The close-knit community of backcountry skiing was in mourning Monday, a day after an avalanche in Washington state killed a prominent judge in the extreme sport plus two other experienced skiers.
Lindsey Vonn from the U.S. has won her fifth consecutive women's World Cup downhill title after finishing third at Saturday's alpine skiing event in Sochi, Russia.
Comcast/NBC will remain the U.S. Olympic network in 2014, 2016, 2018 and 2020. But for now, it's time to focus on 2012.
updated: Thu Feb 24 2011 10:21:00
BASE jumpers took the plunge in 2010 during the "New River Gorge Bridge Day Festival" in West Virginia.
Skiers understand the capricious nature of fame in a sport that is largely hidden from public view for years at a time. It's all about timing. (And back stories, too, but that's another matter. And sometimes it's about timing and back stories together). You can win all the races you like, on any mountainside in the world, but unless you win at the Olympics, you are anonymous. Ted Ligety knows all about this.
Want to pile through chest-deep powder in Japan? Find massive air in China? Here's the guide to Asia's downhill thrills.
Lots of people may be cursing the early arrival of winter this year, but the blast of snow is translating into a blast for skiers and snowboarders.
So much for the idea that Lindsey Vonn and the rest of the U.S. ski team would have a down season in the post-Olympic year. Vonn and fellow Olympic champ Ted Ligety both earned decisive victories in World Cup events as the Cup tour made its annual fall pass through North America. Vonn captured the Super G race in Lake Louise, Alberta on Sunday, while Ligety won the giant slalom event on the Birds of Prey course in Beaver Creek, Colo. It marked the first time since 2006 that two U.S. alpine skiers had won World Cup events on the same day.
updated: Sun Feb 28 2010 02:49:00
Lindsey Vonn's Olympics come to an end. Alex Thomas wraps up Friday's competition.
VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- All of Canada is holding its breath for the result of today's men's cross-country 50km mass start.
WHISTLER, British Columbia -- Here was a familiar scene: Bode Miller standing benignly on skis at the side of race course, poles dragging in the snow, a look of vague disappointment on his face. He is wearing a racing helmet and speed suit, but he is as still as the pine trees behind him and the plastic gates that line the mountainside, all dressed up with no place to go.
WHISTLER, British Columbia -- As massive, wet snowflakes fell on the Creekside alpine racing stadium Friday afternoon, Lindsey Vonn worked an adoring crowd. Autographs here, photos there, always a smile. The hood was pulled up on her white, U.S. Ski team jacket and a hat was yanked down to the top of her eyebrows, but there was no mistaking who was beneath the down and wool. You cannot cover up stardom.
WHISTLER, British Columbia -- Running downhill through the Olympic Alpine Games, with two events left to ski (women's slalom Friday and men's slalom Saturday):
WHISTLER, British Columbia -- Measure these odds: Julia Mancuso is prepared to push out of the start house in the first of two runs of the Olympic giant slalom on Wednesday morning. She is skier No. 18, and at this point in the competition -- bib numbers 16 through 30 -- the racers are sent off every 60 seconds, a shorter interval than originally planned, to hurry the race in bad weather. For the fastest racers, the run takes a little more than 1:15. This means that when one skier is approaching the final pitch of the course, another is starting. Two racers on course at the same time.
Talk about being 21st-century pioneers.
updated: Wed Feb 24 2010 20:07:00
Olympic medalist Nelson Carmichael has some tips on how to bump ski.
WHISTLER, B.C. -- For the first time in a week, it was snowing Tuesday afternoon in the mountains around Whistler. At least it was trying to snow, as dense, wet flakes turned occasionally to rain and then back again to snow, soaking spectators who were leaving the alpine racing stadium after Carlo Janka's victory for Switzerland in the men's giant slalom. It was a return to the conditions that had postponed the start of ski racing for two days at the beginning of the Games, but it was something else, too: Mancuso Weather.
VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- No man has ever won four Alpine skiing medals at a single Olympics, but Bode Miller is a threat to make history today in the men's giant slalom. Medals will also be handed out in biathlon, Nordic combined, women's ski cross and the men's speedskating.
updated: Tue Feb 23 2010 04:26:00
Apolo Anton Ohno becomes the most decorated American Winter Olympian. Alex Thomas reports.
The bronze medalist hits the slopes - and the books
WHISTLER, British Columbia -- Bode Miller woke up on Sunday morning feeling "pretty whipped," as he put it. His crash a few days earlier, during a downhill training run for the men's super combined, had left him not so much sore as out of alignment. "I flew 35 feet through the air and landed on my hip," he said. "I'm fine, but it kind of feels like I'm crooked."
VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- Forget the NFL, and apologies to baseball:
WHISTLER, B.C. -- The truth? It's tempting to say that we - those of us disseminate our words through magazines, websites, newspapers and television -- missed on Julia Mancuso. That we spent the better part of a year hyping Lindsey Vonn as the star-in-waiting of the 2010 Olympics and cruelly overlooked Mancuso, whose giant slalom gold from Turin in 2006 gave her one more Olympic medal than Vonn had won in two trips to the Games.
updated: Thu Feb 18 2010 19:10:00
Vonn, White and Davis all win gold for the U.S. in Vancouver. CNN's Alex Thomas reports.
The skiing champ proves that her injured shin won't get in the way of her dreams
Eight months before the Vancouver Games, Lindsey Vonn skis the Olympic downhill in her mind. She is in a subterranean workout room at the Red Bull soccer club's training center in Salzburg, Austria, balanced with each foot on a nylon slack line suspended three feet off the pebbled orange rubber floor. She is crouched in an aerodynamic tuck, her hands thrust out in front of her chin. Trainer Oliver Saringer speaks gently into her right ear: You're on the downhill course at Whistler .... Vonn closes her eyes and begins shifting her weight rhythmically from one foot to the other as if executing high-speed turns on a Canadian mountainside more than 5,000 miles away.
updated: Wed Feb 17 2010 16:20:00
Bode Miller and Seth Wescott collect medals for the U.S. CNN's Alex Thomas reports.
It's a familiar story -- we look at the athletes' bodies and they seem unusual somehow. We think about what lengths they might have gone to in order to achieve such an abnormal build. Whatever it is they did, we wonder: Is it natural? Is it healthy?
WHISTLER, British Columbia -- Bode Miller's record-breaking bronze medal in Wednesday's Olympic downhill was even more impressive than it initially appeared. Hours after the race, Miller's uncle, Mike Kenney, who is also a coach with the U.S. Ski Team, told SI.com that Miller had undergone arthroscopic knee surgery shortly after Christmas, barely seven weeks before Monday's race. Miller's agent, Lowell Taub, confirmed the surgery in an email exchange on Tuesday.
updated: Tue Feb 16 2010 11:21:00
Skier Lindsey Vonn is using an Austrian cheese to help heal the shin injury she suffered while at the Winter Games.
The Vermont-based mogul skiing champ has been on the slopes since she was 2
VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- The long national nightmare ended at precisely 6:18 p.m. PDT on a soothing Sunday when a scoreboard at the bottom of Cypress Mountain flashed the final standings. Canada exhaled. The man who brought such relief is preternaturally upbeat fellow named Alexandre Bilodeau, a moguls skier who bumped his way down a 250-meter course and into the sporting history of his country.
It's fitting that Valentine's Day, a day when people lead with their hearts, fell during the Vancouver Games. Olympians bring the same dedication to training and competing as they do to supporting their communities and the causes that inspire them. Here are some examples.
VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- The third day of Olympic competitions falls on Valentine's Day, and no one can use a bigger hug than Canada following a tough Saturday in which the host country failed to end its home-gold medal drought. It's unlikely the Canadians will win a medal today (though they have a shot in men's moguls), but Sunday holds major promise for the U.S. in Nordic combined. Medals will also be awarded in the biathlon sprint, men's singles luge and women's speedskating. The highlights:
The last time it visited was four years ago, and right now it's embracing Vancouver. It's not the Olympic spirit, it's El Niño, the weather phenomenon that is helping to give Olympic organizers headaches by bringing warm air and rain from the South Pacific. The fog might be manna from heaven for American skier Lindsey Vonn, though, who wanted a few more days of cancelled training and races to let her bruised shin heal.
WHISTLER, British Columbia -- Alpine skiers are great waiters. Not that kind of waiter (although sometimes that kind, too, because if you're not at the highest level of the sport, like Lindsey Vonn and Bode Miller, you sometimes need another job, too; but that's a different discussion). Waiters. As in: They are very experienced at waiting.
updated: Fri Feb 12 2010 15:40:00
CNN' Ayesha Durgahee catches up with Ghanian ski racer who qualified for 2010 Winter Olympics.
SI.com's writers will preview each event from the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. Here's Tim Layden's look ahead to Alpine skiing.
Athletes from 97 nations will march in Vancouver tonight at the Opening Ceremony of the XXI Winter Olympic Games. Turn on your TV. Watch and cheer.
WHISTLER, British Columbia -- At just before noon on Thursday, Thomas Vonn was sitting in a mountainside media center talking to two reporters, waiting out a snow delay in what would be the first official Olympic training session for his wife, Lindsey. A voice crackled from Vonn's portable radio, the type that ski racing coaches wear to communicate from various points on and around the mountains.
WHISTLER, British Columbia -- Look at it this way: Ski racers are generally injured so often that half their careers are spent in some combination of pain-management and rehabilitation. And even by those standards Lindsey Vonn is an outlier, with a long and colorful medical history that has alternately compromised her career and elevated her personal mythology. She has a scar somewhere to match every title she's won.
The starts are crucial in the regulated mayhem of ski cross, the newest Olympic sport. Sometimes the whole race is right there at the outset. A few seconds, the top of the world. You can feel the tension even during a practice run like the one early last December when Casey Puckett and Daron Rahlves were settling into the stalls of a steel gate at the top of a training course at the Telluride Ski Resort. The Olympic qualifying races were just three weeks away and the Vancouver games themselves were looming in less than two months. The snow that had been falling over southwest Colorado for most of the day was erasing the blue dye lines meant to help the racers gauge the contours of the course, which featured a tricky array of banked turns, rollers, jumps and the deep U-shaped trenches right below the gate known as wu-tangs.
SI.com's writers will preview each event from the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. Here's David Epstein's look ahead to Nordic combined.
SI.com's writers will preview each event from the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. Here's Sarah Kwak's look ahead to freestyle skiing, broken down into the event's three disciplines: aerials, moguls and the brand-new ski cross.
updated: Wed Feb 10 2010 06:29:00
Dr. Jennifer Shu explains how to be prepared to travel to the 2010 Winter Olympics.
The snowboarding community and the sports world at large have rallied around Kevin Pearce, the 22-year-old Olympic hopeful from Norwich, Vt. who suffered a brain injury during a practice run on the halfpipe last week in Utah and remains in critical condition. As of Tuesday morning, more than 14,000 people signed on to the Facebook group Well Wishes to Our Friend Kevin Pearce. The site has received notes of support from fans and fellow snowboarders, but also from many survivors of traumatic brain injuries who have described the productive lives they now lead.
Jessica Jerome is exhausted. The Park City, Utah, resident wakes up early to teach ski lessons to youngsters. She's working 5 p.m. to 2 a.m. shifts at events at the Sundance Film Festival to earn some cash
She's up. She's down. She's up again. The roller coaster ride that is Lindsey Vonn's season rose to its apex again over the weekend, when the defending overall World Cup champion swept three speed races in Haus im Enstal, Austria. Vonn won downhills on Friday and Saturday and captured a Super-G race on Sunday, easing fears that a damaged left arm she'd hurt in a fall last month would impair her Olympic ambitions. The victories boosted her lead in this season's World Cup standings to a robust 192 points ahead of Germany's Maria Riesch.
Four people died and another three were missing Monday after two avalanches in the Swiss Alps, Bern police said.
What a difference a week makes for Lindsey Vonn. The U.S. alpine star had been horrible in Aspen, failing to qualify in the giant slalom and skiing off-course in the slalom. This past weekend, though, she nearly won all three races in Lake Louise, Canada. What's more, Vonn performed brilliantly under the same kind of conditions that often plague skiers in Whistler, site of the upcoming Olympics.
The machinery is fully cranked. Cameras are aimed, stories are in process (including one in Sports Illustrated), video packages have been assembled. In just over two months, the 2010 Winter Olympic Games will unfold in Vancouver and one U.S. skier will play the role of Michael Phelps, the athlete who can win multiple gold medals over the course of the Games, while delivering eyeballs to televisions and page views to Web sites. One athlete will be charged with monetizing the Olympic entertainment enterprise.
The World Cup races in North America weren't kind to the hosts last weekend, as both the U.S. and Canadian alpine teams lost skiers to serious injury for the rest of the year to serious injury.
From the very first words out of Bode Miller's mouth, it was apparent that this day would be different. "First of all, thank you guys for coming here,'' Miller said, opening his portion of a press conference in Los Angeles, at which he announced that he would be rejoining the U.S. Ski Team, and attempt to qualify for his fourth Olympic Games five months from now in Vancouver.
The death of actress Natasha Richardson, who sustained a fatal head injury while skiing, has reignited the perennial debate around the safety of the sport.
Skiers and snowboarders can cut the risk of brain injury dramatically by wearing helmets on the slopes, some experts say.
A chairlift broke on Monday morning, sending skiers into the snowy hillside at a ski resort in southern Spain, according to the Sierra Nevada resort.
'"I had such a crush on him when I was a kid," says my friend Didi Linburn, pigtails peeking out from beneath her pink ski helmet rather than the wool pompom hat she wore as a kid. I peer into the tiny ski shop at the Alta Peruvian Lodge and catch a glimpse of a cute guy in glasses behind the counter. "No idea how old he is," she says, "but I've seen him here every winter since I was 15."
The title on Chris Doyle's business card reads "mad scientist," but he's not crazy, he's just crazy about snowboarding.
Cross-country skiing is less speedy -- and therefore less intimidating -- than its steep-sloped cousin, downhill skiing. It also burns more calories, as skiers glide along snowy trails and skate up inclines.
Yes! No one is yelling, "Hurry up, Mom!" or tapping ski poles impatiently.
A group of skiers had a fortunate escape Tuesday after they were rescued from a stricken gondola that was left dangling over a freezing creek at a ski resort in Canada.
updated: Wed Dec 17 2008 03:29:00
A Gondola dangles in the air after the tower snapped injuring passengers vacationing at ski resort in Canada.
Passengers have been rescued from a gondola dangling over a freezing creek after the tower snapped in half Tuesday at a ski resort near Whistler, British Columbia.
The pros weigh in on every aspect of your skiing holiday--including your socks. Even you black-diamond types might learn a thing or two.
For Peter Metcalf, making a small business big is a matter of doing things in proper style. For this human StairMaster, that means taking the time to climb a combined 17,500 feet of Utah peaks on his 53rd-birthday weekend, toting a fine champagne for a summit party with family and friends.
The gold medalist ties the knot before 100 family and friends in Alabama
Dana White loves to say that running a major mixed martial arts organization isn't as easy it looks -- that's the typical self-congratulatory rhetoric we've become accustomed to from the outspoken UFC president. But White surely is the king of easy in comparison to the Elite XC, a recently tumbling promotion that has become the prodigy of making it look hard -- really hard.
One brief moment during Elite XC's second installment of Saturday Night Fights on CBS encapsulated the plight of the new promotion: UFC middleweight champion Anderson Silva flashed across the screen.
Thanks to its innovative wireless controls, family-friendly games and relatively inexpensive price tag, the Nintendo Wii is hotter than the dancing flames in Donkey Kong.
March gets noisy around now, here in the States. Tickets to the Big Dance are punched daily, brackets are busted, NFL free agents are signing, and veterans are being released or given new life. (Good luck David Carr, and if Eli Manning goes down, I don't want to be you even for one minute). In Florida and Arizona, the regulars are playing deeper into every exhibition game as Opening Day draws near.
Tucson grandmother Sandy Maxfield is determined to get her groove back -- on skis.
I love it when resorts really listen to us.
As his Gulfstream IV roared off the Bozeman, Mont., tarmac one Sunday this past December, billionaire Tim Blixseth glanced out the window and looked down at the Yellowstone Club. The homeowners in this 13,600-acre enclave include Bill Gates, News Corp.'s Peter Chernin, and Barry Sternlicht, the founder of Starwood Hotels & Resorts. The club is the world's only totally private ski and golf resort, and it is Blixseth's vision of nirvana. It is also as self-made as its founder, who grew up poor in rural Oregon and "ate Spam five days a week" when he wasn't using his father's shotgun to kill wild game for dinner. Despite this starting point, Blixseth went on to become a timber baron and smooth operator who twice persuaded President Bill Clinton and the U.S. Congress to allow him to create the club out of the Montana wilderness.
When Peter Jennings left the killing fields of Iraq in 2004 for a Swiss ski trip with his wife, he had no idea he'd never be on skis again. Death comes like a thief in the night, right? Cancer claimed the newsman the next year, but a production company he co-founded continued to make its first film, a documentary about extreme skiing called Steep.
Mary Blilie had been at Big Sky Resort in Montana for just one day but had already snapped more photos of her kids than she had in a long time.
An expansive talk with Sir Edmund Hillary about his historic ascent and the life and fame that came after
Olympic skier Jonny Moseley and his wife, Malia, have welcomed a baby boy, their spokesperson tells PEOPLE.
As mixed martial arts rises in popularity in the United States, many promotions are looking to get a piece of the action. With UFC possessing such an advantage in terms of recognition, visibility and market share, it will be an uphill battle for challengers.
The first news of last weekend was not shocking at all. After a meeting with officials of the U.S. ski team in Park City, Utah, Bode Miller had elected to separate from the team with the intention of competing independently on the World Cup Circuit. Team officials had offered Miller his customary position on the alpine team, befitting for one of the most accomplished racers in the history of the sport.
Imagine skiing on untouched snow where chairlifts, queues and other skiers don't exist.
During one December stretch, the U.S. Ski Team scored an unprecedented nine (top-three) podium finishes in seven races over a six-day period. It was a stunning display of high-level racing by five skiers, and coming one year after a disappointing performance at the Turin Olympic Games, lent some credibility to the team's marketing slogan (or "goal," depending on who you ask): Best In the World.
When American Julia Mancuso won the gold medal in the super giant slalom at the 2006 Winter Olympics, Stefan Ytterborn may have been the only Swedish skier celebrating.
For me, ski trips are vastly important. Riding chairlifts affords me the time to solve today's universal riddles:
U.S. alpine skier Lindsey Kildow has long been burdened by her own promise. She won an international race in Italy at age 14, followed by three medals in the junior world championships. She earned a place on the 2002 Olympic team at age 17 and, six weeks after her 20th birthday, had her first World Cup victory, at a downhill in Canada in December 2004.
Making your debut on the slopes can get tricky long before you slide off the chairlift.
When American Julia Mancuso won the gold medal in the super giant slalom at the 2006 Winter Olympics, Stefan Ytterborn may have been the only Swedish skier celebrating.
Alex Cushing had mountain-sized dreams. He founded one of Tahoe's first ski resorts, Squaw Valley, with one double chairlift and a rope tow, in 1949. Eleven years later the town hosted the Winter O...
Just as they have done for centuries, the bells in the tiny town of Disentis, nestled in a valley beneath the Swiss Alps, call out to monks.
Oleg, Dmitri and Anton have come a long way from St. Petersburg, Russia.
Top Ghanaian skier Kwame Nkrumah-Acheampong has just bumped into a couple of gates as he tears downhill over a tricky steep slope that makes up the grand slalom course at this resort in the Italian Dolomites.
Michelle Kwan is gone. Bode Miller failed to win even a bronze in his first event. What's a U.S. advertiser at the Winter Olympics to do?
Vermont Originals ski hat $33 When Tad and Jane Washburn left the advertising business to buy Vermont Originals in 2004, they also bought into a 33-year-old tradition. The Morrisville, Vt., company...
For those who like to combine skiing with pampering, a high-octane day on the slopes with a low-key evening sipping champagne in a hot-tub, physical exertion with relentless cosseting -- for those, in short, who like their ski holidays luxurious -- then the Game Creek Chalet in Vail, Colorado, is the place for you.
When Jean-Pierre Boespflug invites you to tour the first U.S. destination ski resort built from scratch in more than two decades, it helps to pack your imagination.
The Super G at Boyne is one wild ride.
You've heard of extreme skiing, but how about extreme ski resorts?
(CNN) -- The warmth of the spring sun on the winter's last snow usually signals the end of the ski season. But for some skiers in Europe and parts of Asia, it means it's time to hit the indoor runs at the local snow dome.
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