STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

It used to take Steve Porino a couple days every week to travel overseas to cover Alpine World Cup races, World Championships and the Winter Olympics.

Since the COVID pandemic, he has pared his commute to 30 seconds—the time it takes to get to the broadcast booth in the garage of his Ketchum home.

But you can bet he’ll pop out of his garage this coming week as he broadcasts the 2025 Audi FIS World Cup Finals from the top of Sun Valley’s Bald Mountain, which looms over his home.

Steve Porino talked with Jake Moe, co-founder of POWDER Magazine, at The Community Library.

And he won’t have to do it at 1 in the morning, which is when he broadcasts World Cup races when they’re in Europe.

“This time I can sleep in my own bed,” he quipped.

Porino, a U.S. Ski Team downhill racer from 1988 to 1992, gave Sun Valley residents a peek at his life as a commentator during a talk the Wood River Museum of History & Culture. The talk was organized ahead of the World Cup Finals, which kick off with downhill training on Thursday, March 20, and continue through March 27.

Porino grew up in a skiing family, strapping skis on at age 3 to ski a 200-foot mountain on the border of Illinois and Wisconsin. He started racing at 6 and at 14 enrolled in the Burke Mountain Ski Academy in Vermont.

Steve Porino, his wife Amanda and children moved to Ketchum in 2016.

He began covering NBC Sports’ Alpine World Cup and World Championships in 1997 and has been covering the Olympics since the 2002 Salt Lake Games. He likes that people in Sun Valley understand and care about what he does.

“We lived in Bend, Ore., for 15 years and no one knew what I did,” he said as he gazed across a lecture hall where every seat was full. “When I moved to Sun Valley eight years ago, I came to a place where people cared about ski racing. I go to Apples and learn that my ski IQ is just average.”

Porino gave a rundown on what it takes to cover the Olympics to show the sheer magnitude of the operation. The Paris Olympics involved:

…2,429 NBC staff in Paris and 2,761 in Stamford, Conn., as well as 101 talent in Paris and 33 elsewhere

…4,000-plus hours of coverage across all platforms

…21 production control rooms

…9 remote production trucks

…9 studios

…36 miles of cable

…10,730 pounds of pasta

…86,000 donuts and pastries

…34,400 pizzas

…3,000 gallons of coffee

Track and field alone involved 68 cameras, 8 announcers, 3 spotters, 4 researcher and 1 research bible with 562 pages on world records and the athletes.

“It makes ‘War and Peace’ look like Cliff notes,” he said.

Porino said commentators no longer need to be at the scene of the race as he can watch the action from a monitor in his garage.

“Last year I did it from Bali,” he said, adding that it was a little bit more fraught since a fiber optic cable to Jakarta was cut by a shark while he was there.

Porino noted that Sun Valley is just the third American venue ever to host World Cup races: “So, this is a really big deal.”

He praised the U.S. Alpine Ski Team coached by Michel Rudigoz, who owns Christiania Restaurant in Ketchum, for being the only U.S. team to win the Nations Cup, an award that goes to the country with the most awards overall for that season. That team included Sun Valley Olympians Christin Cooper and Maria Maricich.

Porino also praised Sun Valley’s World Cup downhill as “unbelievably steep”—perhaps the steepest downhill ever, he said. Unlike most venues, men and women will ski the same course. Sun Valley’s 36.6 percent slope eclipses the male courses at Saalbach, Austria, which is 31.3 percent, and the one in Bormio, Italy, which is 29.7 percent.

It eclipses the women’s course in St. Anton, Austria, which is 31.1 percent, and the Beaver Creek, Colo., course, which is 29.8 percent.

Skiers will have to control their speed as they come off Warm Springs onto Upper Greyhawk, said Porino, venturing that the fastest speed will be under a minute 30: “If they let go, they’ll burst into flames and we’ll never see them.”

Porino says he looks at skiers’ body language in the first few gates to determine intensity of the racer, along with whether the body’s in the right place.

He’ll be up on the hill looking at an iPad so he can talk while watching the entirety of a race. New technology will allow him to see how far racers are flying through the air and offer a real time clock comparison.

“A lot of things for me to look at besides analyzing the skiers,” he said.

Porino will be mentoring a colleague, and Sun Valley’s Picabo Street will be trying to get up to speed so NBC can have a female presence at the 2026 Olympics.

“This is us rehearsing what will happen in Cortina,” he said.

During summer Porino has covered bicycle races like the Tour de France from the back of a motorcycle.

He says riding through the towns showcases unbelievable melting pot of culture that viewers don’t get to see during ski races when the action is relegated to the slopes.

“These people are having so much fun camping out for days,” he said. “It’s a great tailgating atmosphere.”

REMEMBER WHEN SPORTS WAS COVERED BY TYPEWRITER?

We’ve come “crazy far” since TV first began broadcasting ski races, said Kristine Bretall, the engagement director for the Wood River Museum of History & Culture.

One of the first to cover ski races was Lowell Thomas, an avid skier who hit up railroads for free travel in exchange for coverage. The first to promote “Lawrence of Arabia,” he also broadcast the opening of Sun Valley Resort on Dec. 21,1936., helping to put skiing and Sun Valley on the map.

He typed his stories on a typewriter and became the voice of Movietone newsreels.

And in 1960 he broadcast the first televised Winter Olympics at Squaw Valley and in 1964 the Summer Olympics in Tokyo. The footage had to be flown to New York since there were no communications satellites in those days.