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Ted Ligety, the only American to win two Olympic gold medals in alpine skiing, met his 3-year-old son Jax after kindergarten late last month and quickly learned that Jax had won a medal. in an after-school ski program.
“Jax showed me his medal and I said, ‘Daddy has medals too,” Ligety said in an interview last week.
It took Ligety 30 minutes to find his Olympic awards at his home in Utah, but once he produced them, Jax had a suggestion: The Ligety family ski medals belonged together, possibly framed. on a wall.
“It was pretty cute,” said Ligety, who told the story to help explain another recent family decision: his retirement from the sport.
After seven wins at Olympic races and world championships and 15 years as one of the elite performers in ski racing, Ligety, 36, will announce his decision on Tuesday, saying he wanted to spend more time with his growing family.
“My priorities have changed,” Ligety said. In addition to Jax, Ligety and his wife, Mia Pascoe, have twins who were born seven months ago.
“I don’t want to be away from home for five weeks of training or racing,” said Ligety, whose last race will be on February 19 at the world championships in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy. “And I don’t feel like I can’t do everything to the level I wanted.”
A magnetic personality of the Alpine World Cup tour, he has been a respected provocateur, using his voice to advocate for athlete rights while pushing the old-fashioned ski establishment to adopt a younger vibe.
In his prime, Ligety developed revolutionary techniques on snow that made him almost unbeatable in giant slalom for a few seasons. But four-time Olympian Ligety wasn’t a one-lap pony: he won the super-G, super-combined and giant slalom in nine days at the 2013 world championships, which no skier had. made. in 45 years.
With Lindsey Vonn now retired, Ligety will be remembered as a trusted star who bridged the gap between the Bode era in American ski racing and the current era of Mikaela Shiffrin.
Ligety became an overnight sensation – at least among American sports fans – during the Turin 2006 Olympic Winter Games, when he claimed his first major ski victory, a shocking upheaval in the event. combined. Bode Miller, who was set to win multiple medals at the 2006 Games, was the pre-race favorite and held the lead midway through the race. Ligety, then 21, was in 32nd place.
But in the endgame, Ligety, wearing eye-catching hot pink gloves and glasses, zoomed in to gain more than half a second.
“When I think of the 2006 Olympics, I still have goose bumps,” Ligety said. “I am in shock and awe.”
Two years earlier, Ligety was not among the top 300 skiers in the world. While most riders displayed the name of the corporate sponsor on the brim of their helmets, Ligety taped his own and wrote: “Mom and Dad”. Back home in Utah, his parents, Bill Ligety and Cyndi Sharp, still believed their son would be in college soon, studying to be an engineer.
The Olympic triumph turned out to be a harbinger, not an aberration.
Ligety quickly rose in the world rankings and became particularly dominant in giant slalom, winning the championship of the season in this discipline five times.
Plus, in an attempt to change ski racing habits, he co-founded a company called Shred, which develops helmets, goggles and other snow sports accessories. Ligety viewed existing racing ski brands as “super dorky” and wanted Shred to lead the sport in reclaiming some of the “cool factor” he believed snowboarding and free riding had emptied from traditional skiing.
Fifteen years later, Ligety said ski racing “definitely has a better image now,” adding that he “hoped we had a little to do with the merging of the different worlds of snow sports.
In 2013, with its place in the sport firmly established, Ligety took a courageous stand against its sport’s European governing body after deciding to increase the minimum ski lengths runners could use in giant slalom. In a stunning blog post, Ligety denounced the changes, which were passed without input from skiers.
“I had to push back,” he said last week. “I’ve always thought that regardless of the punishment, there is potential for more reward if it gives the athletes a voice in these things.
The change in ski length guidelines was eventually reversed, but not before Ligety – in another peek down the pecking order – figured out how to use the new longer skis better than anyone else. He won the opening race the following season on new skis by almost three seconds, an incredible margin for a sport in which races are often won by hundredths of a second.
At the Sochi 2014 Olympics, Ligety was a prohibitive gold medal favorite, and his victory in the giant slalom placed him in an exclusive group of American skiers. Only Mikaela Shiffrin, in 2014 and 2018, and Andrea Mead Lawrence, at the 1952 Oslo Games, also won two Olympic Alpine races.
Over the next several years, knee and back surgeries dulled Ligety’s ability to put in the voluminous training hours he had become known for, and his results reflected those limitations. The last of his 25 World Cup victories was in 2015 and he failed to win a medal at the Pyeongchang 2018 Games.
Ligety’s exit comes as there is a new promise for the US men’s alpine team, which has struggled to find replacements for aging stars like Ligety.
At the end of December, Ryan Cochran-Siegle, 28, won a super-G race, the first World Cup victory in this event for an American since Miller’s victory in 2006. Over the past 14 months, Cochran-Siegle teammate Tommy Ford, 31, has claimed three World Cup podiums, including one victory in the giant slalom . Although both Cochran-Siegle and Ford have seen their seasons cut short by injuries sustained in racing crashes, Ligety feels optimistic about their future.
“There is definitely a changing of the guard,” he says.
Asked what he expects to do next, Ligety said he wanted to devote more time to the day-to-day running of his business and continue to be heard on important competitive and cultural issues in ski racing.
“I won’t be invisible,” Ligety laughs. “But my main priority will be my family. I could be on the mountain with them.
Which will mean more time to add to the Ligety family medal collection.
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