Adventure

What It's Like to Ski With an Olympian

An exclusive program at Utah's Deer Valley Resort lets you get schooled by a world-class athlete.
Deer Valley Resort Heidi Voelker
Courtesy Deer Valley Resort

The thing about regret is it doesn’t seem particularly on-trend at the moment. #Livingyourbestlife and practicing regular self-care and always “being in the moment” and reading 52 books in one year don’t allow for the headspace or time that proper regretting requires. Regretting something means you have to take a hot minute and harp on the past (the antithesis of mindfulness) and wallow a bit in shame about not going after something you wanted or want now for yourself.

I have a couple regrets (proof I am hopelessly uncool by today’s standards at the moment). One that should be filed under “piddling shit” but keeps surfacing as I continue to inch toward “That’s old!” territory is my failure to become a competitive skier. Granted, this is one of those seemingly first-world, troll-inviting admissions you’re kind of embarrassed to be writing down when the world is feeling so end-of-times. But I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t sting, probably because I’ve never felt anything physically as jolting as strapping two sticks on my feet and pointing them down a vertical drop most people wouldn’t want to walk down.

Those pricks of regret became more like stabs when I skied with a flesh-and-blood Olympian, Heidi Voelker, Deer Valley Resort’s ambassador of skiing, who oversees the storied mountain’s Ski With A Champion program. The idea is this: Mere mortals who have the cash get to make turns and ride the lift with a former Olympic skier for the day. This kind of bucket-list endeavor makes sense at a resort like Deer Valley, which is known as a tonier resort, the kind of place where you can sip Champagne in yurts and where a ski valet will help you unload your equipment from the car at the base (no hauling those Vokls on your shoulders from the parking lot).

Former Olympic skier Heidi Voelker

Courtesy Deer Valley Resort

Heidi, however, is the walking embodiment of a down-to-earth mountain jockess. I can’t imagine anyone carrying her skis for her. She’s lithe. And possesses that New England heartiness (she grew up in Massachusetts) that allowed her to ski upwards of 80 miles per hour on the sheets of ice found at every East Coast resort I’ve ever been to. She has what can only be described as a warm capableness, which comes from experiencing the grind of doing something over and over again until you’re, well, wearing a racing bib that reads USA across it. When I meet her at the base of the mountain, her brown hair is tucked up in her knit hat with a fur ball bouncing on top of her head and her tawny skin suggests she has an outdoor job. “Let’s do it,” she says, smiling, ready to take a few turns with us charlatans and not even tempted to lord her obviously superior athletic DNA over my brother and me. I revert to my 16-year-old self and desperately want to impress her.

Problem is, the 2017/18 season in Utah has not been blessed by the snow gods. It is what we avid skiers call “pretty crappy” conditions. (Okay, everyone calls it that.) And as such, we’re stuck on hard-packed groomers with everyone else. But here’s the thing about riding a chairlift with an Olympian—well, Heidi in particular. The lady has some good stories. She was a member of the U.S. ski team from 1985 to 1997 and competed for gold in three Olympics. In this gig, she’s taken a lot of guys out, with um, means, who parrot a common dis on Deer Valley, which is that it’s kind of lame in terms of advanced terrain. She then rightly puts them in their place and tires them out to near exhaustion showing them Deer Valley’s secret chutes that will make the most experienced skiers sweat and not because they’re wearing expensive long underwear.

Her mentor was Stein Eriksen, the stylish Olympic gold medalist and former director of skiing at Deer Valley, who, she says, “remembered everyone, or knew how to make it seem like he remembered everyone.” And when she competed in the 1992 games in Albertville, her brothers were much more excited about meeting NFL player-turned-bobsledder Herschel Walker, than watching their sister race yet again. “They said, ‘I’m good, I can go home now,’” she tells us with a laugh. (Though Heidi never won a medal at the Olympics, it’s rare an alpine skier would compete in three separate games. She admits that, “back then I thought it was a failure,” she says of her experience. “But 20 years later I can see that it wasn’t.”)

Deer Valley Resort

Eric Schramm/Courtesy Deer Valley Resort

If you glimpse the Ski With A Champion page online, you’ll see, “the experience is not a lesson.” And it isn’t. It’s more like take a few runs and then hear an Olympian give an informal Ted Talk as your thighs touch on the chair lift. When we all skied together, there was a bit of me chasing her and her probably humoring me making turns behind me, but then she’d glide by without effort. When I mentioned I was struggling with finding my line in a chute (steep narrow gullies usually surrounded by skull-crushing trees), she offered some fairly simple advice: “Let the powder be your resistance and don’t turn.” Heidi didn’t let the crappy terrain stop us either—she took us all over the mountain, up 10,000 feet to a spot that unfolded into waves of mountains that went on seemingly forever. I grew up in Utah, learned how to ski at Deer Valley, and had never encountered a view like this.

To go fast on skis, really fast, and feel...not so much in control, but masterful, skilled, is an adrenaline rush that can’t be replicated. I was told once I could probably be pretty good, if, in my tweens, I buckled down and got serious and practiced regularly. I don’t remember why I didn’t do it. Maybe laziness. Maybe, when the temperatures were hovering around 2 degrees in February, I preferred to throw the sheets back over my head. I mean, I still do that.

Olympic sprinter Jesse Owens once said, fairly bluntly, “We all have dreams. But in order to make dreams come into reality it takes an awful lot of determination, self-discipline, dedication, and effort.” So wanting to achieve something and actually doing it are canyon-widths apart. Skiing with an Olympic downhill racer is a chance to be in the presence of acute self-discipline, practiced consistently over time. And when you’re in front of it, on an all-white mountain among the snow-tipped pine trees, resentment over what you did and didn’t do falls away. it’s also, for lack of a better word, inspiring. When you’re with Heidi, there’s a bit of a halo effect, as corny as that sounds; it makes you want to just absorb and meet your own goal.

This year, I’m not joining an adult racing team (that’s like playing in a dad band). But I did make a pledge to ski with my six-year-old daughter every Sunday, no matter the conditions or how messy the house is or how many deadlines I’m up against. It’s a different kind of exercise in self-discipline, but one with big payoffs. Also, she likes to go fast like mom, so maybe there is a racer in the family.

To 'Ski With a Champion' visit deervalley.com. Full day is $2,000 (and does not include the price of a lift ticket). Half-days are $1,200.