STORY AND PHOTO BY KAREN BOSSICK
The statue just installed at Sun Valley Festival Meadow looks like something out of “Frankenstein” right now, all wrapped in bandages.
But on Tuesday, July 30, the wraps will come off the new bronze honoring Sun Valley’s 2014 Olympic Gold Medalist Kaitlyn Farrington. The ceremony will take place between 2 and 4 p.m.
The statue is the fourth in Our Olympic Ladies conceived by Ketchum developer Brian Barsotti to honor Sun Valley’s six female Olympic and Paralympic medalists. It was created by Benjamin Victor, the only living artist to have four statues in the National Statuary Hall in the United States.
Farrington grew up on a ranch near Bellevue but learned to snowboard at Sun Valley Resort. Hers is a colorful story that involved her parents selling a cow every time they needed money to finance one of her trips to snowboard competitions.
She won a gold medal in women’s half-pipe competition at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. But that, it turned out, would be her last snowboard competition as doctors discovered she had congenital cervical stenosis, a congenital spine condition that could put her at risk of paralysis if she were to suffer a bad fall while snowboarding competitively.
In the process of placing Farrington’s statue, the other three statues have been moved so that Gretchen Fraser’s is now in the center between Christin Cooper and Muffy Davis. In addition, the statue of Muffy Davis has been realigned so that people can see her steely eyes through her goggles as they pass on the bike path.
Still to be built are bronze statues of Picabo Street and Susie Corrock.