Where are they now?

On April 19, 2006, Colorado’s Ross Anderson went 154.06 miles per hour (247.930 kilometers per hour) at Les Arcs, France. Seventeen years later, that record still stands as the fastest any American has gone on skis, and the ninth-fastest run ever.

Anderson was born in 1972 in New Mexico. His parents were very young Cheyenne-Arapaho and Mescalero-Apache Native Americans, who gave him up for adoption to a Caucasian family in Durango, Colorado. His new dad, Barney Anderson, was an economics professor who had raced for the University of Northern Arizona and worked on the local ski patrol. Ross naturally began skiing at age three and was running gates at age six.

“Not many Natives live in Durango, and I definitely felt out of place because I was the only dark person at the resort,” he recalls. “If I saw someone else who was dark, it was a miracle. It was like, ‘Hey, let’s take a picture!’”

Skiing was Anderson’s passion, but he was a good high school football player, too. After high school he became a member of Up with People, a multicultural singing and dancing troupe that consisted of 400 performers who represented 32 countries. His parents worked as volunteer teachers for the group when it toured. For a year Anderson traveled all over the world, dancing and acting in skits and interacting with many different cultures. Then he went to college for a year.

In 1993, at age 21, he heard about some speed-skiing time trials at Donner Ski Ranch in California and decided to go. He bought a motorcycle helmet and a used speed-ski suit and drove to Donner Summit, where he qualified, at 78 miles per hour. The rest is history. “Speed skiing is cool,” says Anderson. “It’s different, it’s extreme, and I felt I could get good at it. That’s why I stuck with it. Besides, there’s little presence of anyone of color, and it’s at the World Cup level.”

Anderson picked up the sport quickly and was soon racing in international competitions. Overseas competitors had never seen a Native American who skied and were curious and respectful. He once described the feeling at high speeds thusly: “Just think of a Boeing 747. It has to go 120 to get off the ground. And that’s thousands of pounds. We’re 200 pounds and standing on the ground going that fast. But you’re so focused that things are more slow motion than they really are. I don’t hear a thing when I’m skiing. And, really, I don’t want to hear a thing. You get tunnel vision.”

In 2001, at Les Arcs, Anderson took second place in the Professional Speed Skiing World Championships, going 124.6 miles per hour (200.6 kph). That year, speed skiing got its own FIS World Cup circuit, and in February 2002, Anderson joined the tour in Aspen. He finished 10th in his first World Cup race, among a field of 42 finishers and just two miles an hour off Jeff Hamilton’s winning pace. Over the next six winters, Anderson scored 20 top-10 finishes in World Cup and World Championship racing.

In 2005 he won bronze at the FIS World Championships in Cervinia, Italy. And in 2006 he broke the previous American record at Les Arcs, a feat he credits to his ability to focus. “When I was up at the start on the final run, I was so focused that I actually had difficulties hearing the crowd roar,” says Anderson. “The sound certainly travels, but I was so focused I could barely hear it.”

Every ski area in America sits on land once occupied by and sacred to Native American tribes. Yet today only two ski areas, Sunrise in Arizona and Ski Apache in New Mexico, are owned and operated by Native Americans. Bear Paw, in Montana, is owned by a Cree tribe but the tiny area operates as a nonprofit staffed by a diverse group of volunteers.

Anderson is the divorced father of a 20-year-old daughter, Sierra, who lives in Florida and is as passionate about playing softball as her father is about skiing. He has given back to the Native community by hosting Ski with Ross Anderson on weekends at Purgatory Resort near Durango to give Native kids an opportunity to ski. Launched in 1998, the program shut down during the 2020 Covid pandemic, but Anderson hopes to revive it and expand to other ski areas.

Along with Suzy Chaffee, he is also an ambassador for the Native Voices Foundation, which provides slope access along with skiing and snowboarding equipment. He wants Native kids to realize they can succeed. “Sticking with it is one of the main things I’ve known to do all my life,” he says. “I hope kids who read this will realize that if they stick with their subject or their dreams or whatever they want to do in their lives, there will definitely be accomplishments. Follow your dreams.”

Meanwhile, Anderson lives his daily life according to Gandhi’s admonition: “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” 

Dick Dorworth wrote about Sun Valley’s Ed King in the July-August 2022 issue.

With medals in three different disciplines and a Ph.D., this multi-tasker is on her way to doing it all.

Within 13 years, Hedda Berntsen won a World Championship in telemark skiing, a World Championship bronze in slalom and an Olympic silver in skicross. That puts her in the versatility Hall of Fame along with Birger Ruud (won jumping gold, and the downhill half of Alpine combined, in the same Olympics) and Ester Ledecká (gold in super G and snowboarding). Now, at age 46, she owns a Ph.D. in sports psychology and still podiums in FIS races.

Photo above: Multi-discipline medalist Berntsen freeriding in Hemsedal, Norway. Tyler Conrad photo.

Berntsen lives with her husband, Tyler Conrad, near the ski resort of Hemsedal, Norway, in the winter and in coastal Tønsberg, in the summer. Conrad was a Middlebury ski teammate and baseball pitching ace who still holds the school’s strikeout record (177). Berntsen is an associate professor of performance psychology at the University of South-Eastern Norway and has hardly retired from competition. In March 2022, at age 45, she finished third and fourth in back-to-back FIS slaloms. Not Masters. She beat kids born in this century–26 years younger than herself. She raced recently on her 46th birthday, in April.

“I don’t like giving up, you know?” Berntsen says. “I’m still really having fun working on the slalom technique.”

Her current obsession is skateboarding. For the X Games? Nah. She already has two silver medals in skicross from the Winter X Games. She also owns national championship medals in moguls, downhill skiing, youth ski jumping and wakeboarding. She’s written four books and finished her Ph.D. in 2019. What hasn’t Berntsen done?

“Figure skating!” she says. Her bucket list also includes ice cross (roller derby on hockey skates down a luge-like chute); wing foiling (surfing on a hydrofoil stilt, pulled by a kite wing); freestyle dance (Flashdance and gymnastics, on crack); and tumbling (successive flips on a 25-meter sprung track).

More than that, Berntsen says, “I’ve always wanted to be a really great surfer. I have a lot of passions and interests, and I want to do it all. Obviously, you have to make choices and that’s not my strength. It’s the same in my academic career. I would like to learn design, psychology, motivation, teaching.”

But how many people from a small fishing village on the Oslofjord actually pursue and excel internationally at most of their dreams?

Growing up in Filtvet with two siblings, Berntsen challenged herself all the time. Her father, Dag, had been a Nordic skier at Middlebury. Her mother, Marte, was an avid skier. When Berntsen was 5, her father experienced an aneurysm in his spinal cord and has been in a wheelchair ever since. “He’s fantastic, never gives up, very optimistic and positive,” Berntsen says. At 75, he still teaches math and science at the same middle school where Berntsen’s sister, Ingrid, a two-time Olympian in moguls, teaches physical education and science.

At age eight, Berntsen excelled at ski jumping. She beat almost all the boys well before women jumpers succeeded in their drive for international competition. “I was a little bit too early,” she says. At 13, she picked up Alpine skiing, started racing at 17 and dreamed of being a downhill racer.

During her two years at a Norwegian ski academy, Berntsen ran telemark gates at night for fun. Each summer, she trained in moguls with her sister. “It was a parallel development between all those disciplines,” she recalls, with “a lot of variation. Maybe that’s why I became so good so fast. To develop [expertise], it’s important to go out of your comfort zone all the time—and I was always wanting to improve and master [these sports].”

When Berntsen didn’t immediately make the national Alpine team, however, her father suggested she attend his alma mater. “I don’t know,” she remembers saying. “All I wanted to do was be a world-class skier. I didn’t think I would make it if I went to college, but I decided it was going to be possible. And it was possible, because I believed it.”

She flew to Vermont, still so new to racing that, even now, Mark Smith, Middlebury’s Alpine director at the time, said he never would have recruited her. “I think her [FIS] point profile was in the 80s or 90s, and we were looking for athletes in the 30s,” he says. “But she was very intelligent about technique. She also worked at it tirelessly. I mean, she closed the lifts pretty much every day at Middlebury Snow Bowl. We would do training on Nordic skis and she would just about kill herself so she wouldn’t be last in any training situation. She was all attack, all the time. You’ve heard the term, ‘Attacking Vikings?’ Her picture should be in the book under that.”

Another Middlebury influence was her teammate Forest Carey, who raced for the Panthers after a stint on the U.S. Ski Team, then would go on to coach for the team for 14 years, minus a two-year gig as Bode Miller’s coach when Miller broke away from the national squad. Carey had a gift for explaining technique, even as an undergrad, so Berntsen picked his brain constantly.

“She was right on my ass, every training run,” Carey recalls. “Hedda comes down seven gates behind you and sprays you at the finish because she was so close and is so pumped, talking about the feelings, sensations, gets back on the lift and does it again. She had this crazy infectious energy. She was so different than anyone else I’d ever met. The determination. She was just gonna do it! Whatever it took. She had the attitude and the ability.

“She was the reason I made it through college skiing, frankly,” Carey admits. “She’d skateboard around campus, arcing turns, constant movement and activity.”

In 1997, Berntsen won gold at the Telemark World Championships in Meiringen, Switzerland, in a three-minute Classic (includes gates, skating and a jump. “I’ve never been more tired in my whole life, on the course or after,” she says). That year she set the Middlebury single-season scoring record in soccer and retired her cleats.

Carey was dismayed to see her leave soccer. “I’m like, ‘Hedda! What are you doin’?’” he remembers. “She says, ‘Forest! I like the games. But the [soccer] practice, you just run around. Then I can’t lift weights, then I can’t get strong enough to ski so fast.’ She’s the best soccer player the school had ever seen. People would just bounce the ball off her and she’d score. And she quit so she could ski faster! I was like, ‘You’re crazy!’”

After Middlebury, Berntsen went straight to the Alpine World Cup. In 2000–01, her first full season on tour, she earned seven top-10 finishes in slalom, including a trio of fifth places. In the same season—inconceivably—she captured bronze at the FIS Alpine World Championships at St. Anton, Austria, beating Janica Kostelic of Croatia, and sharing the podium with winner Anja Paerson of Sweden.

At the time, Berntsen wasn’t surprised. “Only when I look back at it, I can’t believe I was able to pull it off,” she says. “It shouldn’t be possible. But right there and then, I can never see any doubts. I am in complete belief that I’m going to become the world’s best. I was convinced.”

After the Middlebury years, which involved three months each year of racing, the transition to a world-class workout regimen was jarring. She suffered dangerous muscle deterioration. Bloodwork showed high creatine kinase, or CK, levels, which had the potential for kidney damage.

“The team didn’t let me individualize my program, so recovery took a really, really, really long time,” she says. By 2002, she was cleared for her Olympic debut in Salt Lake City (along with her sister in moguls), but skied out in the first run of slalom and ended her World Cup run in 2003.

By 2010, however, Berntsen was back in full force, ready to compete in the Olympic premiere of skicross. In Vancouver, the 33-year-old Berntsen won every heat, beating even the eventual gold medalist in the semifinals. But she got a slow start in the final heat and claimed silver, behind Ashleigh McIvor of Canada.

Of all her athletic achievements, Berntsen thinks that Olympic silver was the most significant. “It was so unlikely and so late in my career,” she says. “I felt like I never fully reached my potential in Alpine skiing, so it was fantastic to be able to reach that level again.”

More good news followed, at Carey’s 2015 wedding in Mexico. “Hedda was coming in Hedda-style,” Carey says. “I was like, ‘Just get here and we’ll figure it out.’” When Carey had to run an errand, he told his sister, ‘Hedda’s coming in a half hour. Tell Tyler to look after her.’” The college ski teammates reconnected and made an indelible mark on the dance floor. “To this day, everyone still laughs because they were dancing together all night, but it was like a plyo workout, like calisthenics, which fits them both to a tee,” Carey says. “Tyler’s also a phenomenal athlete.”

“In Tyler, I met my match,” Berntsen says. “Relationships were always hard, because I usually beat the boys in stuff, but he beats me at absolutely everything.” Four years later, they married.

Now that Berntsen has a Ph.D. in sports psychology, she has been thinking about her meteoric and multi-faceted ski racing career and reading all her old training logs. She wants to write a scientific article about skill development. “There are a lot of theories on how [sports] learning happens,” she says. “It’s very complex, and sometimes you don’t get the complexity in the theories. For me, it’s been very cognitive. I spent a lot of time analyzing and connecting the feeling of a good turn to what I’d see on video and in coaches’ feedback. Of course, it’s just my own experience, but I have it documented quite well. I wrote journals every single year that I was a ski racer, since 1994: what I wanted to work on, what worked, how many runs I did, how I understood the turns. I cut out pictures of Alpine skiers and glued them in, I made ski development models that I created myself,” she explains.

Those journals could be doubly useful now, because Berntsen still has athletic goals. “I really want to improve in Alpine skiing!” she says. “It would be fun to go to Nationals and be top 15 in slalom. But my job is super demanding, and I can’t always ski as much as all those kids. But that’s the big dream.”

If she did it, no one would flinch.

“People ask me, because of my coaching background, ‘Who’s the best athlete I’ve been around?’” Carey says. “I give half the people the easy answer: Bode, one of the best athletes that ever put on skis and what excitement he brought to people. A lot of it was because he wouldn’t take no for an answer. But I tell the other half: Hedda. Look what she’s freaking accomplished, with her results and her enthusiasm for playing sports. She dives into s*** with such passion and so much energy. She’s one of my favorite people in the world.” 

Aimee Berg is a sportswriter base in New York. She profiled Marco Tonazzi in the May-June issue of Skiing History.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“One more,” Tonazzi said,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photos courtesy Marco Tonazzi.

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

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

In the Beginning

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

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

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

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

The Mighty Mites

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

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

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

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

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

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

The U.S. Ski Team and Beyond

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

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

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

Favorite Son

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

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

The Sully Legacy

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

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

American Downhiller

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The American Downhiller Camp

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Albertville Games would test her courage again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OFF TO THE RACES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EARLY (AND BRIEF) RETIREMENT

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

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

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

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

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

STARTING OVER

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

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

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

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

BACK TO BEND

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

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

NEW LIFE AND AN OLD LOVE

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

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