The Best of the Worst
Here’s a safe prediction: The US Ski Team will like Vancouver better than Calgary.
By Edie Thys Morgan

My claim to fame, should I ever be desperate enough to want one, is that I was the best US skier at the 1988 Calgary Olympics. That achievement is better remembered in less flattering terms as, “the best the US could muster,” because the US Ski Team was coming off its most successful Olympics a mere four years earlier. Recently, I told my sister I wanted to write about the ‘88 experience and wasn’t sure what to call the article. “How about ‘Loser?’” she brightly suggested.

I’m pretty sure there was more to it than that, but I am still trying to figure out how one team went from winning five medals in Sarajevo, to being the only US ski team in the past 34 years to win no medals. It wasn’t talent—six of the athletes in Calgary won Olympic and WC medals in their careers. Many of the coaches, too, had previous or future success. Did we not train hard enough? I have the pictures to disprove that. Was it money? Again, the ski team coffers were much fuller in 88 than in 84. Our demise wasn’t the consequence of any one thing, but rather a combination of circumstances, a perfect storm on all fronts of bad luck, bad decisions and inexperience.

The summer before the Olympics, we still considered our medal chances to be pretty good. Sure, the big guns from the early 80’s had retired, but we still had World Cup Overall winner Tamara McKinney and gold medalist Debbie Armstrong. After two disastrous (and, we later realized, critical) years of athlete mismanagement and coaching blunders nearly caused a mass mutiny in 1986, a good crew was in place beneath a respected, experienced coach from the golden Eighties era. Relations with the equipment companies, badly damaged in the two-year leadership vacuum, had been mostly repaired.

Meanwhile, we relative youngsters were coming up slowly, and a few—like Eva Twardokens and Diann Roffe had come up very quickly. The alpine director of the moment (we went through them like Chapstick) referred to us as a “young inexperienced team.” He never further explained that our inexperience was a direct consequence of a ski team policy in place well before 1984 that had effectively decimated the entire tier of B team athletes. But that’s another story.

Nevertheless, we were naively optimistic, even in July when Debbie broke her leg wrestling with a teammate in Argentina. She’d be physically ready for the Olympics, but only barely. Then things got dicey. In November, during our last stateside tune up, Tamara broke her ankle. She too might be healed by February, but again with no training. “What else can go wrong?” I heard our head coach asking nobody in particular. If he only knew.

We headed over to Europe, the “speed” team (that is, those of us who raced the downhill and super G events) for some final training in Austria and the “technical team” (slalom and giant slalom specialists) straight to Italy for the opening slalom. On Thanksgiving Day, while the turkey cooked in our hotel’s kitchen, we excitedly settled in to watch the opening race. Eva, who had won a bronze medal in the 1985 World Champs as a pup of 17 was our first racer. We cheered as she burst out of the gate. Moments later we heard her scream as she disappeared in a puff of snow. She reappeared on the ground, clutching her blown out knee.

When we joined the technical team in Italy for the opening super G, a small miracle happened. I scored a seventh placed from “out of nowhere” as the press likes to say. Really, there is no such thing. Breakthrough performances are the natural progression, when work pays off, and things come together. The coaches leveraged my result into a motivational moment. This, they assured us, was our opportunity to step up and show the naysayers (and there were many) what this new generation could do. We pushed on to Leukerbad, a resort tucked high into the Swiss Alps where sparse snow conditions, sharp terrain and constant shadows made for a deceivingly treacherous course. Our entire team performed disastrously.

If we were frustrated the coaches were moreso, and that night we got “the speech,” about just how far behind the world we lagged. “Forget about the Swiss, Germans and Austrians,” our coach began. “The French are ahead of us, the Canadians, the Yugoslavians…” He went down the list, finishing with, “the Litchensteinians!” That hurt, considering their entire team included one racer.

Still riding a wave of confidence after the super G, I mistook this for a pep talk, but when I looked up I saw bowed heads and red eyes. The next day I waited a long time in the start, largely ignoring the whop, whop, whop of a helicopter airlifting a racer from the course. I was so focused on my run that I didn’t even notice when our trainer disappeared.

After a somewhat harrowing but fast run I enthusiastically radioed a course report to the girls in the start. Only then did I notice that two teammates already in the finish were white as ghosts. Nick Howe, the writer who traveled with us looked as if he might be ill. The helicopter had been for my teammate and good friend, Tori Pillinger. She had swung wide on the final gate, wrapping her body around the metal finishing post at 60 plus miles per hour.

Two teammates saw the grisly scene in person, and the rest of them saw it on TV from the mountain lodge, before their runs. Thanks to helicopters, great hospitals and excellent doctors, Tori survived. Our team, however, never fully recovered. A few of us who could have celebrated personal bests in the countdown to the Olympics, instead tread lightly amidst frayed tempers and fragile egos. We limped through January and after the final downhill (and another injury to Adele Allender) in Bad Gastein, the Olympic team was quietly announced.

Once in Calgary, the throng of media attention and medal hype again boosted our hopes. Miracles do happen, so why not here? Why not us? After getting our Olympic uniforms, credentials and gear, we checked in to our temporary digs at the Olympic Village and marched in the Opening Ceremonies to deafening cheers. For that moment at least, we all felt proud.

And then the Games began. We moved to our on site housing that the USST had arranged closer to the Alpine events. The Swiss had booked up the one luxury slopeside hotel for their athletes, coaches, masseuses, and—no lie– hairstylists. All that was left, we were told, was the trailer park. We stayed two to a trailer, tromping through the snow to a communal shower. When ABC did a special showing the Swiss dining on white linen and us roasting hot dogs over a bonfire, the sponsors went berserk. Miraculously, rooms in slopeside homes occupied by VIPs materialized. But by then the term “trailer park trash ” was stuck in our psyches.

On the morning of the downhill race when Pam Fletcher, our top ranked downhiller, crashed into a course worker and broke her leg, we barely flinched. It was, as they say, all downhill from there.
Maybe that all explains why, despite all the negative attention we received from those Games, when I came down from my super G run and placed 9th amongst the best skiers in the world, I didn’t feel like a failure. I felt like a survivor.

At the end of the trip we watched the opening World Cups which were impressive! I realize it was a heck of a lot easier running downhill straight down that face than arcing thirty turns on it. It was excellent to get a dose of the scene, to hear the wacky announcer zinging along in four languages and to see the real deal Ground Zero of skiing.

My kids thought their parents went to Europe and all they got was a lousy t-shirt (and a lot of chocolate). And they might have been right, had I not secured a start list for both of them and one autograph on each of their shirts. When they toted the start lists around for week studying the names, I knew that lousy shirt could become something way better.

Two weeks later I took them to Copper Mountain, a place I thought I’d never again visit voluntarily in mid November. It seems the Circle of Life can be cruel, and I find myself with two youngsters who are incredibly eager to ski on one trail with a bazillion people strafing the hill next to them.

No really, it was fun. Now that I live in the east and my early season alternative is the white ribbon of death at one of our fine resorts, I can see that the skiing was in fact quite excellent. Copper has changed in some ways. It has a bigger fancier village, better lifts, no sketchy Club Med and even more snowmaking. But the November vibe is the same and it’s all business. The air is filled with pre-season tension and excitement. By the time we loaded the lift, rows of downhill skis were getting strapped back together and the US Ski Team was already done with their 6:30 training session.

This was the perfect place for my fan training program to come together. I armed the kids with their Soelden shirts and a Sharpie and whispered how to politely stalk members of the US Ski Team for autographs as they were packing up their gear. The first day the kids merely loitered pensively on the sidelines, unable to go in for the kill. I was worried. Perhaps they didn’t have the stalking instinct.

That night, we were at a Squaw Valley group dinner with Stacy Cook and Marco Sullivan, who engaged the kids in conversation as soon as they saw their shirts and hopeful faces. I’ve never been a huge fan of the US Ski Team “playing hard to get” PR tactic, but the athletes sure get the part about building enthusiasm at the grass roots level. Once my guys got a whiff of real ski racer contact, they were like sharks smelling a drop of blood.

The next morning they woke up, wolfed down an Eggo and put on their gear without any prompts or threats. “Mom—we need to get to the lift for some autographs.”

This time, they were fearless, or at least savvy. I could see my son lurking at a respectful distance but trying to get eye contact, making sure the pen—and his intent—were clearly visible. The athletes were wonderful, gladly signing and asking the kids questions about their own ski racing. The kids came back to me periodically and asked in hushed tones who had signed their shirts. Truth is I’ve lost touch, which is easy to do when your only source of ski racing coverage is the Internet. So I taught them the trick about asking the athletes where they were from, and looking them up later. That way you can sort of pretend you aren’t just asking anyone in a uniform for an autograph (even if you are) and the athlete isn’t insulted. These pieces of stalking etiquette are important to me.

So now, I’m pretty sure I’ve created monsters. Already, they are disappointed that I am not taking them out of school for two weeks to watch the Olympics (what kind of parent am I anyway?), but said that it sure would be great to see Birds of Prey next year “when” (not if) we go to Colorado.

I guess we’ll be going, with our Sharpies.

I remember the Tuesday afternoon when Elvis died. It was “Elvis week on the Three O’clock Movie, so I had actually been watching Blue Hawaii when the 3:30 news update told of the King’s demise. Even though I was just a kid, I knew it was a big deal. So I was somewhat surprised that when Michael Jackson–our modern day Elvis–died suddenly, my kids were merely mystified at all the fuss about this “weirdo,” with ironed hair and pale skin and a deer-like nose. When I realized they had never seen his previous incarnations, I was at first appalled at their cultural illiteracy. But when I discovered my parent’s total lack of Michael Jackson reverence, it dawned on me that my generation was perhaps the only one to have incorporated Michael Jackson into its collective psyche. I felt a bit hollow, like I’d blindly invested in some cheap pop culture icon. I thought his passing should be something more historic, but it seemed the only takeaway my children would get from Michael Jackson and his tragic end was that being rich and famous isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Slowly, however, they came around. As they saw more footage of MJ from when he was an eleven-year-old superstar, they became intrigued. Then my sister, ever the vigilant aunt, sent them the “Thriller 25” disc and DVD set for their education. It not only showed the Thriller, Beat it and Billie Jean videos, but also the classic Motown Anniversary show where slinky, snappy MJ unveiled his moonwalk to the world. This sent them to You Tube for an MJ video-a-thon, and “How to Moonwalk” in six easy steps. Soon they were channeling Michael Jackson into their daily routine–moonwalking across the kitchen floor, entering every room with a toestand and punctuating their speech with Woo!, Hoo!, Woo hoo!

On our summer cross-country plane trip I allowed my iPodl-ess son to purchase the commemorative Michael Jackson magazine issue of his choice. Eleven dollars later he returned to the gate with a phone-book sized tome of MJ pictures, facts and stories. He devoured it, and by the time we landed in Reno he was an authority and a staunch defender of all the Pop King’s quirks: “He did not bleach his skin. He had Vitaligo”; “He did not do anything inappropriate with children. He just liked being around them because he was robbed of his own childhood.” He called up a You Tube videos of Christmas Day at Neverland where Michael delightedly scampered outdoors to play with his eight new supersoaker water guns.
“Mom, he was just a kid at heart.”
I happily fed this enthusiasm, as a way to vindicate my own musical youth but also to tackle some weighty issues.

When backstage footage of the Pepsi commercial came out, we counted the eight seconds that Michael’s hair was aflame, and discussed the theory that this event led to his addiction to painkillers. “Why didn’t he quit taking the painkillers when he was supposed to?” they wondered. I answered with a speech about the gray area between physical and emotional pain, and the slippery slope towards drug addiction.

“I wish I’d known him,” my son lamented.
“He could have used a friend like you,” I assured him sincerely, then talked about the importance of family and friends and people you trust, about how money can’t buy you any of those things. I was on a roll.

I took the boys into Wal Mart for school supplies and emerged with the Essential Michael Jackson two disc set, possibly my best purchase ever. These became my silver bullets for road trip bickering. All I had to do was crank them up and the squabbling stopped as the boys belted out songs. Even my own unchecked singing did not curb their enthusiasm. I comforted myself with the thought that perhaps this sad death may earn the entertainment genius recognition from at least two more generations, and vindication with the generation that first made him famous. Finally we may find compassion for his freakish evolution.

When school started, the kids in my carpool gamely adapted to all MJ all the time. Soon, each could request his favorite song by disc and track number, proudly singing all the words and the word-like sounds (I’m still not sure what Sha-mon means, but we say it a lot). Their astute observations– “Of course it doesn’t matter if your black or white. He was black and white”– led to spirited discussions, about which MJ song was the best, which outfit, which hair, which nose, etc. The debate on best voice was resolved by an authoritative statement from the way back seat:
“You know, nobody really knows what his true voice sounded like, because when he hit puberty he started taking those, you know, hemorrhoids.”

As Halloween approaches, Michael Jackson fever has not abated. We scour Ebay for red leather jackets and wide brimmed hats, sparkly socks and a glove. And the teachable moments keep coming. Just recently I heard an assured statement from the back seat:
“I know why Michael Jackson was so good.”
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“Because his dad beat him when he did things badly.”
I let it sit a second.
“Ok. And I know why Michael Jackson’s dead.”
“Why!?”
“Because his father beat him when he did things badly.”
A collective, unspoken “huh?” filled the air of the back seat, while I prepared to connect some of the dots between our scattered collection of MJ factoids.
“Do you remember when we talked about the Pepsi commercial, and how he started taking the pain medications for physical pain, then kept taking them for emotional pain?”
“Yeah”
“Do you think that maybe the emotional pain came from his Dad beating him?”
It felt, at that moment, like something came full circle. Did they get it? That when raising kids, “Beat it” is not the solution? Will they stay away from drugs, choose trustworthy friends, value family relationships, and respect their bodies as they are? Maybe. Maybe that’s too much message from one extraordinarily complicated individual. But they’ll sure have a mean moonwalk for college.

The Miracle on Mascoma St.

By Edie Thys Morgan

I have many lists in the kitchen, but only one has a title. “The Lost” is a growing tally of mysterious disappearances that I truly mourn. Included are things like my hockey skates that were new last year, one son’s down jacket and the other son’s camera, my cell phone and one snow boot whose surviving mate prompts countless forays into the black hole of basement bins. At the bottom of the list is something that was lost so that something much more precious could be found.

My son had been filling a coin jar in the kitchen by skulking around the dryer door, and cleaning out the couch crevices. When it reached its absolute maximum capacity, he begged, “Please can we go to CoinStar?” We had exactly 30 minutes during his brother’s guitar lesson to get to Price Chopper, cash in his coins, and do our shopping. It took 10 minutes just to coax all those coins through the flat slot and into the clattering belly of the machine, but when it was all done we had a slip of paper worth $82.50, net of the 8% that goes to CoinStar. “That’s a lot of money!” I smiled at my son, who skipped gleefully through the store, slip in hand. “That’s a lot of money,” I warned, nervously monitoring his progress, and forgetting half the things I needed to buy. We checked out with a minute to spare and I tucked $82.50 into his zippered pants pocket.

Of course a seven year old has no business with $82 in his pocket. But, I rationalized, it was only for a few minutes. We just needed to make one stop, at the Lebanon Village Market for three staples I had forgotten at Price Chopper. In five minutes we circumnavigated the store, from the free sample area through produce, dairy, and of course the ice cream zone.

Not a half mile from the store I heard the shriek.
“Where’s my money?” Brakes were slammed, one voice was raised.
“You’re kidding me, right?” Then I asked the same dumb question everyone asks when you lose something: “Where did you lose it?” as if anything can be lost if you know that answer.

Back at the store a young manager accompanied us for one frantic lap, charitably conducting a CSI re-creation with my son while I urged him to “just remember!”  She took down our name and number and gave me a sympathetic look. “At this time of day it’s so busy…” She kindly let her statement trail off then added: “You never know, there are some honest people left.”

I smiled weakly and we left, still in shock. The car was silent until a small voice came from the back seat:
“I still have the 50 cents.”
I might have embraced his optimism, but I fumed.
“Maybe someone will find it,” he continued, relentlessly hopeful.
“$82 is a lot of money,” I reminded him helpfully, “and times are really tough now,” then added with zero conviction, “But like she said. You never know.”

Later, we recovered for a teaching moment. I admitted that I should not have given him the responsibility of carrying so much money and he agreed that if he actually earned the money he’d be more prepared to keep track of it. We thought of jobs he could do for friends and neighbors. The tears dried, and he was over it.

My husband was also surprisingly calm, especially considering most of the change originated from his pockets. “Look at it as your personal economic stimulus package. In 20 minutes you supported CoinStar, two local super markets and one lucky consumer.”

I called in the next day. No luck, and (by the quick reply) probably no note posted prominently with my name and number. Two days later I headed back to the market on a trumped up premise, chastising myself all the way to “Get over it!” As I placed my not quite necessities on the belt, I hesitated to break the checker’s rhythm. But I owed it to my son.

“Um, I know it’s a long shot but has anyone turned in some money?” The checker halted her autopilot scanning, and locked her eyes to mine.
“How much?” My heart skipped.
“$82”
She turned away from the register reached into the safe and handed me an envelope. Inside were 6 bills, exactly $82.

Tears sprung to my eyes. I was overcome that somewhere out there–even now, when you can’t depend on a steady paycheck or GM or peanut butter–anonymous goodness exists. It felt nothing short of miraculous.

As I stood there, blathering gratitude and eternal allegiance, the checker resumed her job, seemingly unfazed and explained: “I just saw this in the safe after my break. It wasn’t there a few hours ago. There’s no note or anything, but it can’t be anything else.”

I floated to the bus stop, and when the kids had buckled themselves into the car, I could no longer contain myself.

“Do you believe in miracles? I asked them.
All three blurted at once: “Yes!”
“What’s a miracle?” I asked.
“Getting a Mercedes for free!” our young neighbor volunteered. “My grandpa told me he saw that in a magazine.”
“No, that would be a scam.” I offered a hint: “Like finding something you thought was lost forever?”
“Oh I know!” my oldest son said proudly, “Like when you lost your phone and you got a new one for free?”
“No, that’s marketing.”
They were losing patience.
“What’s this about Mom?” the nine year old cynic demanded.
“Let your brother tell you what it’s about.”
I handed him the envelope and watched his eyes widen. All three boys counted together, “Twenty, Forty, Sixty, Eighty….”
“Eighty Two dollars!” he yelled. “It is a miracle.”
Thank you, whoever you are, for giving me that.

I’m not blog savvy in any way, and think there are much better uses of people’s time, BUT in a nod to full disclosure I am writing another book (this time about skiing) and I for one am interested in all your stories. I have no idea how this will all shake out, but it will take some usable form at some point.

Some good fodder:

Formative, entertaining, memorable or otherwise significant aspects of ski racing (or any sport), as a participant at any level–fan, spectator, parent, coach, groupie, etc…

Hall of fame: The best and worst of coaches, roommates, training methods, gear, etc…

Trips from hell: 8 hours across Italy and up a dead end pass, stuck in Miami for two days with nothing but winter clothes, 80 mph on narrow roads in a Passat with one windshield wiper and no defroster, 10 days on tour in a station wagon with an annoying passenger that ate too much dried fruit. Let’s hear ‘em.

Let ‘er rip on anything, but keep it clean and respectful. You can always call me with names and details!

Things are just getting rolling here, so bear with us as we get things up to speed!