hemisphere and back to the glaciers in the fall. “I skied 12 months a year for six or eight years in a row,” says Gordi, who admits this dream gig required ample support. “I had a very talented wife who kept everything together at home.”

Time spent as a sales rep brought the Eatons income and also keen industry insight. Jim Vandergrift, who had idolized Gordi as a competitor, went on to ski for Middlebury, then became K2’s lead engineer. He explains that Gordi’s perspective of the industry was invaluable. “Gordi’s biggest contribution was in the development side, feeding us info on what skis should do and what was happening in the retail environment so we could combine those variables,” Vandergrift says.

Vandergrift, who spent more than 40 years working with Eaton on product design, explains, “He’s got continuity of being involved from the very beginning to 2017.” Among the tight group of engineers and regular testers, including Tim Petrick, George Tormey and Hannes Rupft, “The Phantom” continued his reputation by always managing to make a few laps before the rest of the crew arrived. He had an uncommon ability to articulate how a ski performed and an unwavering allegiance to the consumer. This provided a critical, sober balance to the rock-star allure of building bigger, wider skis for big mountain skiers. “Every time I went for a ski test I’d always think, ‘Who are these for?’” says Eaton. “In my mind, I would be that person. I’m not making a ski for me.”

Occasionally, a ski would work for everybody. The K2 Four, the first of the factory’s deep-sidecut designs, was that ski. Eaton recalls first testing the Four: “It was the first I ever had been able to put a ski on edge at the top of the turn, continue to feel the edge through the middle of the turn, on to the completion of the turn.” It did this all without sliding, turn after turn, and at high speeds. “I was in my mid 50’s and I had spent the previous 45 years trying to make that kind of turn.” Based on tester feedback, K2 hastily put the Four in its upcoming line and Tormey, who Eaton calls “the best ski technician of his time,” convinced young unconventional K2 athlete Bode Miller to try the ski. Miller rode the Four to Junior National victory, then to the national team and forever changed race—and therefore consumer—ski design.

Staying In The Game

While business kept the Eatons in touch with consumers, Gordi stayed on the cutting edge of competition as well. “His knowledge of the ski world is encyclopedic,” says former U.S. Ski Team racer Mark Smith, who went on to coach Middlebury and the U.S. Ski Team. Smith has the highest regard for the couple. In long chats on skiing, and racing, “Gordi gave me great historical perspective,” says Smith. “He’s a real players’ coach, able to understand it from the athlete’s perspective. In a sport with gigantic egos he’s the polar opposite.”

Gordi’s talent for quietly cajoling people toward improvement is extraordinarily effective on the hill coaching, in debrief sessions, managing employees and accounts, and also in effecting meaningful change. “He’s a really humble guy but he’s not a pacifist,” Charlie Brush says. “Criticism is hard to give. He always found the way to give it in an encouraging way.”

Brush recalls how Gordi used this influence to help upgrade safety standards at race venues across the country to better accommodate the speeds and forces generated by modern equipment. When Brush’s daughter, Middlebury skier Kelly Brush, had a tragic ski accident in 2006 that left her paralyzed after hitting an unprotected lift tower, Gordi’s efforts gained urgency. He leveraged his relationships throughout the ski world to encourage compliance with new national standards. The Kelly Brush Foundation now provides grants to help purchase safety equipment and make venue improvements at clubs across the country.

When son Chris and his family left Middlebury and moved to Hood River, Gordi and Karen followed. Grandparent duty is especially busy now, but Gordi typically still manages to head to the slopes several times a week, on sunny days.

When asked what he skis on, Gordi answers in true ski tester language, with no mention of brand or model. “It’s 84 underfoot, and I also have something 70-73 underfoot. It took me 60 years to carve a turn, and I like to move my skis.” 

Gordi Eaton is a member of the Vermont Alpine Racing Association and Middlebury Athletics Halls of Fame. Karen is a member of Intermountain Skiing and Jackson Hole Ski Club Halls of Fame.

From her home base in Monaco, the Swedish superstar is a TV commentator, advocate for World Cup racer safety, entrepreneur, and homeschooling mom.

When you’re a world champion, an Olympic champion, a World Cup overall champion and a successful TV commentator, you’re not the average mom. But last March, Swedish alpine ski-racing legend Pernilla Wiberg found herself at home in Monaco, doing what many of the world’s moms were doing: homeschooling her kids and busting outdoors for exercise.

Photo top of page: Wiberg in the the final slalom race of the season on March 16, 1997 in Vail. 

“It’s a rollercoaster,” says the 50-year-old Wiberg of parenting, pandemic or not. “It’s not easy and there is not [only] one way to succeed.”

Wiberg and her husband Bødvar Bjerke, a former Norwegian national alpine team coach, share parenting duties for their son and daughter, ages 17 and 13. Most winters, Bjerke covers for Wiberg when she travels extensively for her TV work, from late October through March. Last spring, while the family hunkered into quarantine in Monaco, back in Sweden Wiberg’s brother, sister and mother carried on their lives with no restrictions.

“Nobody can say right now if the approach that Sweden has taken with COVID-19 will in the end be the right one or not,” says Wiberg of the nation’s less-restrictive “herd immunity” policies. “It will take some years.”

Wiberg’s journeys include regular trips to the Pernilla Wiberg Hotel in Idre Fjall, a small ski resort and former mining village tucked up close to the Norwegian border in the northwest part of Dalarna in Sweden. The ski-in, ski-out hotel was built in 2003, shortly after Wiberg retired from racing. “It was the perfect project to jump into,” says Wiberg. She drew on lessons learned as a world-class athlete, from navigating sponsors and negotiating contracts to “doing mistakes,” she says. Today, Wiberg is engaged in all aspects of the hotel, from designing skier-friendly features—including small drying cupboards and lots of hooks for gear in every room—to overseeing marketing and consulting on menus. Her fierce dedication to skiing has shifted from winning races to sharing her love for the sport.

THE EARLY DAYS

Sweden’s winningest female ski racer did not grow up in ski country, but rather 200 miles south, in Norrköping. As the middle of three athletic kids of school-teacher parents, Pernilla participated in a variety of activities, including basketball, running, gymnastics, dance and music. She built her strength and her will by chasing her older sister, Annika. The family learned to ski at the local hill, 400-meter-long Yxbacken, and on school holidays the family made the five-hour car trek to the mountains.

She started racing at age 11 and found quick success on the slopes. In her first international event, at age 14, she won the Tropheo Topolino slalom. At age 16, she joined her sister at Malung—the ski academy that 2018 Olympic gold medalist Frida Hansdotter later attended—and continued her rise through the ranks, competing in the 1988 World Junior Championships.

Athletic kids growing up in Sweden in the 1980s had a god for each season, and they were named Ingemar Stenmark and Björn Borg. “It was amazing,” says Wiberg, recalling the time her alpine-racing idol, Stenmark, walked down a corridor where she and other athletes were stretching during a training camp. “It looked like he was floating over the ground.”

Wiberg suffered a devastating knee injury while competing in Vermont, just before the 1989 World Junior Championships in Alaska. The U.S. Ski Team athletes and coaches convinced the 18-year-old to stay in the States, and to see orthopedic surgeon Dr. Richard Steadman in South Lake Tahoe. After a five-hour surgery, and rigorous rehab that included delivering mail by bicycle to rebuild her strength, Wiberg became another Steadman success story.

But she pushed herself too hard. It was only after her family forced her to go on vacation at Christmas, and she stopped training for a week, that things started to click. She returned to racing in February 1990, and by March, less than a year after surgery, she was on a World Cup slalom podium.

THE TITLES

The following season Wiberg nabbed her first World Cup win, a slalom in January. The next month, at the 1991 World Championships in Saalbach, Wiberg charged back from a 1.6 second deficit on the first run of the giant slalom to win her first World title. She backed that up with Olympic GS gold the following year in Albertville. Wiberg would add speed events to her repertoire, eventually winning in all five World Cup events, and earning World Championships and Olympic medals in four.

The Swedish ski team was small and close, under the direction of Jalle Svanberg. They often trained with the Americans, and Julie Parisien fondly remembers NorAm trips and later U.S. Ski Team training camps with Wiberg, her teammate Ylva Nowen, and Svanberg.

“They were a great team, and such fun,” says Parisien, who remembers Wiberg’s sheer strength and superstar aura. When breakaway poles came on to the scene, the Swedish women were the first to master the technique, meticulously testing ways to clear the gates most efficiently. After scoring her first Super G win in 1994, and then Olympic gold in combined that year, Wiberg started running downhill. She teamed up with the Americans for off-season training and Picabo Street took Wiberg under her wing. “I was like a sponge,” says Wiberg. “I listened to everyone.”

Svanberg, who spent 11 years as Wiberg’s coach, starting at age 14, fostered this innovative and daring spirit. “From early on, she understood that to be the best, she had to do something nobody else did,” says Svanberg. That included exhaustive equipment testing and tweaking, experimenting with favorite smells to induce a “flow state” (Svanberg: “I’m not sure it worked, but we tried”), and working with a leading neurologist whose studies suggested doing max squats the day before a race.

Wiberg’s ability to come back from seemingly insurmountable challenges—including injuries, time deficits or in-season slumps—was legendary and, in her mind, entirely innate. “You are born with the ability to rise from falling, or not,” she says. Svanberg recalls the time a sports psychologist, after one meeting with the Swedish team, told Wiberg, “You don’t need me.”

Wiberg’s skiing success, bolstered by her dazzling smile and well-spoken, friendly demeanor, translated to popularity in her home country and beyond. After winning her first (of four) World titles, she shelved her university studies in economics and sport became her business education. That same year she released the song and music video Privilege. In 1992, after her first of two Olympic gold medals, she united with other Swedish athletes to try to create a more favorable tax status to preserve their earnings. Ultimately, and at first reluctantly, she followed the path of her sports heros Stenmark and Borg and moved to Monaco in 1995. “In the end it was good,” says Wiberg, who explains that Monaco’s proximity to the Alps made it far more convenient than Sweden for a ski racer.

As with many successful athletes, Wiberg sought greater independence, and specifically wanted Bjerke to travel with her for support. When Swedish team members opposed that, she went her own way, spending one year year training with the Norwegian team, and another with Svanberg as her private coach. That year, 1996, Wiberg won world titles in slalom and combined, and the following year she won the World Cup overall title. Despite their success together, she and Svanberg agreed the private team dynamic wasn’t healthy. Ultimately, Wiberg returned to the Swedish team. She and Nowen, with whom she had the original conflict, remain close friends today.

AFTER RACING

By the time Wiberg retired from racing, after the 2002 Olympics, she had racked up three Olympic medals (two gold), six World Championship medals (four gold), one World Cup overall title, an individual slalom World Cup title and 24 World Cup victories across all five disciplines. In 2019 Wiberg was given the Swedish Sports Academy’s Honorary Award, which goes to “the sportsperson who, through their ongoing efforts, brought admiration and respect and enriched Swedish sport.”

Wiberg remains a regular on the World Cup, but now as a commentator for Swedish TV, traveling to the studio in Stockholm on weekends, and sometimes to the ski venues. Olympic medalist and longtime commentator Christin Cooper-Taché appreciates Wiberg’s talents on the hill and in the booth. At Sochi the two would exchange notes daily during the course inspection at dawn. “She is very smart, and very informed and objective about ski racing,” says Cooper. Wiberg enjoys the challenge and the connection. “[Racing] had been my life for so many years, and now I can give back to my sport by explaining racing to viewers.”

Wiberg gives back in other ways, too. While still competing, she was elected by her peers as chairperson for the FIS athletes commission from 1996–2000, and then to the IOC athletes commission from 2002–2010. Since then her involvement has been dizzying, including her work for the past ten years with the FIS Alpine Equipment Working Group. This international group of World Cup athletes and coaches has helped to identify and develop ways to reduce injuries by looking at things like equipment design, cut-resistant fabrics, and factors like physical training, balance, physiology and technique. Wiberg notes how few injuries well-balanced skiers like Mikaela Shiffrin and Marcel Hirscher have had, and believes that plays a key role in injury prevention. She also advocates a backed-off schedule to allow athletes longer recovery times.

Along with her work for the FIS and IOC, Wiberg is a “Champion of Peace” for Peace and Sport, an international NGO, and a board member of both the World Olympian Association and Svenska Olympier. The former is dedicated to inspiring the 100,000-plus Olympians around the globe to help society and fellow Olympians, and the latter is an organization of all living Olympians in Sweden. In addition to her many volunteer roles, she serves on a professional board through her work with MIPS (multi-directional impact protection system) helmet technology.

Despite her own mental strength in competition, Wiberg understands the struggle for many athletes, and acknowledges the challenges of success. “When you have a medal, everyone sees you as a star,” she says. “They expect you to be a superhero and if you are not, the fall is so long. If you feel fragile, you don’t want to tell anyone. We have to say it’s okay to not feel okay.”

Wiberg’s own children enjoy recreational skiing and are active in soccer and gymnastics. After two months at her summer home in Sweden, the family is back in Monaco. Her TV duties will be in the Stockholm studio until the new year, when she hopes they shift to being on site at World Cup venues. What’s next on her rollercoaster? “People expect you to have goals in normal life, but you don’t,” she says. “I still don’t have a career goal, but jobs come to me for different reasons.”

Whatever comes along, Wiberg will attack it in her usual style, with guts and resolve. “All top athletes like to do things 100 percent!”  

reuters / alamy stock photo

reuters / alamy stock photo

 From her home base in Monaco, the Swedish superstar is a TV commentator, advocate for World Cup racer safety, entrepreneur, and homeschooling mom.

When you’re a world champion, an Olympic champion, a World Cup overall champion and a successful TV commentator, you’re not the average mom. But last March, Swedish alpine ski-racing legend Pernilla Wiberg found herself at home in Monaco, doing what many of the world’s moms were doing: homeschooling her kids and busting outdoors for exercise.

Photo top of page: Wiberg in the the final slalom race of the season on March 16, 1997 in Vail. 

“It’s a rollercoaster,” says the 50-year-old Wiberg of parenting, pandemic or not. “It’s not easy and there is not [only] one way to succeed.”

Wiberg and her husband Bødvar Bjerke, a former Norwegian national alpine team coach, share parenting duties for their son and daughter, ages 17 and 13. Most winters, Bjerke covers for Wiberg when she travels extensively for her TV work, from late October through March. Last spring, while the family hunkered into quarantine in Monaco, back in Sweden Wiberg’s brother, sister and mother carried on their lives with no restrictions.

“Nobody can say right now if the approach that Sweden has taken with COVID-19 will in the end be the right one or not,” says Wiberg of the nation’s less-restrictive “herd immunity” policies. “It will take some years.”

Wiberg’s journeys include regular trips to the Pernilla Wiberg Hotel in Idre Fjall, a small ski resort and former mining village tucked up close to the Norwegian border in the northwest part of Dalarna in Sweden. The ski-in, ski-out hotel was built in 2003, shortly after Wiberg retired from racing. “It was the perfect project to jump into,” says Wiberg. She drew on lessons learned as a world-class athlete, from navigating sponsors and negotiating contracts to “doing mistakes,” she says. Today, Wiberg is engaged in all aspects of the hotel, from designing skier-friendly features—including small drying cupboards and lots of hooks for gear in every room—to overseeing marketing and consulting on menus. Her fierce dedication to skiing has shifted from winning races to sharing her love for the sport.

THE EARLY DAYS

Sweden’s winningest female ski racer did not grow up in ski country, but rather 200 miles south, in Norrköping. As the middle of three athletic kids of school-teacher parents, Pernilla participated in a variety of activities, including basketball, running, gymnastics, dance and music. She built her strength and her will by chasing her older sister, Annika. The family learned to ski at the local hill, 400-meter-long Yxbacken, and on school holidays the family made the five-hour car trek to the mountains.

She started racing at age 11 and found quick success on the slopes. In her first international event, at age 14, she won the Tropheo Topolino slalom. At age 16, she joined her sister at Malung—the ski academy that 2018 Olympic gold medalist Frida Hansdotter later attended—and continued her rise through the ranks, competing in the 1988 World Junior Championships.

Athletic kids growing up in Sweden in the 1980s had a god for each season, and they were named Ingemar Stenmark and Björn Borg. “It was amazing,” says Wiberg, recalling the time her alpine-racing idol, Stenmark, walked down a corridor where she and other athletes were stretching during a training camp. “It looked like he was floating over the ground.”

Wiberg suffered a devastating knee injury while competing in Vermont, just before the 1989 World Junior Championships in Alaska. The U.S. Ski Team athletes and coaches convinced the 18-year-old to stay in the States, and to see orthopedic surgeon Dr. Richard Steadman in South Lake Tahoe. After a five-hour surgery, and rigorous rehab that included delivering mail by bicycle to rebuild her strength, Wiberg became another Steadman success story.

But she pushed herself too hard. It was only after her family forced her to go on vacation at Christmas, and she stopped training for a week, that things started to click. She returned to racing in February 1990, and by March, less than a year after surgery, she was on a World Cup slalom podium.

THE TITLES

The following season Wiberg nabbed her first World Cup win, a slalom in January. The next month, at the 1991 World Championships in Saalbach, Wiberg charged back from a 1.6 second deficit on the first run of the giant slalom to win her first World title. She backed that up with Olympic GS gold the following year in Albertville. Wiberg would add speed events to her repertoire, eventually winning in all five World Cup events, and earning World Championships and Olympic medals in four.

The Swedish ski team was small and close, under the direction of Jalle Svanberg. They often trained with the Americans, and Julie Parisien fondly remembers NorAm trips and later U.S. Ski Team training camps with Wiberg, her teammate Ylva Nowen, and Svanberg.

“They were a great team, and such fun,” says Parisien, who remembers Wiberg’s sheer strength and superstar aura. When breakaway poles came on to the scene, the Swedish women were the first to master the technique, meticulously testing ways to clear the gates most efficiently. After scoring her first Super G win in 1994, and then Olympic gold in combined that year, Wiberg started running downhill. She teamed up with the Americans for off-season training and Picabo Street took Wiberg under her wing. “I was like a sponge,” says Wiberg. “I listened to everyone.”

Svanberg, who spent 11 years as Wiberg’s coach, starting at age 14, fostered this innovative and daring spirit. “From early on, she understood that to be the best, she had to do something nobody else did,” says Svanberg. That included exhaustive equipment testing and tweaking, experimenting with favorite smells to induce a “flow state” (Svanberg: “I’m not sure it worked, but we tried”), and working with a leading neurologist whose studies suggested doing max squats the day before a race.

Wiberg’s ability to come back from seemingly insurmountable challenges—including injuries, time deficits or in-season slumps—was legendary and, in her mind, entirely innate. “You are born with the ability to rise from falling, or not,” she says. Svanberg recalls the time a sports psychologist, after one meeting with the Swedish team, told Wiberg, “You don’t need me.”

Wiberg’s skiing success, bolstered by her dazzling smile and well-spoken, friendly demeanor, translated to popularity in her home country and beyond. After winning her first (of four) World titles, she shelved her university studies in economics and sport became her business education. That same year she released the song and music video Privilege. In 1992, after her first of two Olympic gold medals, she united with other Swedish athletes to try to create a more favorable tax status to preserve their earnings. Ultimately, and at first reluctantly, she followed the path of her sports heros Stenmark and Borg and moved to Monaco in 1995. “In the end it was good,” says Wiberg, who explains that Monaco’s proximity to the Alps made it far more convenient than Sweden for a ski racer.

As with many successful athletes, Wiberg sought greater independence, and specifically wanted Bjerke to travel with her for support. When Swedish team members opposed that, she went her own way, spending one year year training with the Norwegian team, and another with Svanberg as her private coach. That year, 1996, Wiberg won world titles in slalom and combined, and the following year she won the World Cup overall title. Despite their success together, she and Svanberg agreed the private team dynamic wasn’t healthy. Ultimately, Wiberg returned to the Swedish team. She and Nowen, with whom she had the original conflict, remain close friends today.

AFTER RACING

By the time Wiberg retired from racing, after the 2002 Olympics, she had racked up three Olympic medals (two gold), six World Championship medals (four gold), one World Cup overall title, an individual slalom World Cup title and 24 World Cup victories across all five disciplines. In 2019 Wiberg was given the Swedish Sports Academy’s Honorary Award, which goes to “the sportsperson who, through their ongoing efforts, brought admiration and respect and enriched Swedish sport.”

Wiberg remains a regular on the World Cup, but now as a commentator for Swedish TV, traveling to the studio in Stockholm on weekends, and sometimes to the ski venues. Olympic medalist and longtime commentator Christin Cooper-Taché appreciates Wiberg’s talents on the hill and in the booth. At Sochi the two would exchange notes daily during the course inspection at dawn. “She is very smart, and very informed and objective about ski racing,” says Cooper. Wiberg enjoys the challenge and the connection. “[Racing] had been my life for so many years, and now I can give back to my sport by explaining racing to viewers.”

Wiberg gives back in other ways, too. While still competing, she was elected by her peers as chairperson for the FIS athletes commission from 1996–2000, and then to the IOC athletes commission from 2002–2010. Since then her involvement has been dizzying, including her work for the past ten years with the FIS Alpine Equipment Working Group. This international group of World Cup athletes and coaches has helped to identify and develop ways to reduce injuries by looking at things like equipment design, cut-resistant fabrics, and factors like physical training, balance, physiology and technique. Wiberg notes how few injuries well-balanced skiers like Mikaela Shiffrin and Marcel Hirscher have had, and believes that plays a key role in injury prevention. She also advocates a backed-off schedule to allow athletes longer recovery times.

Along with her work for the FIS and IOC, Wiberg is a “Champion of Peace” for Peace and Sport, an international NGO, and a board member of both the World Olympian Association and Svenska Olympier. The former is dedicated to inspiring the 100,000-plus Olympians around the globe to help society and fellow Olympians, and the latter is an organization of all living Olympians in Sweden. In addition to her many volunteer roles, she serves on a professional board through her work with MIPS (multi-directional impact protection system) helmet technology.

Despite her own mental strength in competition, Wiberg understands the struggle for many athletes, and acknowledges the challenges of success. “When you have a medal, everyone sees you as a star,” she says. “They expect you to be a superhero and if you are not, the fall is so long. If you feel fragile, you don’t want to tell anyone. We have to say it’s okay to not feel okay.”

Wiberg’s own children enjoy recreational skiing and are active in soccer and gymnastics. After two months at her summer home in Sweden, the family is back in Monaco. Her TV duties will be in the Stockholm studio until the new year, when she hopes they shift to being on site at World Cup venues. What’s next on her rollercoaster? “People expect you to have goals in normal life, but you don’t,” she says. “I still don’t have a career goal, but jobs come to me for different reasons.”

Whatever comes along, Wiberg will attack it in her usual style, with guts and resolve. “All top athletes like to do things 100 percent!”  

reuters / alamy stock photo

reuters / alamy stock photo

From her home base in Monaco, Pernilla Wiberg, Sweden’s all-time top female alpine racer, is a TV commentator, advocate for World Cup racer safety, entrepreneur, and homeschooling mom.

When you’re a world champion, an Olympic champion, a World Cup overall champion and a successful TV commentator, you’re not the average mom. But last March, Swedish alpine ski-racing legend Pernilla Wiberg found herself at home in Monaco, doing what many of the world’s moms were doing: homeschooling her kids and busting outdoors for exercise.
     “It’s a rollercoaster,” says the 50-year-old Wiberg of parenting, pandemic or not. “It’s not easy and there is not [only] one way to succeed.” 

Wiberg and her husband Bødvar Bjerke, a former Norwegian national alpine team coach, share parenting duties for their son and daughter, ages 17 and 13. Most winters, Bjerke covers for Wiberg when she travels extensively for her TV work, from late October through March. Last spring, while the family hunkered into quarantine in Monaco, back in Sweden Wiberg’s brother, sister and mother carried on their lives with no restrictions. 

“Nobody can say right now if the approach that Sweden has taken with COVID-19 will in the end be the right one or not,” says Wiberg of the nation’s less-restrictive “herd immunity” policies. “It will take some years.”

Wiberg’s journeys include regular trips to the Pernilla Wiberg Hotel in Idre Fjall, a small ski resort and former mining village tucked up close to the Norwegian border in the northwest part of Dalarna in Sweden. The ski-in, ski-out hotel was built in 2003, shortly after Wiberg retired from racing.  “It was the perfect project to jump into,” says Wiberg. She drew on lessons learned as a world-class athlete, from navigating sponsors and negotiating contracts to “doing mistakes,” she says. Today, Wiberg is engaged in all aspects of the hotel, from designing skier-friendly features—including small drying cupboards and lots of hooks for gear in every room—to overseeing marketing and consulting on menus. Her fierce dedication to skiing has shifted from winning races to sharing her love for the sport...

From Olympic racing to elite coaching, this once-and-future family has had a powerful impact on the sport.

By Peter Oliver

The Caldwells are America’s first family of cross-country skiers. As elite athletes, coaches, ski technicians, organizational founders, retailers and advisors, the family and the sport have formed a multi-generational bond that goes back 70 years. In U.S. skiing, only the Cochrans come close. 

On a breezy June day in Peru, Vermont, three generations of Caldwells—grandfather John, son Sverre, granddaughter Sophie and her husband, Simi Hamilton—gathered on the porch of Sverre’s home, with its sweeping view south to Stratton Mountain. They pieced together a family history that begins with John’s journey from the Putney School to Dartmouth College to the 1952 Olympics, stretches through Sverre’s seminal coaching gig at Stratton Mountain School, and strides into the present with Sophie and Simi’s leadership on the U.S. World Cup team. 

The family legacy has humble roots in late-1940s Vermont. Although a gifted downhill skier, John was a cross-country neophyte as a high-school athlete at Putney. In his first nordic race, he borrowed his sister’s clunky alpine skis (because they were smaller and lighter than his) and “basically ran around the course on skis,” he recalls. He finished in the top 15. Yet by the time John reached Dartmouth, his skills—and equipment—had improved sufficiently to enable him to compete as a four-event skier, in cross-country, jumping, slalom and downhill. He was named to the 1952 Olympic nordic combined team...

From Olympic racing to elite coaching, this once-and-future family has had a powerful impact on the sport. 

Above: John Caldwell at home in Putney, Vermont, where he first started competing as a high-school student in the late 1940s. By 1951 (right), he was training with the U.S. nordic team for the 1952 Winter Olympics in Oslo.

The Caldwells are America’s first family of cross-country skiers. As elite athletes, coaches, ski technicians, organizational founders, retailers and advisors, the family and the sport have formed a multi-generational bond that goes back 70 years. In U.S. skiing, only the Cochrans come close.

On a breezy June day in Peru, Vermont, three generations of Caldwells—grandfather John, son Sverre, granddaughter Sophie and her husband, Simi Hamilton—gathered on the porch of Sverre’s home, with its sweeping view south to Stratton Mountain. They pieced together a family history that begins with John’s journey from the Putney School to Dartmouth College to the 1952 Olympics, stretches through Sverre’s seminal coaching gig at Stratton Mountain School, and strides into the present with Sophie and Simi’s leadership on the U.S. World Cup team.

The family legacy has humble roots in late-1940s Vermont. Although a gifted downhill skier, John was a cross-country neophyte as a high-school athlete at Putney. In his first nordic race, he borrowed his sister’s clunky alpine skis (because they were smaller and lighter than his) and “basically ran around the course on skis,” he recalls. He finished in the top 15. Yet by the time John reached Dartmouth, his skills—and equipment—had improved sufficiently to enable him to compete as a four-event skier, in cross-country, jumping, slalom and downhill. He was named to the 1952 Olympic nordic combined team.

Grand as it might have been to go to the Games, he didn’t exactly receive the gilded Olympic treatment. Cross-country was little more than a blip on American skiing’s radar screen. “Not many ski clubs were promoting cross-country skiing,” John says, and the team essentially had no budget. Preparation for the Games in Oslo was an on-the-fly affair. Relegated to the margins, John and his teammates self-funded an impromptu camp in Sun Valley, where they didn’t always maintain an intensive focus on training. Enticed one day by fresh powder, they were spotted by a photographer who was so impressed by their downhill talents that he took publicity shots for the resort’s marketing campaign.

Not surprisingly, John’s Olympic performance in Oslo was less than stellar. “I never felt so unprepared for an athletic event in my life,” he says. He remembers making 11 jumps from the legendary Holmenkollen and falling six times. One inelegant but successful jump enabled him to qualify for the 18-kilometer cross-country event, in which he was 73rd among 75 finishers. More than 24 minutes behind the Norwegian winner, he managed to beat just one Australian skier.

That ignoble performance motivated John to embark on a long campaign to upgrade the stature of—and support for—cross-country skiing in America. In 1953, he launched a three-decade career of teaching and coaching at Putney while he and his wife, Hep, started a family (or, as Sophie teases her grandfather, “popping out kids”). Tim, Sverre, Peter and Jennifer formed the next generation to carry the family name forward. Meanwhile, John continued to burnish his own legacy.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, he was back on the national-team scene, coaching several Olympic and world championship teams, becoming the nordic representative on the U.S. Ski Team board, and writing a book, The Cross-Country Ski Book, the only one of its kind in the U.S. at that time. (The book’s success “kept me out of the poorhouse,” John says.) He was also founder of the New England Nordic Ski Association, whose prestigious annual award now bears his name.

Despite these efforts, acceptance of the sport was slow in coming. “Nobody paid attention to cross-country,” John says, and he remembers another USST board member telling him: “If you weren’t such a nice guy, we wouldn’t even have a cross-country program.” For the 1966 World Championship team, it took a $1,000 gift from a friend to pay for top-quality equipment for team members.

That was the world Sverre and older brother Tim entered in the late 1960s and early 1970s as they rose through the nordic ranks. Tim carried the family banner into elite racing, competing in the first of four Olympics as an 18-year-old in 1972. (Peter was also a successful XC racer, building an impressive collegiate record, while Jennifer would win the prestigious American Birkebeiner race in 1983.) During Tim’s 12-year Olympic run, between 1972 and 1984, respect for cross country finally began to take root. “A lot of things changed,” Tim says, and by 1984, “we were treated like kings compared with our predecessors.”

That was all relative, of course. By alpine standards, the American cross-country program was still a bare-bones operation. Team coaches “wore many hats,” says Tim—waxing skis, making travel arrangements, cooking meals, devising fitness programs. “In 1972, you never heard the term ‘wax tech.’ And even in 1984, we were doing a lot of waxing ourselves.” That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. “There was something to be gained by getting a feel for your skis by waxing them.”

And in the absence of official support, says John, U.S. skiers might have had a few advantages over well-financed Scandinavian and Russian programs. Freed from sponsor obligations, for example, U.S. skiers could use any wax brands and combinations that they wanted. “We knew more about waxing than anyone else,” John says of the 1960s and 1970s. “We tried waxing innovations that might have given us an edge.”

Health issues—pneumonia and back problems—slowed Sverre’s athletic development. He stayed connected to the sport by dabbling in coaching as a Dartmouth student in the 1970s. But he found that coaching and athletic development hadn’t advanced much since John’s Olympic struggles in 1952.

When Sverre took over the nordic program at Stratton Mountain School in the late 1970s, he was hired not because of his great expertise but simply because there wasn’t much competition. “There just weren’t that many experienced coaches,” he says. After all, there were no technical manuals for guidance (except perhaps for The Cross-Country Ski Book) and no great American mentors. The concept of the ski academy was essentially birthed with Burke Mountain Academy, founded in 1970, followed by Stratton Mountain School in 1972 and Green Mountain Valley School in 1973. But the academies’ focus was almost entirely on developing alpine athletes. Like John flying blind in preparing for the 1952 Olympics, Sverre had no template to guide him.

Left to his own devices, Sverre managed to turn the SMS nordic program into the best secondary-school program in the country. In a 40-year span beginning in the late 1970s, 16 Olympians have had SMS roots, and Sverre produced so many national-team members that the best number he can put on it is “30ish.” Among those elite skiers are Sophie and Simi, as well as Sophie’s cousin (and Tim’s son) Patrick and recent Olympic gold medalist Jessie Diggins.

As a third-generation standard-bearer for the Caldwell legacy, Sophie claims she felt no pressure to live up to the family name. (“I took the pressure off because I wasn’t a very good athlete,” jokes Sverre.) But there were decided advantages to being a Caldwell: Sophie could tap into a deep reservoir of wisdom and experience.

Thanks in part to John and Sverre, the national team has advanced by light years since the early 1950s. Both Sophie and Simi have been most successful as skate skiers in sprinting events. Sprinting wasn’t added to the roster of Olympic sports until 2002, and skating technique was just beginning to evolve in the early 1980s, when Tim was nearing the end of his competitive career. What Sophie and Simi are doing today was unimaginable in John’s time … or even in Tim’s. Sophie is a two-time Olympian who finished third in the 2017–2018 overall World Cup sprint standings; Simi, who grew up in Aspen, is a three-time Olympian who finished ninth in the overall sprint standings the following year.

Sophie and Simi are not alone in sustaining the family legacy. Sverre’s son Austin has followed his father into the collegiate coaching ranks. Patrick is now retired from the national team, but cousin Zach, proprietor of Caldwell Sports in Putney, is considered one of the best—if not the best—cross-country ski tech in the country. And when Sophie and Simi talk abstractly about having a family in the future, perhaps a fourth generation of Caldwells is preparing, prenatally, to carry the banner farther into the future.

They are, indeed, a once-and-future force of nature.  

From Skiing History, Sept/Oct 2020

Above: Dartmouth coach Dodge in the finish area at the Birds of Prey World Cup giant slalom event at Beaver Creek, Colorado in 2017. Edith Thys Morgan photo.

A former World Cup and pro racer, Dartmouth’s men’s alpine coach has led the return to relevance of U.S. college racing. 

Although few ski racers have been able to take to the slopes this summer, the racing community has been hotly debating the relationship between NCAA skiing and U.S. Ski and Snowboard in athlete development. It’s a long-running argument. At its heart is the question of how elite racers can—or cannot—use collegiate competition in their path to the World Cup.
For more than 30 years, Dartmouth College alpine coach Peter Dodge has been leading that conversation.

Every December, at the Birds of Prey World Cup giant slalom in Beaver Creek, Colorado, the finish area is awash in a sea of green parkas, emblazoned with the iconic Dartmouth ski team snowflake. Dodge is always there, surrounded by student athletes cheering on fellow and former Dartmouth classmates. This past year, they were rooting for Tommy Ford, the eventual winner, and also for 2018 graduate Brian McLaughlin and current student George Steffey, competing in his first-ever World Cup event.

Now entering his 14th year on the U.S. Ski Team, Ford has attended Dartmouth as many national team athletes have—by patching terms together opportunistically while rehabbing from injuries and during off-season breaks. Like Steffey, Ford never raced for Dartmouth on the NCAA circuit. By contrast, McLaughlin, the 2018 NCAA giant slalom champion, is the latest in a trend of promising American skiers who attended college full-time while racing on the NCAA circuit. He emerged with the skills, maturity and ranking to make the jump to the World Cup.

One man who’s been instrumental in creating an environment where such success can happen—especially for American athletes—is Dodge, who’s coached the Dartmouth men’s alpine team since 1990. Looking at his own path in ski racing helps to explain his motivation.

RURAL VERMONT ROOTS

Dodge and his older brother Dave grew up in St. Johnsbury, in the heart of Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. As he remembers it, “every little town had a rope tow.”  Their father, Dave “Duffy” Dodge, an interstate highway builder who had raced for the University of Vermont, taught the boys how to ski under the lights on the rope tows of the Lyndon Outing Club. “Skiing” also included cross-country touring and jumping. On weekdays after school the boys would climb the hill behind the Murphy family’s hotel. They hauled a few saplings along and used them as slalom gates.  On weekends, they’d go to the “big mountain” at Burke.

Racing in that corner of northern Vermont was a down-to-earth affair. On the way to a competition in tonier Stowe, the younger Dodge remembers mentioning to his Dad that the Stowe kids were “a bit stuck up.” Duffy gave his son some no-nonsense advice: “Beat them and they’ll be your friends.” Dodge did just that, and fondly remembers a mass snowball fight that same afternoon with his new buddies. Soon Dodge’s skiing skills would take him well beyond the Kingdom.

Dodge worked his way up the skiing ranks, attending regional camps and national competitions while attending public high school at St. Johnsbury Academy. Meanwhile, the Murphys helped to entice Warren Witherell to come to Vermont, where he started Burke Mountain Academy in 1970. At Burke, coaches Witherell and Chris Jones — as well as Eastern Regional coach George Ostler — helped Dodge to progress. By the time he graduated from high school in 1973, he was on the National Development Team.

HITTING THE ROAD

After one gap year, Dodge started Dartmouth in the fall of 1974. He took the winter off, won the 1975 Can-Am title, and spent the next year on the U.S. Ski Team before being demoted to the C Team. After a lackluster season racing in Europe, Dodge was dropped from the team and returned to Dartmouth in the fall of 1976. Following his fall term, he returned to form, winning the early season races in December 1976. Dodge was then offered and declined a spot on the D Team, with far less accomplished athletes.

That was when he had his first epiphany. “I was sitting in the parking lot of my brother’s fraternity during Christmas break, and it was about 60 degrees. I remember thinking ‘I know I can ski better than this.’” He decided right then to go to Europe on his own.

Dodge recruited Bill Doble as his ski tech and Swiss native Konrad “Butch” Rickenbach — then a student at Burke Mountain Academy — as his coach. Finally, he talked his parents into buying a Peugeot for European delivery so they could get around. After a month together, and strong results, the trio broke up and Dodge joined a Europa Cup tour (funded by the Europa Cup) through Czechoslovakia and Poland. The entire tour, with racers from 15 nations, literally piled into a Russian airplane in Zurich, and then traveled around by bus, with ski bags in the aisle. “It was super fun,” recalls Dodge. His results earned him a spot on the U.S. B Team, and he competed in World Cup races the following season.

Despite finishing 1979 with two top-15 World Cup finishes in Stratton and Waterville Valley, when coach Bill Marolt tracked him down by phone at his brother’s condo in Burlington that spring, it was to kick him off the team. That was when he had his second epiphany. “It was the same story as before. I put down the phone—click—and said, ‘I just turned pro!’” Dodge recalls with a laugh.

That experience helps Dodge relate to the athletes who come to Dartmouth with unfinished business. “After two stints on the U.S. Ski Team, I knew I could ski better. I just wanted to go out and ski the way I knew how to ski.” As with so many American and international skiing stars in that era, he found the World Pro Tour to be liberating.

“The beauty of the pro tour was there were no politics: You show up and go fast,” he says. Dodge found immediate success, winning Rookie of the Year in 1980. After nine years, he retired in 1989 and went to work for his longtime supporter CB Vaughan at CB Sports. Just as he was looking to return to college to finish his degree, the Dartmouth coaching job came up. Dodge took the position over from Mark Ford, who’d been on that same Europa Cup bus tour that launched his international success. Ford’s son is the aforementioned Tommy, currently America’s top giant slalom skier.

COLLEGE RACING’S COMEBACK

At Dartmouth, Dodge inherited a big piece of skiing history and built on the tradition. He has presided over an era that saw NCAA racing move from a step-down program for elite junior racers, to a highly competitive arena where top athletes toggle between the World Cup and the carnival circuit, and often continue their athletic careers after graduation. In many respects, it has returned college racing to its roots and relevance.

“Ski racing in the U.S. was originally born out of college outing clubs,” explains Dodge. Chief among them was the Dartmouth Outing Club, which organized the first Winter Carnival in 1911. Until Bob Beattie organized a U.S. Ski Team in the 1960s, Olympic teams were chosen from the college rosters.  As the U.S. Ski Team grew, college racing became less relevant for development, though some athletes—like Dave Currier, Dodge and Tiger Shaw—were able to work Dartmouth’s flexible D-Plan around their competition schedules.

Shortly after Dodge took over, college coaches in the West, including Richard Rokos at Colorado and George Brooks at the University of New Mexico, took the lead from the World University Games and held some FIS-sanctioned University (FIS UNI) races. Dodge, who was president of the Eastern Intercollegiate Ski Association (EISA), saw the opportunity in that, and eventually Dartmouth hosted the first official EISA FIS UNI race in 1995. “That changed things,” he explains.  In a push to make the tour better, FIS UNI races were phased in and become the norm.

As FIS-level racing legitimized the circuit, and the level of competition rose accordingly, NCAA skiers—from the U.S. and other countries— started moving to their national teams after college. In Dodge’s tenure as coach, skiers who advanced to their national teams, after competing for and graduating from Dartmouth, include: Bill Gaylord (GBR), Patrick Biggs (CAN), Martin Anguita (CHI), Brad Wall (AUS), Tanguy Nef (SUI) and Americans Andy Martin, Roger Brown, Paul McDonald, David Chodounsky, Ace Tarberry, and McLaughlin. Nef, who will graduate with a computer science degree next spring, scored two top 10 World Cup slalom results last season.

By the time Chodounsky, a last-minute recruit, started at Dartmouth in 2004, the team was “stacked,” he recalls.  (Dartmouth men won the NCAA slalom title for five years straight, from 2002 to 2006.) “I was not the top guy, but I knew I was going to a good team,” he says. It was also a tight-knit, hard-working and fun-loving team. Dartmouth’s all-American squad won the NCAA championships in 2007. “Peter never pressured us to finish,” he adds. “He told us you have to go for it if you want to win.” He’d also remind his athletes: “Someone’s got to win today. It might as well be you!”

By Chodounsky’s senior year, he was invited to compete on the Europa Cup with the U.S. Ski Team. As is his policy, Dodge fully encouraged the opportunity for higher-level competition, even though it meant missing two carnivals. Chodounsky graduated in four years with a double major in engineering and earth science and went on to become the top American slalom skier, spending nine years on the U.S. Ski Team and competing in two Olympics.  

THE DARTMOUTH EXPERIENCE

Chodounsky’s success not only made him the poster child for the Dartmouth Experience, but also triggered a shift in perception. College racing, for some athletes, can not only be a path for elite development, but also the preferred path: Four years in a stable, social, intellectually stimulating team structure can be an ideal environment for discovering true potential. “Dartmouth is all about excellence in academics, conduct, standards… having a good experience for athletes,” says Dodge. “Winning is fun, but it’s not all it’s about. We’re preparing them for life.”

That starts by creating a supportive team atmosphere, which is not a mere consequence of a team sport. “We really work on it,” says Dodge, who encourages athletes to help coach each other. “When you coach someone else, you improve your own skiing,” he explains. Dodge, who bristles at the concept of hazing, encourages incoming athletes to be leaders from the start. “I tell them there is no seniority or hierarchy here.  Learn from the seniors, but I don’t expect you to be the last one in line. If you go fast, you’ll start.”

The appealing combo of high-level training and personal development—highlighted most recently by Chodounsky and McLaughlin—has brought Dartmouth an embarrassment of riches, particularly in American ski talent. Again this season, the team will include athletes with multiple years of USST experience. Many have aspirations to continue racing through and after college. In all, Dodge has 12 athletes vying for six spots in each carnival.

Dodge points out that the high level of competition is not unique to Dartmouth, and not unique to men. “Nationally, there’s a lot of college talent. We’re head-to-head with other top teams.”

Athletes like Leif Kristian Nestvold-Haugen, Trevor Philp and Erik Read (all racing for the University of Denver), Jonathan Nordbotten (University of Vermont) and David Ketterer (University of Colorado) have established NCAA legitimacy on the men’s side. And “five past or current NCAA women are scoring on the World Cup,” Dodge says. These include Canadians Laurence St. Germain, Amelia Smart, Ali Nullmeyer and Roni Remme, as well as U.S. racer Paula Moltzan. Meanwhile, U.S. Ski Team members Katie Hensien and Keely Cashman, both World Junior medalists, are competing on the NCAA circuit this season for Denver and Utah, respectively.

If the U.S. has been slower than other nations (especially Norway and Canada) to capitalize on collegiate programs as a development resource, Dodge continues to advocate for ways in which skiers can work towards the national team. “The key is not centralizing,” he says — not defaulting to a system of making selections and choosing stars. That said, coordinating national development with colleges, regions and clubs—so they can all support each other— is particularly important for NCAA college teams, which are not allowed to train together out of season. Dodge has participated in summer projects that bring NCAA athletes from several schools together under the U.S. Ski Team umbrella, and is optimistic about its potential for future collaboration.

Meanwhile, as the NCAA moves to develop rules that allow student-athletes to receive compensation for their “name, image and likeness,” Dodge sees that college skiers—many of whom must buy their own equipment—will see some real benefit. “If ski companies could get some promotional value from college skiers, it would provide incentive for them to provide better and/or less expensive equipment … or even some compensation.”

Along his way, Dodge wondered if he should have tried something else or moved somewhere else— or maybe just gone after a big paycheck as a private coach. But he also realizes that having the opportunity and freedom to build and run a program the way he wants is a good gig. From his base in the Dartmouth Outing Club, his influence on American skiing has been far-reaching and profound. It’s also been rewarding.

“I get to work with great kids and great families, and it keeps you young,” he says. He’s close to his son Jensen, who will play hockey this year for the Morrisville State College Mustangs, and lives next to his dad, Duffy, who quit skiing at age 90. He gets to see plenty of friends who went to New York and made their millions. “When they say they want to move back to Hanover, I say, ‘I’ve got you beat!”  

Edith Thys Morgan spent eight years as a member of the U.S. Ski Team, competed in two Olympics (1988, 1992) and three FIS Alpine World Championships (1987, 1989 and 1991), and was ranked among the top ten downhill and Super G skiers in the world. She retired from racing in 1993. She’s now a writer, blogger, frequent Skiing History contributor, and ski-racing mom. She lives in Hanover, New Hampshire with her family. Learn more at racerex.com. An earlier version of this article first appeared on skiracing.com.