Where are they now?

The Vail-based entrepreneur revisits his World Cup and pro racing careers. 

World Cup and pro ski racer Mark Taché has known Marco Tonazzi for 44 years. Nothing surprises him about the Italian’s achievements. “Nothing at all,” says Taché.

(Photo above: Tonazzi winning the 1985 Italian slalom championship)

Not that Tonazzi runs six businesses in Colorado and Italy with neither a business nor college degree. Not that Tonazzi was the 1990 World Pro Ski Tour Rookie of the Year without ever having made an Olympic appearance. Not that Tonazzi, a slalom specialist, made a World Cup podium in giant slalom—at Adelboden, Switzerland, the crown jewel of GS racing—marking the first one-two finish for the Italian men’s team in 10 years. Not that Tonazzi, who wasn’t even a downhiller, finished the 24 Hours of Aspen race (alone) after 11 knee surgeries.

Surprising or not, Tonazzi’s life has taken an incredible trajectory through three decades of pro and Italian ski racing history, overlapping with legends Gustavo Thöni, Alberto Tomba and more.

The story begins in Udine, a city of 100,000 in the northeast corner of Italy. Tonazzi was a city boy, but his family had a cabin in Valbruna, not far from the renowned ski club at Monte Lussari in the Julian Alps, near the Austrian and Slovenian borders. Back then, school came first, so after class Tonazzi would catch a ride from Udine to Lussari and ski for 90 minutes before the lifts closed.

At age 9, he entered—and won—his very first race, on a plastic surface in Tarvisio. “The [ski] wax was diesel fuel, mixed with oil,” he says. “There was a little box with two rollers. You would roll your skis over the rollers to get them to run faster on plastic.”

In 1977, Tonazzi competed in the Italian junior championships, where he was the youngest by three years in his age group. He recalls, “I wasn’t a favorite. I didn’t have a uniform. I had a hand-knitted sweater by my grandmother. My brother was my coach.” Yet win he did, and at age 18, Tonazzi made Italy’s A team at the tail end of the Italian racers’ Valanga Azzurra (“Blue Avalanche”) heyday, becoming a teammate of Thöni and Piero Gros. “They were my idols,” he says. Eventually Thöni became his coach. “But I was a rebel,” adds Tonazzi. “They called me ‘Ragazzo Hippie,’ Hippie Boy, because I had long hair and the Sony Walkman was just invented so I would ski listening to music. It was wild! An athlete on the national team listening to the Beatles while training! I got fined by the federation for having the Walkman always on my head.” Listening to the Beatles, he claims, is how he learned to speak English.

Tonazzi made his World Cup debut in 1980, at age 19, with less than stellar results. “I sucked really bad in ’83, ’84,” he says. So he was put on the B team, and one day in Bulgaria, he was chasing a teammate between trees and through powder. The teammate stopped abruptly, Tonazzi caught him. “I was all happy and cheering, then I flew off an edge and fell about 25 to 30 feet from the top of a skier’s underpass,” he relates.

Had he not suffered a concussion and brain hematoma, says Tonazzi, “I would have been cut, I was doing so poorly. But because I was injured, they gave me another chance.” On the B team, he eventually won the 1985 Italian national championships and 1985 World University Games, both in slalom.

“I came back to the World Cup, and I don’t know how the secret of giant slalom revealed itself to me, but somehow I got it,” Tonazzi says. In December 1985, he finished eighth in Alta Badia, Italy, from the back of the pack. The next month, he placed second at Adelboden—the Kitzbühel of GS courses—wearing bib No. 40, behind Italian teammate Richard Pramotton. It was Tonazzi’s 25th birthday and time to cash in on a promise. “My dad declared that he would stop smoking if I ever made the top three,” he says. “He thought he was safe,” but his son called him on it in a TV interview.

On the World Cup, 1986 turned out to be Tonazzi’s best year. It also marked the arrival of a new roommate, Tomba. “I was kind of the old wise guy at 25, so they thought I’d keep him in check,” Tonazzi says. Tomba was a city boy, too, from Bologna, and when Tonazzi drove west to camps or races, Tomba’s father would drop off his son to carpool.

“The thing about Tomba,” Tonazzi says, “he didn’t change because of his success. His attitude, mannerisms, ideas, behavior remained the same—to his credit. That was the true Alberto from age 16—a crazy, talented, explosive athlete who thought he was the best in the world before he became the best in the world. I think that’s what made him the best. He really believed he was, knew he was and just went down that path.”

Tonazzi competed on the World Cup through 1989, but he was eager to get away from the confinement and politics of the national team. “I always thought the pro tour was a place where you make your choices,” he says. “I was dreaming of that. I was also dreaming of driving across America in a big car with the radio on. I wanted to do that so badly that when the team came back, I was still ranked 24th in the world in slalom, but I said, ‘I’m done.’ I did it on my terms, which was important to me.”

In his first season as a pro, he drove around the U.S. with two 1984 Olympians, Slovenian Tomaz Cerkovnik and Swede Gunnar Neuriesser, and competed head-to-head against Austrian powerhouses Bernhard Knauss, Mathias Berthold and Roland Pfeifer. Tonazzi loved it. “Someone said they would have to stop the tour to make Marco stop,” he recalls.

But that’s not how it ended. In 1997, says Tonazzi, “I was done. My knees were really not healthy. I was almost 37, super-old.”

He also wanted to do one more thing: the 24 Hours of Aspen race. “To me, it was as close as I could get in skiing to a survival situation,” he explains. “Ski racing is intense, but what’s so tragic about one minute, 20 seconds? There’s no survival. I was missing this idea of fighting with myself through pain, being tired and more than tired. That was the only thing I knew in ski racing that existed.”

To enter, Tonazzi had to be part of a two-person team from the same nation, so he recruited countryman Josef Polig, the 1992 Alpine Combined Olympic gold medalist. Tonazzi was recovering from knee surgery and now says he had “no clue” how to train for 80 runs down Aspen Mountain—a quarter-million vertical feet—at downhill speeds.

Every team had a support crew. Tonazzi’s included Taché, who had never done the event himself despite being a local. “It was a horrific event,” says Taché. “I mean, it’s gnarly. Your partner and you just tuck in behind each other and literally go straight down from the top to the bottom. The lighting wasn’t very good. There’d be totally dark spots. And it’s early season, so all the terrain was more pronounced.”

After about five hours, Tonazzi was flagging so Polig took the lead. Then at around 1 a.m. Polig said, “I’m done. I’m scared, I can’t hold on anymore.”

Responded Tonazzi, “One more. Stay behind me. We won’t push.” At the bottom, they got on the gondola and Polig reiterated, “Marco, I can’t do it.”

“One more,” Tonazzi said,

At the top of the gondola, the competitors ran and jumped into the skis awaiting them, the way they started each lap. “I run out, look at the skis next to me and nobody’s there,” Tonazzi says now. “I turn around and see Joe in the gondola riding back down. So that’s it. I was disqualified.” He skied down alone.

“At the bottom, I asked, ‘What do I do?’” Tonazzi says. “Someone said, ‘Keep going. You won’t be ranked, but who cares?’”

The event raised money for charities, one of which supported children with terminal illnesses. Eventually, after about 15 hours of skiing, Tonazzi stumbled again into the gondola. This time, three kids—beneficiaries of the fundraising who were “paired” with the Italian team during the race—peered into his car and yelled, “Marco! Don’t stop!”

The moment is as vivid and raw as it was 25 years ago. “The doors closed to those three kids that are probably long gone now,” he recalls. “So I skied through the night by myself and finished at noon the next day. It was a great memory. It gave me even more than I expected. I did everything I wanted to do in skiing.”

Tonazzi returned to Vail, where he was living with Amy Wheeler, a ski model known for action shoots for films and magazines. In 1999, they married and now have two daughters: Isabella, 20, a freshman at Montana State University, and Liliana, 17, who plays volleyball in high school. Neither one ski races.

These days, Tonazzi runs six businesses. In Colorado, he owns the Minturn Inn (a bed and breakfast between Vail and Beaver Creek); the Hotel Minturn a few blocks away; Mangiare, an Italian food market farther down the road; and the Valbruna clothing store in Vail. He also co-owns the Valbruna Inn in Italy and runs Valbruna Travel, which enables him to guide at least one summer and one winter trip to his hometown. More recently, he bought half of Astis, a company that makes distinctive leather ski mittens featuring beaded patterns and fringe.

Thanks to Tonazzi’s willingness to empower his staff and delegate work, all of the businesses appear to be thriving. “I try to [hire] people who are better than I am at what they do and give them room to do what they like, to the best of their ability,” he says. “I tell a lot of stories and sometimes they look at me like I’m a lunatic, but I think if they know who I am—my values, morals and ethics—I don’t need to run the business myself. They will make the decisions and run the business like I would, no matter where I am.”

As for why he has so many businesses, the answer is in his nature. “Even while racing, I was always easily distracted by other passions,” Tonazzi explains. “When there’s something I like, I cannot say no. It’s like a missed opportunity. So I kind of take on too much and juggle and try not to drop anything.” 

New York-based sportswriter Aimee Berg wrote about freestyle champ Kari Traa in the September-October, 2021 issue.

Photos courtesy Marco Tonazzi.

Retired after 105 World Cup downhill starts, he launched "American Downhiller" -- a movement and a movie.

The award-winning 2020 film American Downhiller chronicles the U.S. men’s downhill ski team, from their earliest days as laughingstocks in the eyes of their European competitors to Bill Johnson’s breakout gold medal and the success that followed. Produced by Ski Racing Media, the movie has a long backstory, one that starts with Marco Sullivan.

In the Beginning

Born in 1980, Sullivan grew up in the Tahoe City Trailer Park, fondly called “Sin City” or “Little India” by its residents. Located on the south bank of the Truckee River, just 200 yards from Lake Tahoe’s outlet dam, the park offered cheap rent in an idyllic setting. World-class climbers and skiers settled there, in trailers they expanded using recycled construction material from the era’s building boom. People didn’t bother to lock their doors; kids rode bikes and tossed footballs in the streets.

Photo above: Marco Sullivan celebrates his final World Cup race at Kvitfjell, Norway, in 2016.

Sullivan and his older sister, Chelsea, had the run of the place, loosely supervised by the neighbors, including their uncle, Mark “Sully” Sullivan, and his girlfriend, Debbie. Marco’s dad, Paul, operated heavy equipment for Perata Excavation, and mom Rena worked in human resources at Squaw Valley (now Palisades Tahoe), and waited tables in the evenings. The ski area job netted the family season passes.

Growing up, Paul and Mark had raced for the Lake Tahoe Ski Club. Mark would go on to coach at Squaw, ultimately managing the Squaw Valley Ski Team. “He took me to the World Cup in Heavenly when I was five, and I got a picture with Stenmark and Zurbriggen,” Marco recalls. “After that I was hooked.”

The Mighty Mites

Sullivan joined Squaw’s Mighty Mites, who progress from watching routes through the resort’s famed chutes and cliffs to pushing each other down and over them, bell to bell, day after day. Speed is the inevitable consequence, in the tradition of Jimmie Heuga and the Poulsen and McKinney kids. Sully famously attributed the perpetual flow of U.S. Ski Team stars to the “real head coach,” the peak called KT-22. According to Sully, repeatedly lapping KT’s 2,000 feet of continuous vertical rock and roll was all a kid needed to succeed.

Marco Sullivan embodied that. “Coming up through the ranks, I never felt like it was weird to want to be on the U.S. Ski Team or in the Olympics,” he recalls. “There were so many people around who had done it.” Watching over them all was his uncle, who made sure the Sullivan kids had everything from hand-me-down equipment to bunk space at training camps. “Ironically, Sully was never my actual on-hill coach, and I don’t remember receiving a lot of technical coaching from him,” says Sullivan of his uncle. “But he always ensured that I had the opportunities that were necessary.” 

The term “coach” insufficiently captures what Sully did. He inspired, collaborated with, facilitated, entertained, bolstered and, mostly importantly, believed in the people around him. When he and fellow Far West coach Noel Dufty co-hosted an annual camp in New Zealand, an extraordinary run of World Cup speed skiers from the Western Region ensued.

Sully and Dufty championed a community approach to ski racing. “The whole idea was of working together and not worrying about who owns it,” says Dufty. “We took the good from all kids being together.” Sullivan took full advantage of the opportunities. Most of his pack attended North Tahoe High School, where they would start skiing at lunchtime and then take their afternoon classes as independent study.

The next piece fell in place when Trevor Wagner, fresh out of Sierra Nevada College (now University), joined Squaw’s coaching staff. Instead of logging gates and timed runs, the kids spent their competitive juices on KT. “Skiing faster than super G speed all the time, you get so comfortable with the speed that it feels normal,” says Wagner. “You start to look farther down the hill, your vision is longer, and everything slows down.”

Reacting to terrain also develops the elusive “touch” that no coach can teach. And for the Tahoe skiers, that translated into results. “When we hit FIS age, it was natural to be fast,” says Sullivan. “I never felt like there was a ton of pressure.”

The U.S. Ski Team and Beyond

In 1999, at age 18, Sullivan won the Junior National Championship Downhill at Snowbasin and was named to the U.S. Ski Team. During his first year on the team, he won a bronze medal in slalom at the 2000 World Junior Alpine Skiing Championships. The next day, he blew out his knee in the GS, which ended up forcing Sullivan to make a crucial career pivot.

“It hurt too much to come back skiing tech, so I gravitated to speed,” he explains. In December 2001 he started racing on the World Cup and made his Olympic debut two months later, at the Winter Games in Salt Lake City. He finished ninth in the downhill, the best finish for the U.S. team in that race. The following season, Sullivan won the U.S. Super G title—on his home turf at Squaw—and went on to compete in the 2006, 2010 and 2014 Olympics, and the 2003, 2007, 2009 and 2013 FIS Alpine World Ski Championships.

On the World Cup circuit, Sullivan established himself as an elite glider—comfortable at high speeds and calm in bumpy conditions. He missed two seasons, 2005 and 2011, due to injuries, but in 2007, he earned his first podium at the Lake Louise downhill. Later that season, he scored a downhill victory at Chamonix and finished fourth overall in the World Cup downhill standings.

Favorite Son

If Sullivan’s devoted fan base had a clubhouse, it would be Squaw’s Le Chamois. After Sullivan’s win in Chamonix, the “Chammy” hosted an epic welcome home celebration. Of all the legendary Squaw skiers, Sullivan may be the most beloved. During the heart of his career, 50-plus fans—led by his sister—convened for an annual pilgrimage to Beaver Creek for the Birds of Prey World Cup, packing the stands in their green “Marco Rocks” hats and “Marco for Mayor” buttons. They love Sullivan the athlete, but even more so the person; fun, humble, friendly and always giving back more than he receives.

Eddie Mozen started the Squaw Valley Masters Scholarship, which funded Sullivan for five years as a junior racer. Sponsored athletes are asked to give back to the skiing community. “Marco was the poster child,” says Mozen, who ticks off all the ways the racer gave back to the program, even for years beyond his sponsorship. “He ‘got it’ from day one.”

The Sully Legacy

Even as Sullivan found international success, his uncle, Sully, kept him grounded. “He just kept racing really simple,” says Sullivan. “He really believed in doing a few fundamentals correctly, not overanalyzing and always bringing humor to it.” Sully also made everyone—not just the stars—feel like a part of the team. “He did it in a way that was really subtle,” adds his nephew. “Nobody really realized what he was doing until he was gone.”

Sully passed away from cancer in 2014, at age 63.

American Downhiller

Sully’s influence lived on, specifically in Marco’s natural inclination to lift others up to enjoy the ride. In 2010, around the time when U.S. athletes first created their own websites, he passed on using marcosullivan.com, choosing instead AmericanDownhiller.com, a brand intended to be larger than himself. His teammates collectively adopted the term “American Downhiller,” celebrating their rogue spirit in the European-dominated sport.

The name evokes the go-for-broke culture embraced by U.S. speed skiers, the camaraderie built around a shared love of speed, courage in the face of danger, persistence in the face of adversity and brashness in the face of doubt. The crew built on longstanding traditions and added new ones, like an iconic beat-up jeans vest for the fastest American Downhiller of the week. Encouraged by his future wife, Canada’s World Cup slalom specialist Anna Goodman, Sullivan trademarked the term.

Sullivan retired in 2016, donning the ceremonial American Downhiller jean vest at the finish of his final World Cup race and getting doused in Champagne by teammates and competitors alike. He ran his last race at the U.S. Alpine National Championships in Sun Valley, dressed in lederhosen.

Sullivan ultimately earned three national titles, four World Cup podiums and one World Cup victory, and he quietly set the U.S. record for the most World Cup downhill starts, at 105. That’s one more than Bode Miller has. Significantly, Sullivan walked away healthy and still loving the sport, its own accomplishment.

Meanwhile, Anna had retired from World Cup racing in 2012 and pursued a degree in economics and conflict resolution at Westminster College in Salt Lake City while also racing for its ski team. In 2016, she and Sullivan settled back in Tahoe.

Soon after, Sullivan thought it would be cool to run an American Downhiller training camp with his buddies. The program launched in the spring of 2017. Helmet company POC jumped on board, creating American Downhiller gear and funding a series of short webisodes for Ski Racing. Those episodes evolved into the American Downhiller movie, showcasing the full cast of unsung heroes behind the hard-won successes.

The movie tapped into a past that had been largely ignored by the non-racing ski culture. “For these guys, being a downhiller was a footnote and all of a sudden it got brought back out,” says Sullivan. For downhillers to unite under one banner, which included welcoming women downhillers into the club and treating them with equal respect, took someone with Sullivan’s cred and humble demeanor.

The American Downhiller Camp

Just as the movie connected the athletes from past to present, the American Downhiller camps (spring in Mammoth, fall in Saas Fee) built a bridge between World Cup athletes and the kids. The star-studded coaching staff includes Alice McKennis Duran, Leanne Smith, Stacey Cook, Laurenne Ross, Daron Rahlves, AJ Kitt, Bryce Bennett and Steve Nyman. Lessons go beyond technique, including mental skills, which one typically learns only from experience. Says Sullivan, “A lot of what we teach is getting your mind in that capacity of wanting to go fast. Then fear goes away.”

Ultimately, he sees American Downhiller as a national platform from which to pass along a wealth of speed experience to successive generations of skiers. Anna’s business acumen and attention to detail complement her husband’s ambitious vision. In addition to the camps, weekend speed clinics take place at ski clubs across the country. “You can do a lot with a jump, a wave track and some glide turns,” says Sullivan. “You can work on the skills no matter where you happen to be.”

Last season Anna assumed the role of head FIS coach at Palisades Tahoe, while Sullivan took on the U-16 kids. He also has a side business making concrete countertops and furniture. One of his first commissions? The upstairs bar at Le Chamois.

In the summer, when they are not working at ski camps, the couple enjoys all that Tahoe offers, especially mountain biking. Before assuming year-round coaching duties, Anna had competed on cycling’s Enduro World Series tour. Now, when they get a break from camps, the pair load up the travel trailer for weekend trips. At the Lake Tahoe Ski Club annual fundraiser, Sullivan sets up tables while rallying support for the Sully Scholarship that he and his sister started. Every year, the scholarship goes to “an athlete who works hard, is a good teammate and is driven to achieve their goals in the sport of skiing.” Which is to say, an athlete in the Sullivan mold.

To those who suspect that speed events are dying at American ski resorts, Sullivan grins: “It’s not going anywhere. It’s always going to be there.” And it’s always going to be cool. 

Regular contributor Edith Thys Morgan spent nine years on the U.S. Ski Team, competing in three World Championships and two Olympics. She last wrote about “The Skiing Cochrans” in the May–June 2021 issue of Skiing History.

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.

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.” 

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...