The Winter Sports School’s Cam Chin ’97 was recently named head conditioning coach for the Russian Women’s Olympic Team! He is one of a very select group of American coaches to be hired by a European team – generally, it works the other way around with Americans hiring Europeans to run our national ski programs. The lack of Russian success in Vancouver led to a major turnover in their sport federation staffing. This is a tremendous opportunity for Chin as the next Olympic Games will be held in Russia.
Chin attended UNH after WSS, and graduated with a degree in fine arts. He then returned to Park City and worked at WSS as our art teacher and coached the Park City ski team in the winter. Three years ago, Chin took over the role of director of conditioning for the Winter Sports School and did a phenomenal job managing the program.
We’re honored and proud to have played a part in developing Chin’s conditioning coaching experience, and wish him all the best in the future. We will miss you, Cam!
WSS congratulates Steven Nagie ‘09 and Sam Dupratt ‘11 for their recent outstanding academic recognitions! Nagie was awarded a National Merit Scholarship from Southwest Airlines to support his studies in aviation at Westminster College (which also awarded him a full scholarship). Sam Dupratt won an Energy Solutions Foundation Scholarship, a merit-based scholarship for high school sophomores planning to pursue degrees in math, science, or engineering.
It’s great to see academics-only students like Steven achieve such a high level of academic success here at WSS. At the same time, our elite student athletes like Sam, are successful in their individual sports and in the classroom. Athlete or not, our students receive a first-class college preparatory education and the flexibility they need to achieve their best academically and athletically.
Nagie was up against more than 1.5 million juniors in over 22,000 high schools in the 2010 National Merit Scholarship competition. Winners are judged to have the strongest combination of academic skills and achievements, extracurricular accomplishments, and potential for success in rigorous college studies. Nagie is the first student in the history the Winter Sports School to reach this level of recognition.
Dupratt’s scholarship is applicable to his tuition at WSS. The Energy Solutions Foundation Scholarship awarded him $2,000, with the opportunity to qualify for an additional distinguished award of $2,500, $5,000 or $25,000. Sam will be recognized at a banquet later this spring in Salt Lake City.
Check out the following video from PCTV, featuring the 1st Annual WSS Sports Cup. Thanks to all who came out to help us honor our Olympian Winter SPorts School Alumni. A great time was had by all and we’re looking forward to doing it again next year!
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Please join us for the 1st Annual WSS Sports Cup featuring the homecoming of the high-performing 2010 US Olympic team including Ted Ligety, Andrew Weibrecht, Brett Camerota, Nate Roberts, Anders Johnson, Elli Ochowicz, and others. The 1st Annual WSS Sports Cup is presented by Rossignol, Escala Lodges, and The Canyons Resort and sponsored by Budweiser, Bud Light, Swire Coca-Cola USA, Dolphin Capital Group, and The Park Record. Proceeds will benefit The Winter Sports School Scholarship Fund.
Friday, April 9, 7-9 pm
The WSS Sports Cup Reception at Rossignol’s The Mountain Center
Meet & Greet with Olympians, Music, Beer, Wine, Appetizers, and Gold Medal Fun
$50 per adult
Saturday, April 10 10 am-1pm: The WSS Sports Cup Ski Race at The Canyons Resort: Compete with Olympians 1-3 pm: Après Race Escala Reception: Olympians, Awards, Appetizers, Beer, Wine, and Fun
$35 per person, all ages — Race and Après Ski Reception, plus lift ticket (Special lift ticket price $25)
Sign – up today, attendance and participation is limited! To RSVP and pre-register, send, fax or email this form to Julie Bernhard, Winter Sports School, P.O. Box 1998, Park City, UT 84060
Cell.435.640.5119, Fax. 435.649.9087, Email. bernfam1@xmission.com
The Winter Sports School has established a Facebook group page at this link. If you have a Facebook account, please fel free to join the group. We’ll be reproducing blog posts there, yes, but we’ll also use it to announce school events, and group members can use the space to discuss topics and keep in touch. Group members can also easily share blog posts and other items of note with their other Facebook friends. Enjoy, and see you online!
Ted Ligety has done it again. Yesterday in Garmisch, Germany, Ted tied for third place in giant slalom and sewed up his second World Cup giant slalom title in three years. In fact, due to mistakes made by Ted’s closest competitors during the first run, Ted had secured the title before the second run started although, apparently, no one told him about it. “I would have gone harder had I known that,” he said, “but I had a safe second run and was still pretty excited to get on the podium.”
Way to go, Ted! Now you just have to get used to your new introductory soundbite for interviews: “Ted Ligety, 2006 Olympic gold medalist and two-time World Cup Giant Slalom Champion.” Ah, that has a nice ring to it.
Now that the winter Olympic flame has gone out in Vancouver, and we’ve had a little while to resume our lives after staying glued to the set for over two weeks, we at The Winter Sports School want to take a moment to recognize and re-cap the performances of our seven alums who competed there. They are, in order of their graduation years:
Steven Holcomb, WSS Class of 1997, Bobsled — sixth place in two-man bobsled, gold medal in four-man bobsled. What a run Steven’s had. He almost gave up bobsledding a few years ago because of a degenerative eye condition, but after a few years of navigating bobsled tracks almost entirely by feel, he recovered from reconstructive eye surgery and came back with a vengeance. We only half-jokingly wonder whether his success story will lead other bobsled coaches to blindfold their athletes for training runs, because Steve’s post-surgery touch as a bobsled pilot has led his four-man team to two consecutive world championships in 2008 and 2009, and now an Olympic gold medal in Vancouver. Oh, and just to put a cap on things, the 2010 four-man bobsled World Cup season won’t end until early April in Lake Placid, but Holcomb already has the points necessary to make him a mathematical certainty for the 2010 championship. That’ll be three in row.
Julia Mancuso, WSS Class of 2000, Alpine Skiing — 8th in Giant Slalom, 9th in Super-G, silver medal in Super Combined, and silver medal in Downhill. That’s two top-ten finishes, and two silver medals. Okay, we think it’s officially safe to say that Julia is back from her recent difficult seasons plagued by health and equipment issues. And, although the most ink has been spilled over her matching silver medals, we think that her gutsiest performance in these games may have been in the giant slalom. For those who missed this story, Julia’s first giant slalom run was interfered with, leading her to finish the first run in 18th position. Julia was obviously disappointed, but she picked herself up and turned in the third fastest second run to move up to 8th place overall. There’s no way to know for sure whether Julia would have picked up a third medal if not for the interference during her first run, but there’s no doubt that her second run performance under the shadow of such a disappointment showed gold medal grit.
Ted Ligety, WSS Class of 2002, Alpine Skiing — DNF in Slalom, 9th in Giant Slalom, 19th in Super-G, and 5th in Super Combined. Ted said in post-Olympics interviews that he was disappointed not to win a medal in Vancouver after he shocked the skiing world with his combined gold medal in Torino four years ago. After all, he was crowned the World Cup giant slalom champion in 2008 and he leads the World Cup standings in that same discipline in 2010 with only one more race to go. So no Olympic medal surely felt like a disappointment to him, but the way we look at it, a top-20, a top-10, and a top-5 series of finishes are nothing to sneeze at. We’re proud of you, Ted!
Elli Ochowicz, WSS Class of 2002, Speed Skating — 17th in 500M, 26th in 1000M. Our veteran athlete. Vancouver was Elli’s third trip to the Olympics, and the experience apparently hasn’t lost its appeal to her, nor has it robbed her of her sense of humor. Her Twitter comment on race day before her 500M effort, was: “Hopefully the zamboni works today.” Ouch. We love it! Elli brings home a top-30 and a top-20 finish from these games, and joins a very small, elite group of athletes worldwide as a three-time Olympian.
Andrew Weibrecht, WSS Class of 2003, Alpine Skiing – Bronze medal in Super-G, 11th in Super Combined, and 21st in Downhill. If Ted shocked the skiing world in 2006, it was Andrew’s turn to shock everyone in 2010. After the race, Andrew said, “My goal this year was just to come to the Olympics, and if anybody had told me how I would have done here, I wouldn’t have believed them… I had strong results in the World Cup all season, but I hadn’t broken through to that podium finish.” That’s all changed now, and Andrew has officially contributed to the United States’s best Olympic medal performance ever in alpine ski racing. Andrew’s summary of it all? “It was a really cool experience.” Andrew has clearly mastered the art of understatement along with his skiing skills. Andrew’s next step after this season is to get back to his books at Dartmouth College.
Megan McJames, WSS Class of 2005, Alpine Skiing — DNF in Slalom, 32nd in Giant Slalom. Megan deserves big kudos for coming up from the U.S. Ski Team’s B team and, not only getting selected to make the trip to the Olympics, but getting selected to compete in two events. The joy she took in the entire experience is obvious — check out her home made video below. She’ll take you backstage, give you a glimpse of the Olympic whirlwind, and even show you what the opening ceremonies looked like from the athlete’s section of the audience. Congratulations on your first Olympic experience, Megan!
Anders Johnson, WSS Class of 2006, Nordic Ski Jumping — 49th in Normal Hill, DNQ in Large Hill, DNQ in Team. Anders is our most recent grad and official youngster, yet Vancouver was his second trip to the Winter Olympic Games. In 2006 he was only 16, the youngest U.S. Olympic ski jumper and the second youngest U.S. Olympic Ski Team member in history. In 2010, at the ripe old age of 20, he faced the even more daunting situation of battling back from major knee surgery just to make the team. In August of 2009, Anders stiff-legged a landing on a training jump and tore his ACL. After an accelerated and grueling four-month rehabilitation, he started the season, as he puts it, “With my knee about 60% of its normal strength and my head about 50%.” But he battled back against the odds and not only resumed competition, but made it to the Olympics again. Well done, Anders!
We are so proud of all our Olympic alums, and they are all winners. At the end of the day, the seven of them brought home 4 of the United States’s total medal haul of 37. To put all of this in perspective: since opening its doors, the Winter Sports School has graduated 230 students. The way we think of it is, if the Winter Sports School was a nation, its 230 “citizens” would have stood 18th among all nations in the Vancouver Olympics medal count, just behind Finland, and ahead of nations such as Australia and Croatia. Way to go, team! On to Sochi in 2014!
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Steven Holcomb, Winter Sports School Class of 1997, has made history. For the United States, he has ended a 62 year drought in Olympic four-man bobsled gold medals. For his old high school, he has become the first alum to win an Olympic medal of any color outside the discipline of alpine skiing — it just happens to be gold.
Steven carried the weight of high expectations coming into the four-man Bobsled competition. While he finished outside of the medals in sixth place at the Torino Olympics in 2006, he improved over the years to come into these games as the reigning world champion. And he met those expectations by laying down the fastest runs in the first two heats during the first day of competition, giving his team a cushion of 0.40 seconds coming into the second day. That’s an eternity in four-man bobsled.
He then came into the second day and blazed yet another run to win the third heat as well, extending his lead to .45 seconds.
Perhaps at that point Steven finally decided he’d sent a strong enough message. In the fourth heat he seemed content at long last to take a slightly more conservative approach to the run to avoid a crash — the only disaster that could take the gold away from him at that point. He still finished the fourth heat with the third-fastest time and with a .38 second final margin of victory over the rest of the field.
“It’s an amazing feeling,” Steven said of his result. “You dream about it for years, and all the sudden, it’s happening. … I don’t know. It’s just kind of overwhelming.”
You’re the very picture of grace under pressure, Steven, and all of us here at The Winter Sports School are cheering your tremendous accomplishment. Well done!
Andrew Weibrecht, from the Winter Sports School’s graduating class of 2003, may not yet be as much of a household name as his fellow WSS alums Julia Mancuso ‘00 and Ted Ligety ‘02, but that could change very soon. In alpine racing circles, Andrew first made the world sit up and take notice with his dramatic 2007 run down the Birds Of Prey downhill course in Beaver Creek, CO. You can watch a video of that performance at this link, and on that day it was good enough for tenth place. Yesterday, Andrew attacked the Vancouver Olympic Super G course with the same guts and go-for-broke attitude, and this time it earned him a bronze medal.
Andrew was the third racer to attack the course, and he had another moment reminiscent of his Birds Of Prey downhill as he desperately clung to his center of balance on one ski near the top of the course, but he then recovered to smoke the bottom section and cross the finish in the lead, though he didn’t expect to hold that position for long. “It’s the first time I’ve ever come down leading a race,” he said. “I figured I’d stay in there until about 10 guys came down and then guys would start putting fast runs. But I kept staying in there.”
In the end, he held off all but two of his rivals, and Andrew took the opportunity in post-race interviews — his big moment in the spotlight — to… deflect attention to others. “There have been so many people that have supported me,” he said. “This has been a team effort. I want to be gracious with it. I want people to be proud of my Olympic medal.”
On behalf of all of us at The Winter Sports School, Andrew, let me just say: “Done.”
As a side note, since we are a school and should mention notable academic sides of the story as well, Andrew also attends classes at Dartmouth College during the off season, and he currently has completed more than half of the credits required for his degree in Earth Science. So he’ll be hitting the books again soon. Keep that brain growing Andrew! Way to go — in more than one aspect of life.
Wow. Two races… and two Olympic silver medals in Vancouver. Julia Mancuso ‘00 followed up a third-fastest downhill run with the slalom performance of her life to win silver in yesterday’s Women’s Super Combined race. No one expected her to stomp her slalom run like that — not even her coaches. “She hid it from all of us,” said U.S. women’s coach Jim Tracy of her suddenly resurgent slalom form.
Julia sounded a little shocked herself in post-race interviews. “I found my slalom!” she said. “It’s been hiding! Skiing a good run of downhill and having to follow that up with a good run of slalom, I mean, that’s tough,” she said. “I didn’t think I could do it.”
Surprised or not, Julia is entering some pretty rare territory. She is now just the fifth United States woman to win multiple alpine racing medals in a single Olympics. And her two silvers in Vancouver, along with her Giant Slalom gold from Torino in 2006 , combine to make her the most decorated female Olympic alpine athlete in United States history. That’s officially very big.
Julia’s attitude about it all? “I think it’s pretty crazy and cool. Just to be able to ski my best and do my best in the Olympics, that’s really a dream come true.”
Alrighty then — on to the Super G tomorrow, eh? It goes without saying, but we said it yesterday, we’ll say it again today, and we just may be saying it yet again before all is said and done: all of us at The Winter Sports School are so very proud of you, Julia. Follow your inner tiara.
