STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

He wore a ball cap instead of a race helmet. And he was often working at midnight when the world’s top ski racers were in bed dreaming about winning a World Cup medal later on that day.

Curtis Bacca was in the pit crew of the U.S. Ski & Snowboard Team during six Winter Olympics. And he spent 30 years on the World Cup circuit, becoming one of only three American wax techs to prepare skis for a U.S. Men’s World Cup downhill victory and the only American to wax skis and snowboards for medalists in the Olympics, X-Games and World Cup.

Bacca, who tunes skis for mere mortals as well as pros in The Waxroom across from The Magic Lantern Cinemas in Ketchum, discussed his three decades as a wax tech for some of the fastest skis and boards on earth this past week before a full lecture hall at The Community Library.

Curtis Bacca has jerseys signed by Seth Wescott thanking him for helping him win gold medals at the Winter Olympics in Torino and Vancouver.

The talk was organized by the Museum of History & Culture in anticipation of the 2025 Audi FIS World Cup Finals being held in Sun Valley March 20-27.

Bacca told listeners that he grew up skiing at Targhee in Eastern Idaho and got a degree in business before heading to San Diego to try a career in advertising and market. But he missed the mountains so he moved to Sun Valley a couple years later.

“I wanted to get into the ski industry. I asked if they had room for a ski rep. They told me, ‘No, but they’re looking for wax techs on the World Cup.’ ”

In December 1990 Head Skis assigned him to a World Cup race in Wengen, Switzerland, prepping skis for an up-and-coming skier named Kyle Rasmussen. When Rasmussen finished the grueling 2.8-mile downhill course in the top 15, everybody was asking, “Who did that?” Bacca recalled.

Check out Curtis Bacca’s credentials for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.

He was crowned rookie of the year and gained the respect of Austrian wax techs who took him under their wing in a rare move, teaching him everything they knew about preparing race skis.

“Ninety-five percent of the guys who do my job are European. It doesn’t work out for Americans because of the language, but it’s an artisanal lifelong career in Europe. There, wax technicians get interviewed on TV, in newspapers. Here, they don’t know we exist,” Bacca said.

When he returned to Wengen with Rasmussen five years later, it snowed before the race. That meant that the first skiers out of the starting gate would probably have slower times with the skiers that followed having faster times as the snow got compacted. And, gulp, Rasmussen drew Bib No. 1.

Ramussen had a great run, Bacca said, but he expected that other skiers would pass him as the race wore on. When it was over, Rasmussen had become just the third American to win a World Cup downhill race.

Curtis Bacca checks out the bottom of a ski.

“All of a sudden, all the Europeans start coming up to me and saying, ‘Congratulations,’ and I got chills,” said Bacca, who went on to tune Seth Wescott’s snowboard as he won gold at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino and 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver and for Lindsey Jacobellis, a five-time World Champion and 10-time X Games snowboard cross champion, who medaled at the 2006 and 2022 Winter Olympics.

“It’s not many times where Bib 1 wins. That moment propelled us to be among the top in the world.”

Bacca said that the journey towards medals actually begins as soon as the season’s over as technicians pick the skis they think their athletes can win on. After a month or two off, the athletes start testing the skis on the glacier at Mt. Hood, Ore., or in the southern Hemisphere, along with new ski boots.

They try setting the bindings at different elevations on the skis. They make tweaks to correct for things like bow-leggedness. And they aim for precise edging on technical slalom skis.

Curtis Bacca shows off the ski that Eric Keck ran on down the Hahnenkamm course in Kitzbuhel, Austria.

“We’d get the information and go back to the factory where they build skis for each individual athlete,” he said.

Bacca would go to the factory in the fall and narrow the skis down to 10 pair. Of the 10, he said, two are going to be rocket ships and two dogs. The rest are going to be average, even though they were made the same day.

“We’d find the right skis for the athlete, then myself and a test pilot would test five different bases for two weeks to determine the fastest of the bases.  Everywhere is different when it comes to snow surface--Sun Valley, for instance, is different from Norway. And every snow surface is different at different times of the season so we test to get a ski for a particular event.”

Once the bases were dialed in, Bacca said, they would get data from different wax teams to figure out which waxes worked best in fresh snow and which worked best on icy hard surfaces. He carried as much as $50,000 worth of gear with him, some of the high-quality waxes costing a few hundred dollars a bar.

“Athletes don’t think about the equipment. They trust what I put under their feet,” Bacca said. “My job is to find the fastest ski. Their job is to prepare their body and mind.”

Wax technicians have incredible dedication to their athletes, Bacca said.

“If that means working until midnight with just a beer and brot for dinner, that’s fine. I worked with Kyle Rasmussen for 13 years--he was in my wedding. Seth Wescott—I was in his wedding. And Lindsey Jacobellis—everyone joked that she was my third daughter.”

While athletes must trust the ski tech to put the right ski under their feet, ski techs must trust athletes, too, Bacca added.

“You need a relationship, an understanding, communication. If she tells me it doesn’t feel right, even though I know what’s working out there that day, I need to honor that.”

Bacca was constantly checking the snow and air temperatures, snow and air humidity and snow crystals to see if they were sharp or rounded. He kept track of what angle the sun was on the race course at various times and pine trees that might shade parts of the course.

While the athletes slept, he picked the boards they were to ski and snowboard on the next day, grinding and building structure into them, sharpening and beveling the edges and waxing them by hand. Right before the race, he had to figure out what to use for the underlay, base layer and overlay, his decisions possibly meaning the difference a good race and a ho-hum race.

Bacca turned in his passport to the World Cup circuit when the COVID pandemic hit. By then, he had tuned skis and boards that led to 66 World Cup podiums, 25 x-Games medals and six FIS Snowboard World championships.

“I didn’t think I was going to stay in it for 30 years,” he said.

He still shows up at The Waxroom, which he opened in 1997 to tailor skis to skier’s unique needs. There he works on a tuning bench in full view of customers underneath walls decorated with race bibs and race posters.

But before he walked off the stage at The Community Library to prepare for the next day’s work, he had one last story to tell—that of Eric Keck, a downhiller on the U.S. Ski Team with AJ Kitt, Tommy Moe, Reggie Crist and Steve Porino, the latter two who live in Ketchum.

And he had a giant twisted ski that looked like it could have belonged to Paul Bunyan for show and tell.

Keck, who at 245 pounds was the biggest downhiller in the history of World Cup ski racing, was set to test Hahnenkamm the world’s most dangerous course in Kitzbuhel, Austria, in 1991, Baca said. Given a winter with no snow, the course was a wicked strip of ice that had been boot packed by the Austrian Army.

But Keck wasn’t about to take it cautiously on his first training run down the world’s most dangerous course and, supposed to go left, he instead went right.

He charged out of the gate and launched huge air off the Mausfall, flying over the safety fence and landing on the dirt outside. He rose to his feet, blood gushing out of his nose, took a big bow and brandished his twisted ski, the crowd giving him a standing ovation before a helicopter whisked him away to the hospital.

An hour later, his colleague Bill Hudson did the same thing, but he ended up hospitalized with a punctured lung, kidney and multiple fractures. Steve Porino saw what happened and decided not to run it.  Kyle Rasmussen elected to run it but broke his collarbone.

They shut the course down as a blizzard enveloped it before Reggie Crist had a chance to run it.

“So, Reggie didn’t have to go!” Bacca said.