STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

EDITOR’S NOTE: With the Winter Olympics in full swing and four athletes representing Sun Valley, we thought it would be fun to rerun a story that Karen Bossick wrote ahead of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. Remember…some of the statistics, have changed since then. SVSEF, for instance, now has nearly a thousand youngsters in its program.

Bald Mountain gleams in the sun, its steep runs manicured from top to bottom like a golf course.

But to young Christin Cooper this rounded knob that rises 9,150 feet into the air was her “wild mountain.” A mountain that taught her what it took to win an Olympic medal, even as she attempted to tame that mountain.

Lindsey Vonn said that Picabo Street, posing for a photo with SVSEF athletes, raised the glass ceiling for female ski racers a thousand percent.

“I had as my playground this really wild place,” recalled Cooper. “I could go up and be unchaperoned on this huge wild mountain and ski fast and ski hard, with storms raging in my face, no idea where I was going. I felt like I was a mountain goat—I could do anything.The mountain taught me to be a scrapper and a fighter.”

If each county in Idaho had its own license plate, 5B’s motto would be “Famous Olympians’’ instead of “Famous Potatoes.” Seventy-seven Winter Olympians have called Sun Valley their home, including several female medalists.

Gretchen Fraser, the first American woman to win a gold medal in alpine skiing, lived and trained here, as did Christin Cooper, who won a silver in giant slalom at the 1984 Olympic games in Sarajevo. Andrea Mead Lawrence, the first American to win two gold medals at the same games and is still the only American to hold two golds in alpine skiing, trained here. So did Susie Corrock, who won a bronze medal in the 1972 Olympics in Sapporo, Japan.

Picabo Street, who won a silver at the 1996 games in Lillehammer and a gold at the 1998 games in Nagano, got her first taste of speed on skis when her Dad took her up Baldy and told her to ski straight down. And Muffy Davis, who raced neck and neck down Baldy with Street until she was paralyzed in a ski accident, roped in a bronze medal on an icy course at the 1998 Paralympics in Nagano. It was the first of many medals to come.

Sondra Van Ert, seen here at a Janss Pro Am fundraiser for SVSEF kids, helped pioneer snowboard racing as it debuted in the Winter Olympics.

What propelled these women of Baldy to a success few other Americans have experienced? Strong personal desire and drive, for sure. But beyond that: A valley with a tradition of great skiers who are totally dedicated to skiing. A stable of top-notch coaches who competed and coached internationally. And an unrelenting mountain that looms larger than life.

Averell Harriman began encouraging skiing excellence from the time he hand-picked Sun Valley to build America’s first ski resort.

Determined that Sun Valley would match anything that Europe had to offer, he imported some of the world’s best skiers—men like Otto Lang, Leif Odmark and Stein Ericksen—to teach skiing. Under Harriman, Sun Valley became the first to field international races with racing events that eventually brought such ski legends as Jean Claude Killy and Tommy Moe to Sun Valley for aspiring racers to inspect up close. And he encouraged ski racing by giving room and board to talented skiers in exchange for them doing odd jobs.

The first four racers named to the 1948 Women’s Olympic Ski Team trained at Sun Valley, working odd jobs at night.

Michel Rudigoz coached a 1984 Winter Olympics team that included gold medalist Debbie Armstrong, silver medalist Christin Cooper and Sun Valley’s Maria Maricich.

As these women tasted success, they gave younger skiers greatness to aspire to. Lawrence aspired to follow in the ski tracks of Fraser. Cooper looked up to Olympians Susie and Pete Patterson. And Picabo Street was determined that she should have a run on the mountain named after her, just as Fraser and Cooper had.

“Pete Patterson was definitely one of my role models,’’ Cooper said, of the Ketchum boy who overcame what should have been career-ending injuries to get a fifth in downhill at the 1980 Olympics. It was the highest finish for an American man in downhill until Billy Johnson captured the gold.

“Actually, the whole Patterson family was my mentors. They embodied the kind of skiing ethic that people in the valley had when I was growing up. Work hard. Play hard. No whining. Put a lot into it and you’ll get a lot out of it.”

If chasing legends wasn’t enough to get the competitive juices schussing, the coaches certainly knew how to inspire the kids. Over the years, the coaches included Lane Monroe, Terry Palmer and Michel Rudigoz, a French restaurateur and most successful of all U.S. Olympic ski coaches at winning medals. They were all men who had tasted skiing at its highest level and who had taken turns coaching the U.S. Ski Team.

Christin Cooper, seen here with former ski racer Terry Palmer, co-founded the Janss Pro-Am as a way to raise money for the Sun Valley Ski Education Foundation.

Jazzed on skiing, they loved to ski hard and the kids had no choice but to try to keep up with them. Foggy? What the heck, let’s go race. Sunny? Better yet, let’s race some more.

“You can’t become a world-class anything on your own, and we had excellent ski coaches who were world-class and taught us how to be world-class,’’ said Pete Patterson, who had a stint as a heli-ski guide at Sun Valley. “Even when I was on the U.S. Ski Team, I used to look forward to coming home to the coaches here because they were so good, they always had new ideas and techniques to experiment with.”

What tied everything together, what brought those world-class coaches to a tiny hamlet in Idaho, was the mountain.

“The mountain is probably the center of it all,” said alpine head coach Pat Savaria, who raced on the World Cup circuit for six years. “Such a large mountain, so much terrain. There’s not a flat place to rest. You’re always having to make a turn. You’re always having to control your speed. If you can ski that mountain well, you can succeed wherever you go.”

“I’ve skied everywhere and Baldy is definitely one of the best mountains in the world,’’ said Cooper. “It’s world class. It has a relentless pitch to everything on it. The Bowls are phenomenally wonderful, challenging, long. The mountain requires you to be tough and strong. You can’t stay bad, not improve, if you spend a lot of time skiing Baldy. It demands too much. You have to buckle up and go.”

Indeed, the mountain lured young ski racers who wanted that extra edge that their own ski area couldn’t give them. Women like Adele Allender, who moved here from Squaw Valley, Calif., when she was 16 and went on to win the 1989 Nor-Am championship, among other things. Women like Sondra Van Ert, who had a successful ski career, then traded her ski boards to become a four-time U.S. Snowboard champ who was still winning races on the World Cup circuit at age 35.

Van Ert left the world-renowned steeps of Snowbird, Utah, at age 16 to come to Sun Valley where the harder snow made for firmer race courses. Here, her drive time to the training grounds were cut from 40 minutes to a couple minutes, she wasn’t the only kid in her school on the ski race team, she wasn’t forced to ski with the university men’s team because of lack of good coaching for youngsters her age.

“I’ve traveled the globe visiting ski areas, but there is no comparison to Sun Valley,” she said. “The feature that truly distinguishes Sun Valley is the unrelenting pitch; the whole mountain goes downhill for an amazing 3,000 vertical feet. Between the perfect manmade snow and immaculate grooming, it just begs for non-stop cruising runs, leg-burning run after uncrowded run, all accessed by high-speed quads.’’

Coaches took full advantage of the steep vertical, cajoling Sun Valley Company into letting their young charges race unharnessed down the mountain an hour before lifts opened to the public each morning. The kids reached speeds of 70 miles per hour, flying two-thirds of a vertical mile downhill in 2 ½ minutes, a feat it takes a good recreational skier about six minutes to do.

Susie Patterson, who went on to become an adventure photographer, recalls the first time her coach unleashed her from top to bottom.

“I was skiing so fast—faster than I’d ever skied in my life. I was adrenalized, I felt a sense of danger, yet I knew I wasn’t totally out of the real of control. And I got back to the top and one of the coaches said, ‘You can start going fast any time.’ ”

Fear of speed is kids’ biggest deterrent to doing well in racing so it’s paramount to give kids a sense of speed in an environment where they don’t realize how fast they’re going, said Monroe. “Once you get the feel of it, you don’t fear it. You get in a regular race and the speed is just second nature.”

Van Ert can attest to that. She felt the coaches were “a little crazy” when they put her on 215-centimeter downhill skis the first day out in early December. But, after several sessions of early morning downhill training on Warm Springs and skiing moguls and slalom courses on her long boards, she landed a spot on the U.S. Ski Team as a downhiller—and she’d been a slalom and giant slalom technical racer up until then.

In a town that cherishes good skiers, local eating establishments, like Apple’s Bar and Grill, have toasted good showings with lunch on the house. And, always, there are the townspeople, supporting yet another fundraiser to ensure that the 400-pllus kids in the valley who want to race get that chance, regardless of  how much money their parents make.

The non-profit Sun Valley Ski Education Foundation, which has been called among the most innovative successful programs in the country, has an Olympian Development Fund to cover expenses of year-round training for the top 5 percent of its alpine racers. Travel and other expenses cost up to $20,000 per person per year.

“Rarely can you live in a town where you can have such a normal family life and school life and still get a heck of a lot of skiing in. It’s such an amazing place,” said Susie Patterson, who grew up in a modest three-bedroom house her father built at the bottom of Warm Springs before it was removed to make way for the lavish Warm Springs Lodge.

“I think the Wood River Valley itself has a way of breeding great athleticism,’’ agreed  Van Ert. “It is such a way of life in the valley. Everyone is active in a sporting, healthy lifestyle—hiking, mountain biking, water skiing, Rollerblading, golfing, skateboarding, paragliding ... I can remember going to Atkinson’s and everybody was so healthy I was just too plain embarrassed to consider buying any junk food.”

The question now on everybody’s mind is whether Sun Valley can continue to dominate the world of alpine skiing as it did in past years when it placed six and seven kids on the U.S. Ski Team at a time.

Locals talk about going through a dry spell, even though it was just the last Olympics that Picabo Street waltzed away with the gold and even though Van Ert continues to dominate the snowboarding world. And Graham Watanabe (who would go on to compete in the Winter Olympics) is racking up first places in Intermountain Division snowboarding giant slaloms.

Still, Rudigoz, Monroe and Savaria fear Sun Valley is losing its edge as more and more kids’ parents shell out up to $20,000 a year to send their kids to ski academies in Stratton, Vt., and elsewhere where kids basically study ski racing, making a profession of it.

Sun Valley is losing its edge in a world where ski racers  train year-round in places like South America, said Rudigoz. An increasing number of vacation skiers and liability concerns are squeezing opportunities for the kids to go full blast down the mountain.

And, while Sun Valley’s polished slopes get rave reviews from vacationers, Christin Cooper worries that all that manicuring and manmade snow will slow down the mountain’s athletes’ march to the gold.

“The groomed runs are nice and it’s fun to ski them, but I don’t think we’re doing any favors carving perfect turns on perfect snow—it’s a bit like driving on the freeway,” she said. “The Olympics are not about perfect conditions but excelling in adverse conditions, about the unpredictability of not know what’s coming up. That’s where the Europeans excel. They’re used to being out of control in less-than-ideal conditions.”

On the other hand, Cooper says, the Wood River Valley is one of the few communities whose ski culture seems to remain vibrant when others are withering.

“The Wood River Valley is changing, but not as rapidly as other places because it’s not close to a big population center,’’ she said. “People are drawn to Ketchum for the right reasons—a life that isn’t very populated, a life where everybody hikes and climbs the mountain. They’re people who respect mountain culture and mountain life and it helps keep their priorities straight. And that includes living to ski and skiing to live.”

And that, you might conclude, just might be enough to keep Baldy in the limelight when it comes to the chase for the gold.