Over 20 years, race days were generally tension filled. Where to stand and watch? How to properly encourage or congratulate without sounding like this was really nothing more than expensive thrills and fun? What to do when they fall or miss a gate? Can I offer help? How to check the scoreboard nonchalantly so as not to appear too interested, too keen?
Angie Duke, Beaver Creek 2018. Photo: Gepa images
By Biddle Duke
I remember watching other parents at my kids’ first races, searching for clues on how to be a ski-race parent. How to handle the confusing mix of pride and terror as our 8- and 9-year olds came into view over the icy knoll on Stowe’s Slalom Hill, small, wobbly, and by the looks of most of them, out of control.
Many of the parents shouted cheers and whoops of encouragement. I joined in, but my voice belied an anxiety I felt every race day right through to our son’s final collegiate race.
My own two kids weren’t accustomed to hearing me raise my voice. If I shouted at them on the side of that mountain, would my 8-year-old daughter look over, startled, and veer off course?
“Why’s dad shouting? What’s he shouting about?”
Once, as she barreled her way down the course, she heard me calling out, “Go, Ellie!” She called back, between GS turns, “I’m going!”
How to behave as a ski-race parent was never obvious to me. Over 20 years, race days were generally tension filled. Where to stand and watch? How to properly encourage or congratulate without sounding like this was really nothing more than expensive thrills and fun? What to do when they fall or miss a gate? Can I offer help? How to check the scoreboard nonchalantly so as not to appear too interested, too keen?
Most questions revolved around one central question: how to help my kids find joy in this sport, where victory is so painfully elusive?
“How’d Tyler do?” I’d ask a fellow dad and friend about his son, once my own son’s chief rival.
“Third loser,” he’d reply, jokingly, or some version of that. Meaning Tyler had finished fourth. Tyler Mullin ended up racing—and winning—through high school but the sport took hold of him in more profound ways. Like so many ski racers he will forever be one of the best skiers anywhere he goes.
•••
In reflecting on my years as a ski-race parent I went looking for answers, and the kind of perspective I wished I’d sought when I was starting out.
What if every race season began with a required meeting for new parents entering the sport? When my kids started racing in 2000, there was a parents meeting, but it was more logistical than directive. I would have loved to have heard from a parent who knew what I know now. To be able to ask questions like, “What should I do if my kid falls in a race and I’m standing right there? How should I talk to my kid on the car ride home after a tough loss, or even a great success?”
Gatherings where such questions are possible are more commonplace now. But “it’s been missing and there’s a need for that from the very beginning,” Eileen Shiffrin, mother of one of the greatest of all time, Mikaela Shiffrin, told me. “The right kind of parental involvement from the start is essential, I’ve always stressed that.”
How parents engage in any youth sport is a matter of endless discussion and debate—and increasingly, rules. But most rules for parents are self-evident: don’t be a jerk. Our kids need us to not be jerks, but they also need us in other ways, ways that are more nuanced and often unspoken. As parents we can be the most influential people in our child’s development. Or, we can’t. It depends on how we go about it.
Many of skiing’s champions—Henrik Kristoffersen, Marc Girardelli, Shiffrin, Ivica and Janica Kostelić, Lindsey Vonn—were coached or managed, or both, by their parents at some point in their careers, and most at the top have exceptionally close and sometimes complicated parental relationships. But what works for Mikaela Shiffrin, who for years was coached and managed by her mom, is not necessarily what’s right for Ted Ligety, whose parents mostly cheered from the sidelines. Few of us have Eileen Shiffrin’s or Ante Kostelić’s or Helmut Girardelli’s experience or knowledge.
•••
So, how about the rest of us?
“Your main job is to provide unconditional love, period, full stop,” said longtime Green Mountain Valley School headmaster and coach Dave Gavett.
Seems easy enough. But it’s not. Boundaries get blurry in sports, and as parents our egos get wrapped up in our children’s athletic dreams. That’s where the trouble starts.
Gavett groomed dozens of U.S. Ski Team athletes at GMVS. He saw all sorts of ski parents. Many struggled with their kids, he said, crushing their spirits, hurting their relationships, instilling the wrong values. Every coach can tick off the telltale signs of parents who are emotionally suffocating their children.
“You can celebrate success and share in the joy, but parents shouldn’t live vicariously through their kids. Those are the parents who say ‘we had a great race today.’ ”
“‘We?’ ” Gavett said, rhetorically. “There is no ‘we’ here.”
“Children are so intuitive. They understand when they’re driving the bus and when dad or mom is driving the bus. Kids want it to be their thing. If you allow the child that space it is going to happen. You can’t manufacture that in a child.”
Parents have no choice but to be hyper involved at the beginning of the ski-racing journey—from early morning wake ups and providing meals to transportation and morale boosting. But always check your enthusiasm.
“A parent’s drive and passion can overwhelm kids,” Chip Knight, the United States Ski Association’s national alpine development director, told me in a conversation last season. “At a certain point it’s important that children realize that the passion comes from within, so that it’s intrinsic to them, not the parents.”
Ski racing is a minefield of disappointments. Which, it took me years to grasp, is why it’s a great teacher. It knocks you down again and again, forcing youngsters to search for confidence and strength to keep at it. Most kids race for clubs and teams but ultimately how you feel about yourself and the sport is all up to you.
And success is often painfully subtle and utterly meaningless, except to the racers themselves. Nothing else in my children’s young lives taught them to find the emotional strength that ski racing did.
“How’d it go today?” the conversation might have gone with my son.
“I fell.”
“Bummer.”
“I’m OK. I had a great first run.”
Sometimes my son Angie would tell me he was satisfied because he’d skied well for a few turns in a race. A few turns. To be clear, he was squeezing the joy he needed out of about 10 seconds of an entire day, a day that had been the focus of years of training, tuning, travel, frostbite, bad ski-area food, to say nothing of missing out on all the fun stuff he might have done as a teenager. Ten seconds. That was enough to keep going.
“Failure should be celebrated,” is Dave Gavett’s advice. “So many parents are just looking for success when really 80 percent of the learning takes place in the failure. As Henry Ford said, ‘Failure is just an opportunity to begin again in a new way.’ ”
“When the moment is right, just ask questions and let them try to find the answers,” Gavett said of dealing with a disappointing day of training or race, or an injury, or a conflict with a coach. “When the moment is right. Just ask ‘do you want to talk about it?’ Don’t lecture. Just try to elicit thoughts, to help them work through it.”
That, Gavett stressed, is how young athletes will learn from failure. No amount of parental wisdom—or information—can learn it for them.
“Never lie,” cautioned Barbara Ann Cochran, an alpine skiing gold medalist, a former U.S. ski teamer, and sports therapist.
Lie?
“Never tell your children they skied well when they didn’t. They’re smarter than that, they’ll see right through you, your credibility will be shot, and they’ll never listen to you. Just find something positive to say, like ‘you had a solid start.’ ”
“As an athlete you always need to feel there are things you are doing well, and that the skills you have will help you succeed,” said Cochran, whose son, Ryan Cochran-Siegle finished last season 20th overall on the World Cup as a member of the U.S. Ski Team, his best season ever.
Barbara Ann shared a story from her own racing career. She’d finished eleventh in the first run in the world championships in Val Gardena in 1970. Her dad, Mickey Cochran, ordinarily didn’t have the money or the time to go to most of his kids’ races in Europe—he raised four ski champions—but he was there on that day, as a spectator, as a parent.
The first run, on an unrelentingly steep pitch, icy and unforgiving, had gotten the best of Barbara Ann. Her sister Marilyn, also in the race, had finished ahead of her.
Biding her time between runs, “I was nervous,” Barbara Ann recalled. “Really nervous.”
“I knew Dad was at the top of the course behind the ropes with the other spectators,” she said. “So before my second run I went to find him. I told him I was really nervous.”
An impish grin appeared on Mickey Cochran’s face.
“Nervous?” Barbara Ann recalled him saying. “I always thought you were the cool cucumber in the family.”
That was it. No advice. Nothing more than a small, sweet compliment.
“That cooled my nerves right down.”
Barbara Ann went on to win the silver medal, overtaking her sister. Giggling, she added, “I don’t think Marilyn talked to Dad between her runs.”
•••
I chortled recently when Dan Leever, publisher of the online magazine Ski Racing, reported in his Fall Line column that his magazine’s research found that few, if any, parents felt regrets about their journeys through the sport.
No regrets? Absurd costs, huge time commitments, families sent into funks by children stewing through grueling race days, the total subordination of everything else—all other activities, pastimes, and possibilities—to one single goal.
I can’t be the only parent who frequently would ask himself, after doing my volunteer race day in sub-zero temperatures or trying to soothe my broken-hearted child after watching him fall at the first gate: “Is this supposed to be fun? Is this worth it?”
But I can see why most parents told Leever’s researchers how much they loved the sport and what it had given them and their families. In the end, for me, despite the many doubts and questions over the years, and a few regrets, the answer also is yes, it is absolutely worth it.
My daughter coached last season at Taos, N.M., after living away from the mountains for a number of years.
I watched her with her U10s, guiding them through drills and their preferred activity, ripping through ancient stands of fir, pine, and spruce. It snowed and snowed over the holidays and the skiing was quiet, effortless, and perfect.
“I’d forgotten how good I am at this, how it makes me so happy,” Ellie beamed, as she played pied piper.
At some point along the way I became a hindrance. My children surpassed any knowledge and any skills I might have had when they got to the age of about 14. And the joy and thrill I derived from my children’s journey in the sport could get in their way. My role faded. I became a spectator.
Letting go was painful—and thrilling. They were on their own, which really means they found the people they needed to keep going.
“What’s really critical is that athletes learn to find support and coaching and advice from all the different sources around them,” said U.S. Ski Team’s Knight.
“Our sport really takes a network,” the three-time U.S. Olympian said. “And learning how to use that network is a great skill that they’ll have forever.”
“It’s also important that they can coach and take care of themselves. If parents are too heavily involved it can get in the way of building that valuable resiliency in the athlete.”
•••
I asked my son recently how I’d done as a ski parent. He raced from the age of 7 through college, and spent a season racing in Europe for the ski team of Argentina, where he was born. He’s 25 now, and will ski only a handful of days this winter.
There’s a last-man-standing aspect to skiing. You don’t have to be Bode Miller to find your way onto a college squad. You have to be good, sure, and you have to stick with it. This was my son’s story. He stayed the course, and it paid off, racing four years at Middlebury College.
Angie had dark days. Long stretches where he wasn’t finishing races, illnesses and injuries, failed attempts to reach goals, 16 years of training and more training, of travel, and some awful encounters with difficult people. But memory—his and mine—doesn’t go there.
“When I look back, I don’t think about the results, the really tough parts,” he said. “I just think about how much fun it was.”
I often go back to chairlift rides in the sun, my kids silently beaming, in their element, a few sparkling snowflakes.
While he reminisced, I ran through the years in my mind. I made all the mistakes. I cared too much. I lied, complimenting him when he knew very well that a compliment was undeserved, mistakenly believing that’s what love required. I ran to the scoreboard after his finishes. I hung out too close to the start houses. I stalked him on live timing, cursing when the clock would run long—had he fallen? Was he OK?. My wife and I never knew what to do when he was racing far away. Call, clumsily, after races?
“How’re you doing?”
“Fine.”
“Do you want to talk?”
“Not really.”
•••
Recently, Angie recalled a weeklong trip we’d taken to races in Europe, father and son. He’d had a tough season over there. Poor snow, few finishes. But he was surprisingly upbeat when we met up in France that spring. Off we went, no coach, no tech, in a crammed station wagon, to six races across the Alps.
The start lists were all Europeans. We bunked up together in tiny hotels, every meal just the two of us, and sleuthed out nooks where he could tune his skis. He needed me, but I played it down. He skied well, but continued to struggle with finishing. What he remembers is us being together.
“That was a great trip. The mountains, the races, hanging out the two of us.”
I pressed him further.
“You weren’t perfect, who is? ... You were great,” he laughed, using “great” almost as a substitute for “why are we having this conversation?” and “thanks.”
I can remember times when I was not great. Like when I was scolded by one of his coaches for over-exuberance when he skied onto his first podium at a major race.
“You’re making the other kids uncomfortable,” the coach told me.
I asked Angie about that day. He doesn’t mention the cringe-worthy moment.
Whether that’s rosy hindsight or fuzzy memory doesn’t matter.
All that comes to mind is that it was a day when he was at his very best.