Where are they now?

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.

His Olympic gold was only the beginning. The triumphant, sometimes tumultuous professional and personal life of the 1960 Olympic downhill gold medalist, technique analyst, resort developer, and entrepreneur of eyeglass fame. By Alain Lazard

Today in the Haute Savoie of the French Alps quietly lives Jean Vuarnet, 83, captor of the first Olympic medal ever won on non-wooden skis. Vuarnet’s downhill victory at the Squaw Valley Winter Games signaled the start of the most productive decade for the great French national ski team of the 1960s. At the time of the Games, Vuarnet had already begun to co-author, with Georges Joubert, a best-selling series of influential ski technique books. In the period 1968–1975, he directed major changes in both the Italian and French national ski teams. He spearheaded the development of France’s first car-free ski resort, and then launched an eponymous and très chic line of sunglasses, marketed worldwide. Later in life, he experienced a strange twist of events that had their beginning almost 50 years earlier.

Vuarnet is dividing his time these days between the ski town of Morzine, where he was born, and Sallanches, gateway to the Mont Blanc region, where he resides in a boutique retirement home with two other residents, and his lively companion Hifi, a King Charles Spaniel. Sallanches is where the Dynastar ski company has long been headquartered. Last year, Vuarnet—just as he was recovering from hip replacement surgery—suffered a stroke. Despite this double blow, he’s determined to rebound from the ordeal.

From Law School to the Winter Games
Jean Vuarnet was born on January 18, 1933 in Tunisia, where his father, Dr. Victor Vuarnet, had recently established a medical practice. Originally from Savoie, Dr. Vuarnet soon changed his mind about life in North Africa. He returned with his family to the French Alps in 1934, settling in Morzine, one of few established French ski resorts before World War II.

Little Jean began to ski when he was two-and-a-half years old. When his father bought him his first pair of skis, he threw a fit because he thought they were too short. It was an early indication of his penchant for going straight downhill rather than wasting time with turns.

He was known by everyone in the village as Jean-Jean, the son of Dr. Vuarnet. Like the other kids, he skied and ice-skated whenever possible. He also introduced skijoring to the valley by attaching a harness to Toto, a dog that belonged to his childhood friend Roger Vadim. (Vadim went on to become a movie director and the husband, at various times, of Brigitte Bardot and Jane Fonda.)

When he finished grammar school at age 11, his father sent him to a private boarding school in Paris. He was expected to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a physician. Dr. Vuarnet exerted an overwhelming influence over his son. He encouraged Jean to pursue excellence in sports, but not to the detriment of his education. The elder Vuarnet had achieved this balance himself by attending medical school while playing soccer at an elite level, including his selection to the French national team for the 1936 Summer Games.

Vuarnet’s mother, overshadowed by Victor, had a lesser influence on him. The couple divorced when Jean was 10. His father remarried quickly, but as soon as Jean began to bond with his stepmother, his father divorced and remarried again.

As a high school student in Lyon and Annemasse, Vuarnet skied mostly during the holidays, dabbled in jumping, and became a competitive swimmer. After graduation, he decided to give ski racing a serious shot while earning a college degree. He enrolled as a law student at the University of Grenoble in 1952.

Around the same time, he became romantically involved with a young French-Canadian woman who, after she discovered she was pregnant, wrote a letter to Jean explaining the situation. The letter arrived at the Vuarnet home in Morzine. Dr. Vuarnet opened it, and then promptly decided not to reveal its contents to his son, who was away at college. Jean discovered nothing of what had happened. The girl returned to Montreal, presumably never to be seen again.

At law school, Jean joined the Grenoble University Club (GUC), where the ski program had recently been taken over by a PE teacher named Georges Joubert. It was a remarkable winter. At the French University Games, Vuarnet won the 1952 national titles in downhill, slalom and combined. He also picked up a lasting reputation as a “city racer” from his future colleagues on the French national team, mountain boys who at the time seldom pursued education beyond the age of 13 or 14.

Schooled in cities, Vuarnet was only partly raised in a ski town. He never became a true “natural” skier by his own admission. To compensate, he observed and analyzed what the best skiers were doing. Olympic bronze and silver medalist Guy Périllat expressed it well in a 2002 interview in l’Équipe Magazine: “Jean wasn’t the most gifted among us, but he always scrutinized everything in depth.”

Vuarnet’s attitude was a perfect fit with what Georges Joubert was doing at the GUC. Their first book, Ski ABC: Technique Moderne, published in the fall of 1956, was praised by 1937 overall world champion of alpine skiing, Émile Allais, who contributed a preface. The purpose of the photos in Ski ABC was to demonstrate that the world’s best racers all used the same basic techniques. That opinion contradicted the narrow nationalism prevalent in ski technique at the time, when French, Austrians and Swiss each were claiming to have the superior method.

For more than a decade, Joubert and Vuarnet analyzed and explained what they observed in elite racers, codifying their findings in five books, translated into multiple languages, which influenced ski coaching and teaching around the world. Joubert tended to focus on turning technique, Vuarnet on speed. From their books emerged inventive technique terms, such as the Jet Turn, the Serpent, Avalement (swallowing terrain irregularities), and l’oeuf.

Vuarnet’s downhill research led him to an enhanced streamlining of the body, with feet farther apart for superior gliding. After he used it to win his Olympic downhill gold medal at Squaw Valley, American media called it the “egg,” which translates to French as l’oeuf. Actually, a cartoonist at the French sports daily l’Équipe, André Caza, in 1946 used the word “oeuf” in a comical way to describe the positions employed by cyclists and skiers to streamline themselves.

For Vuarnet, the correct stance was not natural. It required special physical conditioning to build the stamina necessary to hold the position for sustained periods of time. It combined the two necessities for reaching maximum speed in speed racing: a body profile offering minimal air resistance, and the ability to keep skis flat on the snow and properly loaded for the best possible gliding. The racer could employ it to gain time on the easier sections of downhill courses. Later, Honoré Bonnet, the iconic director of the French Ski Team, wanted to call the position “VJ” (Vuarnet Jean), but it was dropped for l’œuf, or aller tout schuss.

The Path to Olympic Gold
During the period leading up to the 1960 Winter Olympics, Vuarnet rose rapidly through the racing ranks, winning regional and national races and competing on the international circuit. He collected seven national titles in all three existing disciplines—downhill, slalom and giant slalom—from 1957 to 1959.

He made the cut to race the giant slalom and the downhill at the 1956 Olympics in Cortina d’Ampezzo, only to discover at the last minute that his GS spot had been given to another team member. Angry, he declared publicly that James Couttet, the French team coach and 1938 world downhill champion, “…was a great racer but a mediocre coach.” The declaration made the front page of France Soir, a daily newspaper with a print run of 1.2 million copies. Vuarnet didn’t ski in the GS or in the downhill…and Couttet resigned.

At the 1958 World Championships in Bad Gastein, Vuarnet won a bronze medal in the downhill, then added three titles at the French National Championships. That year he married the attractive Edith Bonlieu.

Vuarnet’s new bride had experienced family misfortune. She had grown up among four siblings with three different fathers, without knowing her own. One brother was 1964 Olympic GS gold medalist “Le Petit Prince” François Bonlieu, who was killed tragically in 1973. Notwithstanding these challenges, Edith became a formidable racer in her own right, winning three national titles. A leg fracture prevented her from competing in the 1960 Squaw Valley Olympics. She could console herself with the knowledge that, uniquely, she had a brother and husband who were both Olympic gold medalists. (Edith and Jean went on to have three children—Alain, b. 1962; Pierre, b. 1963; and Patrick, b. 1968.)

At the 1960 Winter Games at Squaw Valley, Vuarnet rode a pair of metallic Allais 60s made by Rossignol, designed in collaboration with Emile Allais. At the time, high-performance competition skis were still made of laminated wood. One of the drawbacks of the first metal skis produced was the lack of consistency between the skis in a pair. Vuarnet left France for the Olympics without a pair to his liking. Even with the best pair sent to Squaw Valley, only one ski performed well. He instructed Rossignol to make him a second ski similar to the one he liked… and he received it in California only days before the race! The skis were worth their weight in gold.

A New Life After Racing
On returning from Squaw Valley, Vuarnet was greeted at home by an overwhelming reception in Morzine. He was offered the position of Director of Morzine’s Office du Tourisme, in charge of promoting the resort. He started work immediately. Also, with the aid of ski journalist Serge Lang, he wrote a book, Notre Victoire Olympique. A new life, a new career had begun.

Pouilloux and another eyeglass manufacturer approached him with an offer to develop a new and stylish pair of sunglasses, called the Vuarnet. Sales were slow, but took off in the 1980s after the company was a sponsor of the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles, where it introduced its catchphrase, “It’s a Vuarnet Day, Today.” Newspapers compared owning a pair of Vuarnets to having an Hermès scarf. Celebrities Mick Jagger and Miles Davis wore Vuarnet glasses, as did world-class sailors and ski instructors at resorts like Cortina, Courchevel and Megève. Annual sales reached 1.4 million pairs worldwide and in the United States, Vuarnets surpassed Bausch & Lomb’s Ray-Bans for a few years in a row. France rewarded the success with the coveted Annual Export Award.

Creation of the Avoriaz Resort
Beginning in the 1960s, new ski-in, ski-out resorts were being developed in France—among them La Plagne, Tignes, Les Menuires, Flaine and Les Arcs. As head of Morzine’s Office du Tourisme, Vuarnet envisioned a grand project—the development on an adjacent plateau of a high-altitude, pedestrian resort.

“I convinced the municipality to imagine a brand new resort above Morzine,” Vuarnet recalls, “free of cars. It would be Avoriaz.” As the possessor of a law degree, an Olympic gold medal, and knowledge of skiing and the local terrain, Vuarnet was seen as having the assets necessary to launch such an ambitious venture. The municipality gave the project 200 acres of developable land for a base village. Avoriaz, the first no-car resort in France, opened in 1966. Later Vuarnet negotiated an agreement to connect Avoriaz to 11 adjacent resorts, including four in Switzerland. Les Portes du Soleil is now the second-largest complex of interconnected ski areas in the world.

Italian and French National Ski Teams
After the launching of Avoriaz, Vuarnet anticipated devoting more time to his growing family, with two boys and a third on the way. But another challenge arose: The president of the Italian Winter Sports Federation asked him to lead the country’s languishing alpine ski team, ranked 8th in the world. The losing status was unacceptable to the proud Italians, who still remembered the great period of Zeno Colò, 1950 world champion in giant slalom and downhill at Aspen and downhill gold medalist at the 1952 Olympic Games.

Vuarnet hesitated, but finally accepted the challenge, with the condition that he be given carte blanche to run the operation as he wished. He led the team from 1968 to 1972, blessed with the arrival of 18-year-old racer Gustavo Thoeni. Success followed. Before his tenure, the Italian alpine team in 17 years had scored only one podium in the classic races. A year after Vuarnet left the team, 1973, Italy had risen to second in the men’s Nations Cup standings, and a year later first, ahead of Austria. The exceptional team was nicknamed The Blue Avalanche. Between them, Thoeni and Piero Gros won the overall crystal globe, symbolic of the best alpine ski racer in the world, consecutively between 1971 and 1975.

In 1972, Vuarnet was petitioned to accept the vice presidency of the French Ski Federation, which perceived the national team to be in trouble. Against his better judgment, he accepted, with the condition that his friend and collaborator Georges Joubert be placed in charge of the team. Despite what the two men brought to the table—Vuarnet’s just-accomplished turnaround of the Italian team, and Joubert’s transformation of an insignificant university ski club into the number-one team in France—the new assignment quickly turned sour. Their reforms were derailed. The fusion of staff, racers and suppliers, which Vuarnet had been able to create in Italy, did not happen. The French Federation, supported by the government’s Secretary of State for Youth and Sports, decided to fire six top racers for intransigence. Joubert resigned.

The mountain community and 1968 Olympic triple gold medalist Jean-Claude Killy unconditionally supported the racers, leading to a split between Killy and Vuarnet that persists to this day. It’s a long, complicated and unpleasant story. (For one version of what happened, visit www.affairevaldisere.fr; a differing interpretation will appear in the July-August 2016 issue of Skiing History.)

Vuarnet quit after two years. By 1974, he had spent almost 15 years working nonstop since his gold-medal win at Squaw Valley, with little time for family life. Edith had borne the brunt of handling the house, running two ski shops in Avoriaz and raising three boys. The only time the family spent together was during extended summer vacations in the South of France, the Costa del Sol in Spain, and aboard Vuarnet’s sailboats, the Eileen and the Tahoe, a 64-foot custom-built schooner.

Vuarnet took advantage of this window of time to try his hand at a lifelong passion: books and reading. For a few years he launched and operated a publishing company, Les Éditions VUARNET, which handled titles as diverse as cinema, history, travel guides, sports and medicine. This semi-dilettante period didn’t last. In 1987, Vuarnet decided to capitalize on the strong brand recognition of his namesake sunglasses by launching a skiwear line with his son, Pierre. Subsequently created was Vuarnet International, which branched out into watches, sportswear, shoes, perfume, cosmetics, pens, luggage, leather goods, jewelry, ski underwear, helmets, ski poles and skis. The company came to oversee luxury Vuarnet shops in Brazil and France, and developed licensees with distribution in 30 different countries. Jean Vuarnet retired in 1998. His son Alain, who succeeded him, stepped down two years ago.

Family Tragedy
The years 1994 and 1995 were horrific ones for Vuarnet and his family. In October 1994, news emerged of a mass suicide in nearby Switzerland. The bodies of 53 members of an obscure apocalyptic cult, the Order of the Solar Temple, were found dead and partially burned. A few days later, two journalists showed up at the door of Vuarnet’s chalet in Morzine. From them Vuarnet learned that his wife Edith and Patrick, the youngest of his three sons, belonged to Solar Temple. Thankfully, they were not among the victims. But the family was devastated. Over the next year, they desperately tried to persuade mother and son to leave the sect.

The effort failed. On Christmas Day 1995, another 14 sect members were found in a remote area of the Vercors range near Grenoble, their bodies shot and partially burned. After a week of waiting, Jean learned that Edith and Patrick were among the dead. It was a terrible tragedy. Despite public outcry and civil lawsuits, a key cult leader—a Swiss musician and orchestra conductor—was inexplicably acquitted.

The funeral of Edith and Patrick in Morzine was a moving tribute to the Vuarnets from the local community and afar. Jean received hundreds of condolences from around the world. One was from a Montreal woman named Christiane. She reminded him that they had known one another in the early 1950s. By coincidence, Jean’s son Pierre was living with his Canadian wife and two children in Montreal at the time, so Jean decided to spend the 1996 Christmas holidays with them. While he was there he looked up Christiane. To his shock and surprise, she told him how she had moved to Canada and given birth to a lovely child, Catherine. In Montreal, for the first time, Vuarnet met his biological daughter, named Catherine.

Three years after re-connecting in Montreal, Jean and Christiane married. Over the next 13 years together, they divided their time between Morzine, the Baleares Islands (where Vuarnet moored his schooner, Tahoe), and a picturesque Cantons de l’Est village in Quebec, Knowlton, which happens to be the longtime home of Canadian two-event world champion Lucile Wheeler Vaughan—who had no idea another gold medalist was living nearby.

In 2012, Christiane died of a heart attack. After her passing, Vuarnet sought a place where he could spend the remainder of his years. He found a retirement home in Sallanches, then recently returned to his home town of Morzine.

Only a handful of French ski champions have accomplished so much after their successes on the slope—notably Émile Allais, Vuarnet, and Jean-Claude Killy. Vuarnet looks back at his career with pride and equanimity. Over his multi-faceted career, he made a good amount of money, “but money-making,” he says, “never drove the decisions that led to my successes.”

The author, the late Alain Lazard, was a longtime ISHA member and frequent Skiing History contributor. His most recent articles included “Rise and Fall of Racing Nations” (May-June 2015) and “Joe Marillac: The Little-Known Frenchman Who Helped Squaw Valley Win the Winter Olympics” (July-August 2013).

I know the small box it’s in, but right now, I couldn’t tell you which large box the small box is in.” Deb Armstrong is talking about her gold medal from the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo. “I could find it if someone wanted to see it,” she assures me. “It’s a ‘working’ medal.” 

The same could be said of its owner, who today, at 52, continues her quest to develop as a skier. In fact, she admits to being a little sensitive about being known 

as “Deb Armstrong, Olympic gold medalist.” “I didn’t ‘retire’ from skiing,” she explains. “I continue the pursuit of lifelong learning through the sport I love.” 

That pursuit has included a stint on the PSIA Demo Team and six years as alpine director for the Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club, where this fall she saw the fruition of a four-year project she championed, the $2.5 million Stevens Family Alpine Venue. Located at the Steamboat Ski Resort, it’s a dedicated training and competition site for alpine, telemark and snowboard racers.

In her current position, leading the U-10 program for SSWSC, Armstrong finds her evolution as a skier more relevant than ever. “If you’re going to teach kids, they don’t care about a gold medal after five minutes. It’s fun. But it’s not enough.” 

The Storybook Career

Hugh and Dollie Armstrong raised their kids, Debbie and Olin, to love learning, the outdoors and all manner of recreation. Weekends were spent skiing and hiking in the mountains near their Seattle home, where Hugh was a clinical psychologist at the University of Washington and Dollie taught school. The kids’ first turns were at Alpental. Both took to racing there on weekends, while participating in multiple sports during the week. “I was too short for basketball,” explains Deb, though it didn’t stop her from playing for inner city Garfield High School. In skiing, however, her athleticism made her an exceptionally quick study. Even after missing two entire ski seasons at age 12–13, when the family moved to Malaysia, Deb shot up the junior ranks, winning her Junior Olympic competition by two seconds, and gaining the U.S. Ski Team’s attention. 

Her international ascent was similarly steep. “She was very fast, if she made it,” recalls Michel Rudigoz, head U.S. women’s coach at the time. “She could let ’em go!” Armstrong won her very first World Cup downhill training run, and within two years was in the World Cup downhill first seed.

Going into the 1984 Olympics, having just scored her first podium five weeks earlier (a super G bronze in Puy Saint Vincent, France), Armstrong’s star was on the rise. But she was hardly conspicuous amidst a dazzling roster of World Cup champs like Tamara McKinney, Christin Cooper, Cindy Nelson, Phil and Steve Mahre, and brash downhill sensation Bill Johnson (see page 33). Knowing Armstrong’s competitive nature, Rudigoz offered to make her a bet. Before he could make his wager for the DH race, she beat him to the punch: “Bet you $50 I medal in either event.” Determined to fully experience Olympic competition by staying in the moment and having fun, she nabbed gold in the GS, ahead of favorites Cooper and McKinney. Four years later, after six years on the World Cup and 18 top-ten finishes, Armstrong retired from the U.S. Ski Team, at age 24.

After her World Cup career, Armstrong hungrily immersed herself in academics—“I wanted to read books, write papers and fill in the gaps of what I’d missed while skiing”—and earned a history degree from the University of New Mexico. When the inevitable question of “What now?” surfaced, she listed priorities: The next chapter had to meet her intellectual need to teach, her physical need to be athletic, and her spiritual need to be in the mountains. “Those three things brought me right back to skiing,” says Armstrong. 

In 1995 she became a skiing ambassador at Taos, and often felt ill-equipped to answer the most technical ski questions from guests. To address that, she set about earning her PSIA level 1, 2 and 3 certifications, eventually landing a spot on the PSIA Demo Team. 

The Plot Twist

In the fall of 2004, Armstrong got bitten by a tick carrying the Borellia virus. “One weekend I rode my bike 200 miles and by Tuesday I was on life support,” she says. Suffering from Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) and sepsis, she spent six days on a ventilator in a medically induced coma. Sidelined for the 2004–2005 ski season, she eventually recovered—but unusual symptoms lingered. “I smelled the drugs coming out of me for a year,” recalls Armstrong, who later wondered if she was “the same Deb.” (Studies show that one-third of people who survive an ICU experience suffer from PTSD.) 

In 2007, daughter Addy was born. Armstrong and her partner moved to Steamboat, where Deb took a position as Technical Director of the Ski and Snowboard School. Soon she was lured back into the racing world as Alpine Director of SSWSC. The job—working directly with athletes, parents and staff; managing schedules and programs; fundraising and working with the city and the ski area—was demanding. 

She started noticing behavioral changes, like agitation and irritability, confusion, trouble concentrating, and difficulty being with friends. At the same time, she also went through a separation. “Personally, I was barely making it,” she says. “I kept thinking that day-to-day life should not take this much energy.” A concussion in the fall of 2013 was the final straw. Even after the acute symptoms passed, she had to go home to rest at noon each day. That spring, after six years of running SSWSC, Armstrong stepped down. She restructured her job and her life, reducing stress where she could, but still not understanding her symptoms. 

The New Reality

Last spring, she finally connected with neurologists at Stanford University for an exam and MRI and then with Dr. Pamela Kinder at Blue Sky Neurology in Aurora, Colorado. Kinder suspected that Deb, like many athletes, was underreporting the head trauma she had suffered over the years. “Today we know that there can be significant and damaging injury with no loss of consciousness,” says Kinder. Deb recalled a head injury in 1980 at age 14, and another in 1995, but surely there were other crashes along the way, and more soccer-ball headers than she could possibly count. 

A SPECT scan revealed that Armstrong was suffering from the cumulative and long-term effects of Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), something much talked about in the NFL, but less acknowledged among ski athletes. Kinder credits Armstrong’s “Olympian brain”—especially adept at overcoming physical and emotional challenge—for the ability to maintain her previous immense work responsibilities while quietly coping with debilitating symptoms. 

For Armstrong the diagnosis was both liberating and validating. Managing her condition, which involves deficits in her short term and working memory, is something she had instinctively done by restructuring her life “and writing everything down.” Now, however, she can do it with more acceptance and understanding.  

Today the woman who dedicated her 40th year to “throwing helis” is in her element, pushing her skiing skills and working not only with the 80 young kids in her program but with their coaches and parents. She regularly makes and posts instructional videos, and leads clinics and conversations that foster technical development and a healthy culture and learning environment for the kids. She gets to work with Addy, who recently turned nine, and to spend her time figuring out how to best utilize Steamboat’s facilities to create a unique experience for eight- and nine-year-olds.

“Personally and professionally the job could not be a better fit,” she says. “I’m out all day, reaching people, teaching, guiding, helping. When not coaching, I am a 100 percent hermit in my house, feeding my introvert self.” 

Armstrong came away with an abiding sense of gratitude for being able to live without the stress of always rising to the occasion. “I can handle doing that some of the time,” she assures, “but not for everyday life.” 

From Jackson Hole to Alaska, the former Olympic downhill champ now makes a living as a mountain and river guide. By Edith Thys Morgan

Pictured above: Moe leads skiers through the Jackson Hole backcountry as a guide. Courtesy of Jackson Hole Mountain Resort.

At 8 a.m. on any given powder day in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, up to a dozen backcountry guides gather for their morning briefing to go over snow, weather and avalanche conditions. From there, they meet their clients on the deck of Nick Wilson’s Cowboy Café and hop on the early tram for a day of adventure on 4,000 vertical feet of skier heaven.

Among the guides is one especially boyish, perpetually grinning 44-year-old who looks more like a puppy straining at his leash than one of America’s most successful and steel-nerved downhill ski racers. If you want to feel what it’s like to play hard—to play like it’s your job, in fact—then let 1994 Olympic downhill champion Tommy Moe be your guide.

Known as “Moe Vibe” among his former teammates, Moe still exudes his famously mellow demeanor, though it masks a heavy metal heartbeat—the edgy tune that hums within every World Cup downhill racer, the riff that kicks in when making split-second decisions at 80 mph. It surely sparked when, heading into the 1994 Lillehammer Games, Moe was featured in Sports Illustrated as a poster child for the beleaguered U.S. Ski Team. SI referred to the team as “Uncle Sam’s lead-footed snowplow brigade,” and described Moe, participating in his second Olympics, as “no soaring success.” 

Indeed, Moe’s flight to the top was not direct. The Montana native’s early and spectacular promise was accompanied by youthful exuberance and experimentation that got him kicked out of two ski programs. His father collared him to work construction in chilly Dutch Harbor, Alaska, a stint that firmed up the younger Moe’s resolve to focus his efforts on skiing. 

After settling in at Glacier Creek Academy in Alyeska, Alaska, Moe glided through the youth ranks, capturing Junior Olympics titles. In 1989, he also triumphed at the Junior World Championships and U.S. Nationals. That same year, the late coach Dan Bean captured the magnitude of Moe’s potential at a U.S. Ski Team coaches meeting, when he asserted: “If we screw up Tommy Moe, we should all be shot.” 

And yet, by the early 1990s, Moe’s career had stalled. He had speed and looseness, but was missing discipline. With his big-mountain pedigree and laidback attitude, Moe might have been lured into the extreme skiing scene. But instead he chose the path of persistence, buckling down and focusing on refining his lower speed skills with the U.S. technical coach, Thor Kallerud. 

Picture to the left: Moe wearing his medals from the Sun Valley spring series, sometime in the mid-1980s. He rose quickly through the junior racing ranks. Photo courtesy of Megan Gerety.

Everything—skiing, equipment, experience, coaching and teammates— came together in 1994. Despite SI’s dire assessment, AJ Kitt, Kyle Rasmussen and Moe were quietly becoming a force. On the eve of the Olympic downhill, Moe, who was fourth in the final training run, privately decided to win a medal or go down trying. He focused on skiing the hill’s natural rhythm—that so suited his big mountain style—as perfectly and daringly as possible. “To this day when I watch the race, I was the guy who didn’t have that one mistake,” he says.

Not only did Moe win the most coveted and prestigious prize of the Winter Games (only the second American to do so, after Bill Johnson in 1984), but four days later, on his 24th birthday, he captured Super G silver and became the first American male skier to double up on medals in a single Games. Moe had the last laugh with SI, appearing on the cover with the headline, “Golden Boy.” 

Moe admits it was tough to stay motivated after Lillehammer, a challenge further complicated with a season-ending knee injury a year later. He retired at age 28 after the 1998 Nagano Olympics—where he placed 8th in Super G and 12th in downhill—with 12 years on the World Cup circuit and five U.S. National titles.

For better or worse, the trappings of fame did not snare Moe. For a brief time one could get caffeinated with a “Tommy Moecha” in Minnesota’s Mall of America. Within the ski industry, he cashed in on the requisite line of gold-medal endorsement deals, and he raced on Jeep’s King of the Mountain Tour for six years. But Moe, who barely overlapped with Bode Miller in 1998, just missed the catapult to mainstream fame ridden by later U.S. Ski Team stars like Miller, Lindsey Vonn, Ted Ligety and Mikaela Shiffrin. “I could have kept going until 2002 (and the Games in Salt Lake),” he says, “but I had achieved my goals and wanted to move on.”

That included business opportunities that leveraged his passion for outdoor adventure sports like kayaking, fishing and big mountain skiing. Along with partner Mike Overcast, Moe started his entrepreneurial career in 1992 by founding Class V Whitewater, a river guiding business that he parlayed into Chugach Powder Guides in 1997. Soon after, Moe realized he needed a home base in the Lower 48 and signed on as Jackson Hole’s Resort Ambassador in July of 1994, a role that has been a perfect fit for the affable, approachable, leave-your-ego-on-the-tram-dock Moe. 

In 2003, the same year he was inducted into the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame, Moe married fellow Alaskan, Olympian and downhill racer Megan Gerety. He and Gerety are “both pretty Type A,” he admits. During the winter, Tommy reports for duty at Jackson Hole and travels to ski events while Megan teaches fifth grade full time. Come springtime, Tommy shifts into gear for his Alaska season, based at the Tordrillo Mountain Lodge, which he co-owns. While Megan runs the show at home, Tommy guides 12 guests per week on skiing, fishing and the “Cast and Carve” and “Kings and Corn” fishing/heli-skiing adventures.

All the travel makes the summer downtime at home—with Megan and their two daughters, Taylor (6) and Taryn (4)—all the more precious. “It’s cool because it’s not all about us anymore,” says Moe. “It’s all about them.” In addition to mountain biking, paddleboarding and waterskiing, the family logs time outdoors camping, hiking and fishing. 

Moe relishes mixing work and play in his roles as guide, instructor or coach. “Choppers, trams or gondolas: I love it all,” he says. “Being in the mountains, skiing 100 plus days per year and having the life I enjoy...It’s a dream come true.”  

Many racers believe they need downsized, super-stiff, ultra-narrow boots. The most accomplished alpine ski boot designer of the plastic era, Sven Coomer, believes that’s changing. 

By Jackson Hogen
Photos by Sven Coomer

While there have been several seminal figures in the creation of the modern plastic ski boot, including Bob Lange, Hans Heierling, Mel Dalebout and brothers Chris and Denny Hanson, a case could be made that none has left as large a footprint as the puckish Australian, Sven Coomer. Over the course of a career that began when he competed in the modern pentathlon at the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne at the age of 16, the autodidact Coomer studied the foot and its function in a variety of athletic environments. From his first contract with Puma in 1965 to his recent work with Atomic, Coomer has left a trail of innovations, many of which enjoy a considerable market presence today. From his home base in Aspen, Colorado, where he has lived since 1997, the last ten years with wife Mary Dominick, Coomer continues to contribute to various boot development projects. 

Above: The Astral Slalom and Racer (1971) became best-sellers, launching the craft of ski-shop custom fitting.

One of Coomer’s designs, the Nordica Comp-3, was the inspiration for the external tongue originally licensed to Raichle and sold by the Swiss brand as the Flexon series. This three-piece shell design still exists intact in the Full Tilt collection, and its imprint is all over the mainstays in Dalbello’s current line. Coomer’s work in the field of molded athletic orthotics, first marketed under the Superfeet brand, virtually created the custom insole category that he still competes in with his unique Down Unders line. 

The groundbreaking models Coomer helped develop for Nordica in the late 1960s began with the one-piece Olympic, followed by the two-piece Astral Racer and Slalom, also known as the benchmark “banana” boots. The Olympic was the first ski boot with a removable liner, a breakthrough that enabled inner boot customization. Then came the iconic Grand Prix and GT, a suite of successes that put the erstwhile middle-of-the-pack leather boot brand on the path to market dominance in the dawning era of plastics. Modern ski boots don’t just echo these designs; they’re based on them. When Coomer claims, “These boots established the fundamental technology and functional design criteria that remains standard in every ski boot today,” he’s not exaggerating. 

Coomer’s influence isn’t limited to the impact of his legacy. A recent collaboration with Atomic resulted in the patented Hawx series of non-race boots that has become the world’s biggest seller, followed up by a reconceived race boot, the Redster. 

AN OLYMPIC PENTATHLETE LEARNS TO SKI IN SWEDEN

Born in Sydney in 1940 to a Swedish mother and Australian father, Coomer soon became deeply involved in multiple athletic pursuits, including swimming and his particular passion, modern pentathlon. His precocious talents earned him a spot in the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, for which he felt well prepared. Disaster struck when Coomer was knocked unconscious and hospitalized after a tree separated him from his mount during the cross-country event. Coomer wasn’t about to miss the next four days of competition, so despite bruises that covered half his body, he slipped out of the hospital before dawn and limped back to team headquarters. He ended up 32nd out of 40 entries, a remarkable achievement considering his condition. 

The International Pentathlon Union Secretary General Willi Grut, the 1948 Olympic gold medalist in modern pentathlon, tried to convince Coomer to compete for Sweden, the world leaders in the sport. After finishing high school, Coomer worked his way to Sweden on a merchant ship so he could continue his specialized training while studying mechanical engineering at Stockholm’s Tekniska Institut with an eye towards a career in product design. Impressive competition results had Coomer on track to compete for his native country for the 1960 Rome Games when Australian authorities informed him that he would have to return home to train. Since competing for Sweden was no longer a viable option and as there wasn’t time to find work on a merchant ship for the six- to eight-week trip back to Australia, Coomer was out of luck. “So I gave up on that idea, for the time being,” says Coomer with just a trace of resignation. 

To help take his protégé’s mind off his disappointment, Grut suggested Coomer come up to his cabin in Åre over spring break and learn to alpine ski. “I was instantly smitten with skiing, the new challenge and the possibility of competing in winter pentathlon (giant slalom, cross country, shooting, fencing and riding). When I returned to Stockholm I was determined to finish school, catch a merchant ship back to Sydney, get a job in a ski area and train to be a serious skier.” 

While he never competed in winter pentathlon, Coomer did become proficient enough to train at the national ski team level, which he did with both French and Swiss team members. He counted among his friends Jean-Claude Killy, François Bonlieu, Emile Allais and Leo Lacroix. He frequently cut first tracks with Junior Bounous in Utah and coached the McKinney kids when he ran the ski school at Mt. Rose, Nevada. 

Back in Stockholm, Coomer submitted his ideas on improved track and field shoe design to an influential sports shop that put him in touch with Puma. At the conclusion of a 1965 ski expedition across the Alps from Innsbruck to Grenoble, Coomer was invited to Puma’s factory for a five-day meeting about applying emerging technologies of performance footwear to artificial track surfaces. Coomer’s interest in product development had borne its first fruits.

Each of the next four winters were spent running ski schools, beginning with the PSIA experimental ski school in Solitude, Utah. This position was followed by three years at Mt. Rose and contiguous Slide Mountain near Lake Tahoe. The seasons culminated each spring in a six-week ski test with SKIING magazine editor Doug Pfeiffer at Mammoth Mountain. “It was the first magazine ski testing program,” Coomer recalls. “We’d spend April and May testing and go retreat to New York to write about the skis and ski technique.” 

LEAP FROM LEATHER TO PLASTIC

In turn, the Nordica Comp-3 led to the Raichle Flexon, a favorite of downhillers, mogul and extreme skiers. This photo shows how the boot’s parts evolved.

In 1968, Norm MacCleod from Beconta, distributor of both Puma and Nordica, came to observe the ski tests. MacCleod was sufficiently impressed with Coomer’s ideas about boot and ski design that he invited Coomer down to San Francisco for an interview, which led to Coomer’s signing on with Nordica the following year. Initially MacCleod would carry or mail Coomer’s detailed designs to Italy until Nordica, eager to move ahead quickly, proposed he move there and oversee developments directly in the factory, instead of by correspondence.

When Coomer began with Nordica, the transition from leather to plastic boots was stalled in its infancy. Many racers preferred the close fit of leather, as the first plastic boots were often shapeless inside. Nordica’s initial effort at a plastic shell Coomer describes as “miserably unwearable, really awful.” The first task was to make the best possible leather boot based on all the custom models he designed from each U.S. Ski Team member’s input and then consolidating all the versions into one model, the Sapporo. The Sapporo—worn by Paquito Ochoa when he won slalom gold at the Games for which the boot was named—would serve as the foundation for the first plastic boot that would be anatomically accurate and would take full advantage of all the new materials had to offer, delivering both comfort and performance without compromising either. 

While assembling a wish list for the ideal plastic boot, Coomer delineated, “173 criteria and details that had to be attended to for every model in every size, so it would function correctly,” he recalls. “The key was how to stabilize the foot and lower leg, fore and aft, for a balanced stance and flex. Until that time boots were very low, just over the ankle high, and scary as hell going fast. As we built up the boots, front and back, we called the extensions ‘spoilers’ because they were so effective at helping retain balance, stability and leverage that they spoiled you.”

In 1973, during his tenure at Nordica, Coomer attended an Athlete’s Overuse Syndrome seminar in San Francisco. There he met Dr. Chris Smith, a lecturer in biomechanics at the California College of Podiatry, and Dennis Brown, owner of Northwest Podiatric Labs. Together they would forge Superfeet, presenting their proprietary ideas to leading ski dealers in 1976. Their custom-molded insoles, vacuum-cast in plaster, found a fast following; however, the 3/4-length orthotics were made of hard plastic or fiberglass and took weeks to get back from the lab. Coomer continued tinkering, looking for a better solution that could be molded in situ using a similar process as the vacuum plaster casting. At a trade show in 1979, Coomer found the plaster substitute he’d been searching for the: Birkenstock cork in sheet form. The on-the-spot cork Skithotic was born. 

Meanwhile, by the late 1970s Coomer’s R&D position at Nordica had become untenable after Mariano Sartor was brought in from Caber to run the rapidly expanding design department. Sartor was a skilled draftsman but not a skier, and he succumbed to the pressures of a marketing department who declared four-buckle boots passé and one- and two-buckle boots the future. “It began the Dark Ages of boot design,” Coomer laments, “and it lasted until the mid-1990s.” Nordica ditched the functional design principles that had guided Coomer’s work. His final project, in 1976, the three-piece Comp-3, was the first plastic boot to feature a supportive, lace-up inner boot. 

Coomer quit Nordica to further advance the three-piece shell concept, molding samples with the intent of interesting a boot manufacturer in licensing the innovative boot design. The partner he recruited to sell the concept eventually shut Coomer out of the deal “when he realized he had all he needed and it ended up licensed to Raichle. So 1978 became the year to move on.”

FOCUSING ON R&D AT FOOTLOOSE

The Koflach Super Comp (1983) introduced the power strap. The DH version, left, used a leather cuff because downhill racers of the period found it gave smoother ankle articulation in absorbing bumps at high speed.

He relocated his family (first wife Kathleen, daughter Robin, now 38, and son Seth, 36) from San Francisco to Mammoth to concentrate on perfecting Superfeet orthotics and shell modification technology. His tiny on-slope testing and R&D facility was “an instant success” leading to the creation of Footloose Sports, a specialty ski shop that continues to be rated among the best in the country. Coomer’s partner, Tony Colasardo, still a hands-on co-owner, concentrated on the retail operation, allowing Coomer to continue to work in the R&D arena. Coomer sold his interest in Footloose to Corty Lawrence, Andrea Mead’s son, in 1995.

Following a successful product overhaul at Koflach, Coomer found an outlet for his Mammoth research into custom-fit concepts in his next consulting relationship, with San Marco and Munari, brands made at the Brixia factory in Montebelluna, Italy. 

It was while working with Munari on a new rear-entry model and subsequently on an overlap boot design that used all 173 of Coomer’s design criteria, that he began perfecting and producing his patented silicone-injection liners with Brixia’s encouragement. When the Silicone Personalization System (SPS) was introduced to Swiss dealers by their local Head distributor, the rebound in San Marco sales was so sensational that Head bought the brand new Brixia boot factory and marketed SPS internationally under the Head brand. 

Coomer continued to produce his silicone liners under his own ZIPFIT brand (for Zero Injection Pressure Fitting), while pursuing a new objective: eliminating all mixing and injecting of volatile chemicals. The latest result of his pursuit of perfection is “a pre-packed dynamic-response fit system that fits by actively molding a granular cork and proprietary clay-like composite according to the skier’s personal dynamic anatomy. The formula cannot catalyze, harden, pack-out or droop, and can be effectively refitted perfectly every day, rather than the familiar progressive deterioration, and it’s durable enough to last a thousand days, or longer than your shells.” 

To assist the daily fitting process, Coomer created the Hot Gear Bag, a clever accessory that heats boots and other ski paraphernalia. The bag warms both shells and liners to an optimum temperature so the skier can slip easily into any boot. It’s been an essential accessory among the World Cup racers for a decade. 

While there isn’t an overlap or three-piece shell made today that doesn’t owe some debt to Coomer’s trailblazing designs, the current Atomic collection has his fingerprints all over it. The Hawx series evolved from concepts developed in partnership with Hans-Martin Heierling and drafted by the Claudio Franco design studio in Montebelluna. The Redster race boot concentrates on stabilizing the rear foot with an ultra-solid spoiler so the skier’s forefoot is allowed to flex and move naturally within the confines of the shell. This liberation of the previously stunted, frozen and crushed forefoot is what allows for the subtle edging and foot steering that initiates the slalom turns of World Cup champions Marcel Hirscher and Mikaela Shiffrin. Coomer suspects that if racers would only fit their boots more accurately, coupled with a dynamic molding inner boot medium between the foot and shell, and without down-sizing into short, narrow, thick-sidewall shells, their results just might improve. 

But then, Coomer, the Cassandra of the ski boot world for the last forty-five years, knows all too well that just because you can prove you’re right, doesn’t mean your advice will be heeded.  

Jackson Hogen is the editor of realskiers.com and co-author of Snowbird Secrets: A Guide to Big Mountain Skiing. His career includes stints as a ski designer, binding and boot product manager, freestyle competitor, ski instructor, marketing director, ski tester for 25 years and boot tester for 20. As a freelancer writer over the past four decades, he has regularly contributed articles to magazines including SKI, Daily Mail Ski, Snow Country and Skiing History.

Are today’s boots really any better? In a November 2014 editorial on RealSkiers.com, author Jackson Hogen observes that alpine ski boots haven’t evolved much in the past 25 years. To read the article, click here.