STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK
It took a while for the “surreal experience” of winning Olympic gold at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi to set in for Sun Valley’s halfpipe snowboarder Kaitlyn Farrington.
It may take even longer to get over the surreal experience of seeing herself in bronze against the backdrop of Sun Valley’s Bald Mountain.
Farrington watched this week as a bronze likeness of herself sailing through the air on her snowboard was unveiled at Sun Valley’s Festival Meadow. The statue takes its place next to statues of Sun Valley’s Olympic and Paralympic medalists Gretchen Fraser, Christin Cooper and Muffy Davis.
“I’m pretty shocked,” said Farrington, who was joined by fellow Olympians Christin Cooper, Picabo Street and Susie Corrick Luby at the ceremony. “It’s so surreal to have a statue of yourself—pretty mind blowing. And winning the gold medal was a whirlwind from making the team at the last minute to having my parents at the Olympics. It didn’t set in until everyone was there to greet me when I landed at the airport back home and they took me on the fire truck to the big celebration at Warm Springs.”
Kaitlyn Farrington grew up on a ranch south of Bellevue, joining the Sun Valley Ski Education Foundation snowboard team as a fifth-grader. Her parents sold off a cow—perhaps as many as two dozen in all, she says-- every time she needed money to travel to a competition.
She won the final U.S. Grand Prix Series of the 2013-14 season at Mammoth Mountain to make the U.S. Olympics team. Then she spun, flipped and shredded her way to an Olympic gold medal in a halfpipe in the Caucasus Mountains of Russia as her mother held a sign “Cowboy Up.”
Sun Valley Resort honored her afterwards with a run in The Bowls called Kaitlyn’s Way. And the City of Bellevue named the southern end of the Wood River bike path in her honor.
But eight months later Farrington was forced to retire from halfpipe competition when doctors determined she had a degenerative spine condition, following a fall during a routine jump in Austria in which she went number for a few minutes.
The congenital cervical stenosis, herniated disk and kink in her spinal cord meant that she risked paralysis if she continued to compete in such a high-impact sport, they said.
“I moped, I was a little depressed. But I could only go forward,” Farrington said.
Farrington has continued to snowboard recreationally—she works as a snowboard guide at Aomori Spring resort in Japan, often taking clients into the backcountry. During summer she lives in Whitefish, Mont., where she cleans short-term rentals.
“I still have dreams of competing, dropping into the halfpipe,” she said.
Farrington said she loved growing up in the Sun Valley area where everyone had her back: “All mountain towns are really welcoming, and that’s something they need to hold onto.”
Farrington said that going to the Boise studio of Benjamin Victor, who has four statues in the National Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol, was “cool.”
“His studio is inspiring because there are sculptures everywhere. I sent him the photo I wanted the sculpture to look like. Then I took my uniform there and he took my measurements.”
Picabo Street, who won two Olympic medals and three World Championships in Downhill and Super-G, will be the next Olympic athlete to be cast in bronze for Our Olympic Ladies. Her sculpture is slated to be unveiled during the World Cup Final races that will be held at Sun Valley Resort in March 2025.
Street said she will get her Olympic uniform, skis, poles, boots and helmet out of the shed as soon as the heat breaks in Park City, Utah, where she now lives, and take them to Victor’s studio. U.S. Ski Team racer Hayley Cutler will be the model since she’s still racing and has the active looking body Street once had.
“I’m so excited, so honored,” said Street. “I’m not often at loss for words, but trying to articulate the meaning of this is beyond words. Watching how Muffy Davis and Kaitlyn and Christin Cooper responded to this is an opportunity I will never forget. It says: We did this. We accomplished this.
“And it’s the epitome of paying it forward, giving kids a spot to come and dream. It’s amazing to think I will live on in bronze, and it gives the kids who look at it a chance to aspire to something, to shoot for something, to think about what it could take for them to achieve something like this. And—mandatory--it reminds me to ask myself: What are you doing to pay it forward? Is what I’ve accomplished useful?”
Muffy Davis, who medaled in on a monoski at the Winter Olympics and a handcycle in the summer Olympics, wasn’t able to attend the unveiling due to a Blaine County Commissioners meeting.
But, she said, “While I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting Kaitlyn in person, I will never forget watching her gold medal performance at the Sochi Olympics—she captivated us all and was so deserving of her win. Katilyn is an incredible athlete and I am immensely proud to have her a part of this powerful and important monument.”
Davis praised Ketchum developer Brian Barsotti for having the vision to bring Our Olympic Ladies to fruition. The Idaho Women’s Athlete Foundation grew out of it, its mission to honor the legacy of Idaho’s female Olympic and Paralympic athletes and to inspire and support the next generation of power female athletes from Idaho.
“Through these spectacular sculptures by renowned sculptor Benjamin Victor, it is the hope of IWAF and all the women included in this monument that aspiring young women will see them as examples of what is possible, that they will be inspired and motivated by these beautiful replicas of athletic achievement to go out there and chase their own dreams and goals,” Davis said.
The original vision involved honoring six Olympic ladies, including Street and Susie Corrock Luby, who are still waiting on their statues. But there has been talk about including other female Olympic athletes from Sun Valley, including equestrians Debbie McDonald and Adrienne Lyle and hockey star Hilary Knight. Some have even stressed the need to honor men like high jumper Dick Fosbury and Jake Adicoff, who is still raking in Paralympic medals.
But the Idaho Women’s Athletic Foundation would not be committed to raising money for the male sculptures, said Davis.
“Once we get the next two up, we want to start sponsoring camps for girls and buying jerseys for girls whose schools supply jerseys for the boys but not the girls. I’m stepping off of the international Paralympic and Olympic boards I now sit on so I can focus on those efforts. We want to honor our legacy, inspire our future.”