Photo courtesy of Shannon Bahrke

Q&A

As an Olympic athlete I get asked some pretty funny questions from time to time. The American public only sees us every four years for two weeks—not a lot of time to get acquainted. So I will answer some of them, and maybe these were ones you were wondering yourself.

1) Do Olympians make money? Well, it’s all dependent on who you ask. There are a few Olympians out there who are millionaires. I, however, do NOT fall into that category. I would call myself more of a thousandaire! I am one of the lucky ones who most of the time comes out ahead. We make prize money when we win World Cups. And I have endorsements, and I am so thankful for my sponsors (BioEnergy RIBOSE®, DonJoy®, Moment Skis, and Toko®). There are some athletes, and I’ve definitely been there, who have to fund their own travel, food, lodging, training, etc. We don’t take home a $44 million dollar pay check like the pros, and for most of us, we don’t compete for the money, we compete because we love what we do!

2) If you’ve made the Olympic team once, don’t you get an automatic spot on the next one? NOPE, that is completely false. We have to compete for our spot on the Olympic Team each and every time. On the U.S. Ski Team we have to compete all winter long to actually retain our spot on the ski team. It is like that in most Olympic sports too.

3) How many different sports do you compete in at the Olympic Games? I don’t know that many business people who could be the CEO of an airline company and also a doctor. The same is true with us. We spend our whole life trying to be the best in one sport so we only compete in one sport at the Olympics. I am only a mogul skier!

4) How often do you train? We spend on average 3-5 hours in the gym every day six days a week. We have a strength and conditioning coach we work with, and he writes us all of our programs. They include a lot of cardio, weight training, balance, intervals, plyometrics, etc. In addition to this I try to do as much work outside of the gym as possible like hiking, biking, and yoga.

5) Where do you ski in the summer? We actually practice our jumps into the water at the Utah Olympic Park in Park City. We ski down a plastic ramp and go off a jump into a pool of water. It hurts a lot less when you land on your head in the water as opposed to snow!! And we try to get back on snow at least every six weeks even in the summer. We have a spring camp in Colorado. Our next camp is either Whistler in Canada or Mt. Hood in Oregon, depending on where the snow is best. Then we head down south to El Colorado, Chile—there are many, many powder days there in August!! In the late summer we go to Zermatt, Switzerland to ski on a glacier. When the snow finally hits the U.S. again we go to Colorado and train at whatever resort has snow.

6) How much and where do you travel for competitions? We travel pretty much every week or every other week from Dec. 15th until the end of March. We rack up a lot of frequent flyer miles on Delta. We’ve been to Japan, Korea, Switzerland, Germany, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Italy, Czech Republic, France, and of course all over Canada and the U.S.

Ok, enough questions for now. If you think of any I’d love to answer them. I’m off to the gym!

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