Where are they now?

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

By Peter Oliver

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Skiing History, Sept/Oct 2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

RURAL VERMONT ROOTS

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

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

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

HITTING THE ROAD

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

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

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

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

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

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

COLLEGE RACING’S COMEBACK

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE DARTMOUTH EXPERIENCE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Since the 1960s, this Austrian instructor has been an influential voice in ski technique and mountain management … and for the past few decades, a hard-working innkeeper in Vermont. By Edith Thys Morgan

Photo above: Dixi Nohl in March 2020 outside of The Charleston House, the Vermont inn that he and wife Willa have run for 21 years.

On a typical day in Woodstock, Vermont, Dixi Nohl is up at 7 a.m. to set up breakfast, which his wife of 50 years, Willa, cooks for guests at the Charleston House. The two have run this bed-and-breakfast at the edge of town for 21 years, and welcome guests from all over the world who come to experience quintessential Vermont. They fuel up on Willa’s feast, especially German pancakes with sautéed peaches, which she admits is “not health food,” and, as Dixi adds with a laugh and a decidedly German accent, “no German has ever recognized it.”

Dixi and Willa have lived in Vermont since 1967, and in Woodstock since 1997. They consider themselves proud Vermonters, though both hail from beyond its borders. Willa grew up in Canada, while Dixi was part of the Austrian invasion that shaped ski technique and the ski industry in America.

Dieter “Dixi” Nohl grew up in St. Anton, Austria, where, in the 1950s, his parents Fritz and Maria built the Hotel Montjola above the heart of the village. At the time, Fritz was running the ski school in Zurs over the Arlberg Pass. They slowly built up the hotel and eventually acquired the neighbor’s house, making the Montjola—and Maria’s famous fondues—a destination in St. Anton.

As a ski racer, Nohl’s contemporaries included Karl Schranz, Egon Zimmermann and Pepi Stiegler. After a rash of injuries—five broken legs, including two in the same season—he took a break and delved into the three-year process of getting his Austrian ski instructor’s certification. In 1960, at age 20, Nohl accepted Sepp Ruschp’s invitation to come to Stowe and join the ski school. Nohl was a welcome addition to Stowe’s ski school and social set, setting slalom courses for Ted Kennedy and teaching young Cindy Watson (daughter of IBM’s Tom Watson) to ski. He was featured in September 1960 LOOK magazine as Stowe’s “Romeo on Skis.”

For the next four years, Nohl followed an annual migration pattern, teaching in Stowe in the winter and in Portillo in the summer. Nohl fondly remembers Portillo’s convivial ambiance, with all of the guests together in one hotel, gathering for dinner. In the fall, Nohl returned to Austria and taught English to aspiring ski instructors as part of their certification under Professor Stefan Kruckenhauser, the “Ski Pabst” (Pope of Skiing).

Kruckenhauser had filmed Nohl and his fellow ski racers for his book Wedeln: the New Austrian Skiing Technique. In 1969, Bob Ottum of Sports Illustrated described wedeln as: “an entire new style of skiing, a legs-together, wriggly, snakelike way of going down the hill, using hip movement and heel thrust from the waist down…[that] swept the world like no other form of skiing before or since.” Kruckenhauser continued to film Nohl, a star student, for technical demonstrations on his trips home to Europe.

When Gore Mountain opened in 1964 in New York, Nohl was hired to start its ski school. In 1967 he returned to Vermont to take over the ski school at Madonna (Smugglers’ Notch), where he also started the Fondue Haus. During that time Nohl represented Madonna at pre-season ski shows in major northeastern cities. At the show in Montreal, he met Willa, who was manning a bus tour booth as a favor for her friend. They married the following May. In 1972 they moved on to Mad River Glen, where Dixi stayed for 12 winters, running the ski school and heading the resort’s year-round marketing program.

Around this time, Kruckenhauser quite literally changed his stance on ski instruction, famously showing up in Aspen at Interski in 1968, armed with film and young beginner skiers to promote his new technique. Advances in ski material and design allowed for shorter, more maneuverable skis that accommodated a wider stance. This was an easier and quicker way for beginners to learn than the feet-together wedeln, and Nohl, described in SKI as “Kruckenhauser’s alter ego,” helped to spread this new skiing gospel. “It made sense,” says Nohl. “As the skis got shorter and shorter, the stance got wider and wider.”

Kruckenhauser was happy to use fellow Austrians to export his ideas and get newcomers skiing well quickly. Nohl was an early adopter of video review with his ski students at Mad River. He took an active role in writing and demonstrating pointers in SKI and was also an examiner for PSIA.

A constant in SKI magazine throughout the mid- to late-1960s, Nohl brought his meticulous understanding of technique to readers though a treatise on the respective evolutions of the Austrian and French ski techniques, as well as a comprehensive comparison of the American, New Austrian (wide-stance) and GLM teaching methods. His concise one-page pointers included things like the “Tired Skier Carry,” for getting kids off the slopes, the thrust in slush for conserving energy, and no less than six ways to ski a catwalk.

Each spring, SKI organized a photo shoot starring Nohl. “Because of his training under Kruckenhauser, along with his thin, tall physique, he was a superb technique demonstrator,” explained John Fry, then editor of SKI. “We’d get all these pointers sent in by instructors, in longhand. Sometimes they included pictures, sometimes not,” he says. They shot the whole season’s pointers in a day or two. Sequence shots of Nohl were then converted to line art by artist Bob Bugg.

While at Mad River, Dixi and Willa sent their older son, Jay, to Green Mountain Valley School to pursue ski racing. When the family moved to Burke in 1984, and Dixi took the role of general manager, Jay and his younger brother Cory attended Burke Mountain Academy. Jay went on to ski for Dartmouth College, and Cory raced for Williams. Nohl managed Burke for 13 years (1984–1997), coming in after the development of the lower mountain and lasting through five owners and multiple bankruptcies. Finn Gunderson, who was headmaster at Burke Mountain Academy during some of that time, remembers negotiating for snowmaking and hill space with Dixi, who was also dealing with state regulators, managing the resort and fending off creditors. “He was always proud of the school and supportive,” says Gunderson.

When Burke sold again, in 1997, Nohl moved on to Woodstock. He had visited the Charleston House one winter and the owners mentioned wanting to sell. With his training in the hotel business, Dixi and Willa jumped in. Twenty-one years later the inn is their work and their social life, and they never shut down between seasons. Willa gets out for volunteer work, and to stage the occasional political rally or fundraiser, while Dixi skis at Killington regularly. The rhythm of inn life keeps them busy every day until afternoon.

“We love Vermont,” says Willa, who can’t pick a favorite of all the places they’ve lived along the way—Jeffersonville, Warren, Burke and Woodstock. “It is home for us. We are lucky to feel that way.” 

Edith Thys Morgan is a ski-racer mom, blogger and author, and former World Cup and Olympic alpine racer (racerex.com).

The high-flying, and at times bumpy, journey of freeskiing’s busiest athlete. By Edith Thys Morgan

Jeremy Bloom is a planner…to a point. That point typically comes just when he launches towards his next big goal in life. At age 37, he’s already achieved more goals than most would dare envision accomplishing in a lifetime of hard work. At age ten Bloom set a goal to ski in the Olympics and play football in the National Football League. He did both, becoming a two-time Olympian (2002, 2006) in freestyle mogul skiing, then being drafted by the Philadelphia Eagles. He is the only athlete to ski in the Olympics and also be drafted into the NFL. And that was just a start.

 Along the way he became a three-time mogul World Champion, fashion model, and TV personality. While in the NFL, he worried about being productive after sports, and took advantage of an NFL partnership program to study entrepreneurship at the Wharton School of Business. After retiring from football in 2008, and forming a successful nonprofit to give back to society, he started Integrate, a marketing software company in 2010. As Integrate continues to grow, Bloom explains how he planned its success. “We like to call it jumping out of an airplane and assembling the parachute on the way down,” Bloom laughs. “I love that part of it.” 

Indeed, the uncertainty that goes along with bold ambition is one of the many sports parallels Bloom sees in business. “In some ways it is very similar to being an athlete. You set a really big dream and vision and have a little bit of an idea of how to get there. But everybody’s journey is different. You have to take it one day at a time.” ... 

Jeremy Bloom is a three-time World Champion, two-timeOlympic competitor and the only Olympic skier who also played in the National Football League. 

By Edith Thys Morgan

Jeremy Bloom is a planner…to a point. That point typically comes just when he launches towards his next big goal in life. At age 37, he’s already achieved more goals than most would dare envision accomplishing in a lifetime of hard work. At age ten Bloom set a goal to ski in the Olympics and play football in the National Football League. He did both, becoming a two-time Olympian (2002, 2006) in freestyle mogul skiing, then being drafted by the Philadelphia Eagles. He is the only athlete to ski in the Olympics and also be drafted into the NFL. And that was just a start.

Along the way he became a three-time mogul World Champion, fashion model, and TV personality. While in the NFL, he worried about being productive after sports, and took advantage of an NFL partnership program to study entrepreneurship at the Wharton School of Business. After retiring from football in 2008, and forming a successful nonprofit to give back to society, he started Integrate, a marketing software company in 2010. As Integrate continues to grow, Bloom explains how he planned its success. “We like to call it jumping out of an airplane and assembling the parachute on the way down,” Bloom laughs. “I love that part of it.”

Indeed, the uncertainty that goes along with bold ambition is one of the many sports parallels Bloom sees in business. “In some ways it is very similar to being an athlete. You set a really big dream and vision and have a little bit of an idea of how to get there. But everybody’s journey is different. You have to take it one day at a time.” 

As golden as Bloom’s career has been, it has not been easy. His name has been in the news recently with California passing the Fair Pay to Play Act in September 2019, which permits college athletes in the state to hire agents and be paid endorsement money, essentially doing nothing less than rewiring amateur college athletics. Other states are sure to follow California, eventually leading to racers on elite college ski teams, for instance, being able to accept big-dollar endorsements from sponsors.

Bloom helped get this tectonic shift in college athletics moving 15 years ago when he sued the NCAA to allow him to accept skiing endorsements—which totaled as much as six figures—while also playing college football at the University of Colorado (CU) in Boulder. After two years, he lost his legal battle, and quit college football to prepare full time for skiing in the Olympics.

He dominated the sport in 2005, and entered the 2006 Games as the favorite, but did not medal. From there, he went directly into the NFL, an acronym he defines as “Not For Long,” and spent much of the next three years sidelined by injury.  

These experiences were fodder for Bloom’s book Fueled by Failure (Entrepreneur Press, 2015), which touches on his life’s philosophy, including: his 48-hour rule for steeping in and obsessing on failure before moving on; the Five Pillars of success in his company (performance, entrepreneurship, responsibility, creativity and humility); and positive reminders like “Don’t let the good days go to your head or the bad days go to your heart.” Other than his book’s title, little about Bloom’s life reads like failure. 

GROWING UP

Jeremy Bloom was born in Fort Collins, Colorado, and grew up in nearby Loveland (the town, not the ski area), the youngest of three in a skiing family. While skiing with their older children, his parents, Larry and Char, often left Jeremy with his grandfather, Jerry, who outfitted him with a superhero cape and baited him down the slopes with mini Snickers and an abiding faith in his abilities.

Larry, an avid sports fan, tossed the football with Jeremy in the afternoons, and indoors at night. “We spent countless hours watching the Broncos, and during the Olympics that’s the only thing that was on our TV,” recalls Bloom. When watching the 1992 Olympics, young Jeremy told his parents he wanted to ski in the Olympics and play in the NFL. Larry and Char shared what Bloom describes as “a healthy disregard for the impossible,” and encouraged him to pursue both paths. 

While competing for Team Breck he became the youngest athlete on the U.S. Ski Team at age 15, while also becoming a high school track and football star. His ski coach from age 11, Scott Rawles, describes the quick-footed Bloom as “the best trained athlete out there,” thanks to his track and football success. Additionally, “he had the mental attitude over everyone,” says Rawles.

Longtime U.S. Ski Team star and freestyle legend Trace Worthington was struck by Bloom’s outgoing personality and confidence with the older generation of athletes, as well as his savvy regarding sponsorship. He arrived on the scene with an agent, in pursuit of contracts for both skiing and modeling. To sponsors the pushy young kid delivered. “He had this infectious positive attitude,” says Worthington. “A lot of us would sit around and joke, ‘What doesn’t Jeremy Bloom do great?’” After the freestyling success of Eric Bergoust, Nikki Stone and then Jonny Moseley, Bloom stepped boldly into a legacy and the spotlight. 

TAKING OFF IN ALL DIRECTIONS

By the 2002 Winter Olympics, at age 19, Bloom was already World Champion, and though he did not win a medal, he set his sights on the 2006 Games. In the meantime, the small (5 foot 9 inches, 180 pounds) but fast athlete had been recruited by the University of Colorado Buffalos as a wide receiver, and enrolled that fall. In his first game, on the third punt return team, Bloom didn’t expect to see any action, but the coach sent him in. He ran 75 yards for a touchdown. Bloom set a pile of records at CU and earned All-American honors freshman and sophomore years, all while continuing to compete full time in skiing. 

“I had to radically change my body for each season,” explains Bloom, who had to gain 15 pounds for football, and then lose it almost immediately for the competitive ski season. Mentally, however, doing both sports was an advantage. “When I was ending football season, my skiing competitors were coming off eight months with no competition. Mentally I was so sharp and ready to jump back in.” Additionally, he was familiar with the pressure of playing in front of 50,000 people. 

Off the slopes and the field, Bloom was also building his brand in mainstream culture, sought after for modeling, product endorsements, TV guest hosting and celebrity appearances (he won the 2003 CBS Superstars Competition). While playing for CU, Bloom battled the NCAA for the right to keep his earnings—upwards of $350,000 per year— from skiing, his non-NCAA sport. Before starting his junior year in 2004, the NCAA declared him ineligible to compete in college football, and Bloom chose to focus on skiing and the 2006 Olympics. Bloom dominated the 2005 season, winning a then record six straight competitions. Off the hill, he had near rock-star status, and entered the 2006 Winter Games in Torino as both a celebrity and the heavy favorite for gold. The capriciousness of athletics struck, however, and the gutsy, usually rock-solid Bloom bobbled, finishing 6th. It was a surprise for fans, and devastating for Bloom, who calculated that he “missed a medal by an inch.” 

Three days later, despite not having played football for two years, Bloom crossed the pond back to Indianapolis and the 2006 NFL Combine for prospective draftees. In April he was picked in the 5th round for the Philadelphia Eagles as a returner and wide receiver. While in Philadelphia, Bloom enrolled in the NFL program that arranged for players to attend MBA classes at Wharton after practice and in the summer. Sidelined with a hamstring injury, his passion for training started shifting towards business and entrepreneurship. After two years, Bloom was traded to the Steelers, and quit football a year later, at age 27.

RETIREMENT AND REBOUND

That same year, Bloom started his first business, inspired by his love for his grandfather Jerry, and his grandmother Donna (who lived in his home 19 years), and also by the profound experiences while traveling with the U.S. Ski Team. He saw how elderly people are revered, respected and treated with dignity in other cultures like Japan and Scandinavia, and wanted to bring some of that respect home by starting Wish of a Lifetime, a nonprofit that grants seniors their wishes. The first year Wish of a Lifetime granted four wishes, and now, ten years later, the organization of 40-50 people grants one wish per day, in the U.S. and Canada. These range from trips to reconnect with family, to fulfilling lifelong dreams, to revisiting favorite activities or places, to getting something as simple as a warm rug underfoot. The effect on recipients is not so much about the wish, “but that someone cares,” says Bloom.

Though Wish of a Lifetime remains a top priority in Bloom’s life, he realized that this dream would not be a path to the economic success he desired. After putting management in place, he embarked on his next venture, co-founding Integrate, a marketing software technology firm. Integrate was named best new company at the 2011 American Business Awards, the same year Bloom was named to the Forbes 30 under 30 list for tech innovation. In 2013 he was a finalist for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year, and was also inducted into the U..S Ski Hall of Fame.

A decade after its founding, Integrate, and Bloom, continue to expand and evolve. Bloom hosted CNBC’s Adventure Capitalist for two seasons and is a keynote speaker at various events. He is on the board for U.S. Ski and Snowboard, where he is focused on athlete education. “I’m passionate about the transition from sport, specifically under the lens of mentorship,” says Bloom. “That, and mental health, which is as important as physical health.”

Last year Bloom married Brazilian actress Mariah Buzolin. Now living in Denver, the couple is building a home in Boulder and looking forward to starting a family. “I’m not sure what it’ll be like,” says Bloom. “People can only prepare you so much. I’ll be assembling that parachute on the way down. I’m sure I’ll figure it out.”

Edie Thys Morgan is a former U.S. Ski Team member and two-time Olympian. She grew up in Squaw Valley and now lives in New Hampshire with her husband and two ski racing sons. Follow her on skiracing.com and at racerex.com.

From the January-February 2020 issue of Skiing History.

With his retirement, record-breaking 8-time overall World Cup champion Marcel Hirscher of Austria is arguably alpine ski racing’s GOAT. Or is he? 
By Patrick Lang

Early in September of this year, Marcel Hirscher at age 30 announced that he was ending his remarkable career. The Austrian won the overall World Cup title, symbolic of the world’s top alpine racer, a record eight times—three more than the previous record holder Marc Girardelli, and four more than Lindsey Vonn.
Hirscher’s “goodbye” press conference was aired live in evening prime time on Austria’s national TV channel ORF1, and was video-streamed on platforms around the world.
In dozens of tweets published soon after his announcement, leaders from several countries expressed their admiration of Hirscher. His top competitor, 28-year-old Frenchman Alexis Pinturault, even said that he regretted the Austrian champion’s decision. Runner-up to Hirscher in the 2019 overall World Cup standings, Pinturault considers him as the “GOAT”—the Greatest Of All Time—of alpine ski racing for his impressive triumphs, his amazing dedication and his constant search for perfection.
Surveying the list of victories, gold medals and crystal globes amassed by Hirscher since his first major win at the FIS junior World Championships more than ten years ago, it’s difficult to challenge Pinturault’s opinion...

At the Nagano Olympics, he was stripped of snowboarding's first gold medal. The next day, he had the medal back. Today, Ross Rebagliati is a successful marijuana entrepreneur in British Columbia.

By Michel Beaudry

"I wouldn't change a thing," says Canadian snowboard legend Ross Rebagliati. Owner of one of the most notorious gold medals in Winter Games history, the happily married father of three insists he long ago made peace with his past. "Sure, it hurt when it happened," he admits. "It totally changed my life. But it also provided new opportunities for me and my family."

Today the 46-year-old is a successful medical marijuana entrepreneur in British Columbia's bucolic Okanagan Valley (use of marijuana for medicinal purposes has been legal in Canada since 2001, and the country plans to legalize the drug for recreational use in the summer of 2018). His dispensary is called Ross' Gold. It's a play on words, but also a reflection of where he wants to take his company. . . .

To read the rest of this story, see the January-February 2018 issue of Skiing History magazine. To read the digital edition online, you must be a member of ISHA. Not a member? Join today!

A woman world champion and a man before his time. 
By Edith Thys Morgan

Erik Schinegger leads the life of an Austrian world champion skier. The 68-year-old runs a thriving children’s ski school on Simonhöhe, one of the ski hills on which he learned to ski, in the farming community of Agsdorf. Off the beaten track from the celebrated ski areas in the Arlberg and Tyrol, people come to this area in the Carinthian Alps for quiet vacations, in winter to ski, and in summer to relax by the lake. Along with his wife Christa, Schinegger has welcomed them over the years at his two hotels and lakeside restaurant, and is every bit the local celebrity. 

As much as his path—from humble farming roots and homemade barrel-stave skis to athletic greatness—resembles that of other Austrian champions, Schinegger’s story is unique. 

Schinegger’s winning downhill run at the 1966 World Alpine Ski Championships in Portillo was recently memorialized in a film celebrating the 50th anniversary of the event. That downhill title, however, is not listed on the Austrian Ski Team’s own list of achievements, and appears inconsistently in record books. Schinegger’s name populates Ski–DB.com, the comprehensive ski racing results database, but no longer appears on Wikipedia’s page of world ski champions. Instead, the 1966 title is attributed to France’s Marielle Goitschel. Where the name Schinegger does exist in the record books it is as Erika Schinegger, the woman he once was. (To see the Portillo film, go to http://www.skiportillo.com/en/blog/50-year-anniversary-of-portillo-world-champs/. The Schinegger footage begins at 6:16 minutes.)

I first heard of Erik Schinegger on the eve of my first World Championships competition in 1987. Our first stop, before getting credentials for the event, was for gender testing. We looked at our trainer, in equal parts horror and disbelief, and he assured us we would be keeping our clothes on. It would be a simple process of swabbing inside our cheeks for a saliva sample. But why? “Apparently there was an Erika who turned out to be an Erik,” he said. We had the test, and later chuckled that our official “Certificates of Femininity” might come in handy at Ladies Night, if there was ever any question. 

Later that evening I asked Nick Howe, the journalist traveling with us, who had an encyclopedic knowledge of ski racing history, and he confirmed the barest of details about what the Austrian Ski Team referred to quietly, if at all. Erika had been a spirited and well-liked member of the Austrian ski team and in Portillo had won Austria’s only gold medal. In the run-up to the 1968 Olympics it was discovered, through the very same test I’d just had, that she had male chromosomes, and was thus disqualified from the Olympics. She underwent surgeries, and the transition from Erika to Erik apparently had been successful. Erik even attempted to compete on the World Cup as a man, but it didn’t work out. That synopsis left a lot of unanswered questions. A year after that conversation with Howe, in 1988, Schinegger explained much about his ordeal in his book, Mein Sieg Über Mich (My Victory Over Myself). It described in detail the remarkable journey from Erika to Erik, a triumph that was hard-won and painful. 

Schinegger was born on the family farm in Agsdorf, to a mother who looked quizzically at the baby’s genital area and a father who would have preferred a male farm hand to a fourth daughter. The midwife congratulated the couple on their daughter, who grew up as an energetic tomboy. Despite her father’s disdain of athletics, Erika learned to ski by looking at pictures of Austrian greats and walked 14 kilometers to her first ski race at age 12. Starting dead last, in the 314th starting position, she won. She skyrocketed through the ranks first of the provincial and then the national team. In her first World Championships, in Portillo, 19-year-old Erika won the downhill gold. 

Austria embraced the fairytale, celebrating her with an extended nationwide victory tour. Agsdorf showered her with gifts and a hero’s welcome. Schinegger, who was earning success in technical events as well, seemed poised to make a run at her dream of winning three gold medals at the upcoming 1968 Olympics. For Kneissl, the Austrian Ski Team (ÖSV) and the people of Carinthia, Schinegger was a source of pride and economic opportunity.

In the fall of 1967 the fairy tale suddenly unraveled. In order to quell the suspicion that Eastern Bloc male athletes might be competing as women, the International Olympic Committee instituted gender testing for all female athletes prior to the 1968 Olympics. Schinegger and her teammates had the newly implemented saliva tests in Innsbruck as a routine part of their Olympic preparation. Later, while at a training camp in Cervinia, Schinegger was called back to Innsbruck. There she was greeted by a tribunal of six men—physicians and ski officials—who informed her that based on the results of the test she could no longer compete in the Olympics or on the ÖSV. They had prepared a statement for her to sign, announcing her retirement from sport for personal reasons, and strongly encouraged her to disappear—on a trip they would arrange—until it blew over. Bewildered and bereft, she signed the statement, but on the condition that she return to the clinic under an assumed name, for thorough testing. Two weeks later the results were conclusive and devastating, though in retrospect not entirely surprising. Erika was a biological man. 

The urologist presented her with a choice: she could undergo plastic surgery and hormone therapy to continue life as a woman, thereby preserving her athletic career, the gold medal for Austria and the honor of her hometown. “Medicine can make you a woman,” he explained, “but never a real woman.” Alternatively, he continued, she could choose another, more painful option: She could have surgery to release the male sexual organs that had developed internally and become the man she was meant to be. Against the wishes of her parents, the ÖSV and her ski sponsor Kneissl, Schinegger—who had since puberty immersed herself in sport to bury doubts and fears about her sexuality—chose the latter. 

On January 2, 1968, Erika checked into the Innsbruck clinic under a false name, wearing women’s clothing. Over the next six months she endured four painful operations with no support or companionship. Words she uses to describe that time are loneliness, despair, confusion, depression, fear. She studied men’s ski technique on TV and a German etiquette guide to learn proper male behavior. On June 13, 1968, dressed in men’s clothing ordered from a catalog under a cousin’s name, Erik emerged. In a fast new Porsche, he drove away from the hospital and into an uncertain new life. 

Within days, while competing for the first time as a man in a bike race, Erik revealed his transition at a press conference in Klagenfurt. The news stories were sympathetic, but the townspeople and the ÖSV were not. Adulation for Erika turned into embarrassment and shame about Erik. Villagers avoided him, and stared when he sat on the right side of the church—the male side—for the first time. The town of Agsdorf, which had given Erika a leather-bound document availing her of a two-acre plot of land on which to build a pension, reneged on it. The document read “Erika” not “Erik,” they reasoned, so it was no longer valid. 

Of all the pain he endured, however, the worst was not being able to ski race. “It was through skiing that I felt love,” Schinegger explains simply. Only his former coach, Hans Gammon, welcomed him to an ÖSV camp, where the awkwardness with teammates was surmountable, but the hostility from the federation was not. Despite strong results against the likes of a young Franz Klammer, head coach Franz Hoppichler—under the directive of the federation—banned Schinegger, first from training camps and later from all opportunities to advance to the national team. Even after shining in time trials and winning three Europa Cup races, he was disallowed from the national team and blocked from competing for another country. Eventually, at age 21, Schinegger gave up the fight to race. 

He passed his ski school certification in 1973 and took over the Simonhöhe ski school in 1975, the same year he married a pretty young woman named Renate. The couple had a daughter, Claire, in 1978. In 1988, he published his book and publicly gave his gold medal to Marielle Goitschel. In 1996, for the 30^th anniversary of the event, Marielle was also awarded a gold medal by the FIS. She then returned Erik’s medal on a televised show in Paris. He had, it seemed, won his Sieg.

A more complete picture of Schinegger’s ordeal emerges in the 2005 documentary Erik(A), by Kurt Mayer. The film reveals the full extent of Erika’s and Erik’s struggles, through the lens of the people who shaped his story: the hometown boys who marveled at her determination, hard work and physical stamina; the mother who questioned the midwife from the start, but never rocked the boat of success (“you could see it always,” she says); the teammates who joked about her unfeminine hair and gait, and wondered why she never showered with them; the coaches who assumed her physique was a consequence of farm labor; and the medical and sport officials who contend that they denied Erika and Erik a future in skiing for her own protection.

While revisiting the people and places of her past, Schinegger shares her early doubts of her sexuality, and her fears of being a lesbian in a small Catholic town in a small Catholic country. She recalls her resolve to keep her secret hidden, even from herself, by immersing herself in the comfort of sport, the only place where she felt a sense of belonging. The most poignant meeting is between Schinegger and Olga Scarzettini-Pall, Erika’s closest friend on the team who won the 1968 gold medal that might have been Erika’s. Pall admits to being sad at losing her friend Erika—“We had a good time being girls”—and darkens when recalling the way the Austrian team took ski racing from Schinegger.

Fellow athletes, though claiming that they “knew it all along,” nevertheless did not dispute the medal or hold Erik responsible. “When I heard she would be able to have surgery and become a normal man, I was pleased for her,” says Nancy Greene Raine, to whom Schinegger was runner-up for the GS title in 1967.

“I blame the doctors and the ÖSV, not her,” says Marielle Goitschel, whose comment alludes to the question on many minds. How could the ski federation have failed to determine her true gender? Some, including Schinegger, suspect they chose to ignore it to protect the medal. Keeping Erika female was a matter of politics, economics and pride for the Austrian team. Karl Heinz Klee, then president of the ÖSV, maintains they were trying to protect Erika’s best interests by discouraging the “transformation,” which they feared would not be conclusive and would lead to a “miserable existence.” To him Erik quickly replies: “It was not a transformation. It was a correction.” 

Erik(A) explores the complicated personal struggles, as Erik tried to prove his masculinity with a series of “crutches.” First was the Porsche, then his prowess with women. His first wife Renate recalls her husband as unsympathetic and overbearingly macho. His daughter Claire talks about growing up with the feeling that her existence was “living proof of his masculinity.” 

Today, Schinegger’s journey is no longer a source of gossip and notoriety but a commentary on acceptance and understanding. Successive forms of gender verification—physical exams, then chromosome testing, then testosterone testing for “hyperandrogenism” —have been deemed humiliating, socially insensitive and ineffective, particularly in the case of athletes like Schinegger who are “intersex.” (Intersex is a general term used for a variety of conditions in which a person is born with a sexual anatomy that doesn’t fit the typical definitions of female or male.) The International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF) ceased all gender testing in 1992 and the International Olympic Committee followed suit by voting to discontinue the practice in 1999. Chromosome testing was last performed at the Atlanta Games in 1996. Gender is determined by a complete physical exam by each team doctor. The IAAF and IOC policies state that to “avoid discrimination, if not eligible for female competition the athlete should be eligible to compete in male competition.” Today, someone in Schinegger’s circumstances would be able to compete.

When Schinegger is brought into discussions on gender issues in sport, as with athletes like Jamaican sprinter Caster Semanya (who was allowed to compete at the Rio Games despite elevated levels of testosterone), he is encouraging but honest about enduring the experience. “It hurts but you get used to it,” Schinegger said in an interview before the Rio Games, adding his opinion that, “People should be able to decide for themselves whether they want to live as a man or a woman, once puberty has begun.”

With his second wife Christa, Schinegger has found “true warmth” and seems at peace with himself. Together they run their inns and in 2015 retired from their restaurant on the Urban See. His celebrity appearances include a 2014 stint on Austria’s Dancing with the Stars. He enjoys spending time with his three grandchildren, and proudly shepherds 3,000 plus kids each year through the Schischule Schinegger. 

Life is good, and yet he still rankles at the treatment from the ÖSV. At the federation’s 100^th anniversary celebration in 2008, the program omitted the year 1966 when listing World Championship medals. “They even didn’t mention the silver and bronze medals of Heidi Zimmermann and Karl Schranz,” says Schinegger, “just so they did not have to mention my name.” In 2016, when Austrian TV wanted to make a documentary about the 1966 World Championships, ÖSV president Peter Schröcksnagel prohibited it. The only apology Schinegger received was from the TV producers. 

Schinegger’s story, however, continues to be told. A movie of his life—in the works ever since two Hollywood screenwriters read John Fry’s 2001 story on him in SKI magazine—will be completed this year. The German/Austrian co-production, directed by Reinhold Bilgeri, is being produced by Wolfgang Santner. “This story, of how he dared to do it, has never been told in a movie…and it needs to be told,” says Santner. 

He is philosophical when taking stock of his celebrity appearances, his ski school, his popularity in France after handing the medal over to Goitschel, the 100,000 copies of his book that have sold, the documentary and the upcoming movie. “Had I been ‘fixed’ at birth I would not have had these opportunities,” he says, reinforcing what has become his life’s motto: Stein sind da, um sie wegzuraumen. Translated literally, the phrase means “rocks are there so we can remove them”—and challenges so we can overcome them. 

Edith Thys Morgan is a former member of the U.S. Ski Team and frequent contributor to Skiing History. Read her blog at www.racerex.com and see “Foreign Relations,” her article on international ski racers competing for American colleges, on page 24.