STORY AND PHOTO BY KAREN BOSSICK
The second in a series of Olympic Ladies statues will be unveiled today—Thursday, Aug. 29--at Festival Meadows on Sun Valley Road.
A new statue honoring 1984 Olympic Silver Medalist Christin Cooper, who grew up training on Baldy, will be unveiled at 4 p.m.
It will join a statue of Gretchen Fraser—the first American to win an alpine skiing medal. A larger-than-life statue of Fraser, which was unveiled in August 2016, was moved to Festival Meadows from its former site in Warm Springs earlier this week.
Cooper will offer a few comments, as will multiple-medalist Paralympian Muffy Davis.
The event is being held in conjunction with the Sun Valley Ski Education Foundation and the Idaho Women’s Athletic Foundation.
Eventually, there will be statues honoring five Olympic and one Paralympic medalists in what is believed to constitute the largest women’s athletic monument in the world.
The Row of Champions, launched by Brian Barsotti, will also include Susie Corrock, who won bronze in downhill at the 1972 Sapporo Olympics, and Picabo Street, who won gold in Super G at the 1998 Nagano Olympics and silver in downhill at the 1994 Olympics in Lillehammer.
It will also include Kaitlyn Farrington, who won gold in Halfpipe at the 2014 Sochi Olympics and Paralympic medalist Muffy Davis who has a fistful of ski and handcycle medals from the 2002 Paralympic Games in Salt Lake City, the 1998 Paralympics in Nagano and the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.
The statues are being designed and cast as donations become available.