Roark’s daunting journey to skiing’s biggest stage began on winding Vasquez Road in Winter Park, where she lived alone in a tent for six months and scared away bears by banging on pots. Thrown to the curb after her parents threw away their marriage, Roark had fled to the Rocky Mountains. When rain or the temperature fell, her bed was the cramped back seat of a 1980 Jetta.
“All I asked for my 17th birthday was food,” said Roark, her eyes filling with tears.
The Olympics seem like such an impossible dream to Roark that she hesitates to talk about the achievement, afraid if she mentions it her ticket to ride might somehow be revoked.
“The ‘O’ word,” Roark said. “For years, I couldn’t bring myself to say the whole word. It was too much. Too big. And I really didn’t think it was in my cards.”
On Saturday, after emerging from a broken home and enduring six knee surgeries, at an age when many skiers look to smooth out life’s bumps, Roark will launch herself off the snow and do a 180-degree spin with a giant backward spread eagle as the Winter Games begin.
“The trick is called the Bronco,” Roark said. “I’m a big football fan. And I’m from Colorado. So I’d like it to be known as the Denver Bronco.”
Once upon a time, when her mother and father were still in love, Roark was a prodigy on skates, training alongside future Olympian Nancy Kerrigan as a kid from Denver with big ambitions. The double axels and everything else Roark loved spun out of control when her mother and father divorced, eventually leading her to become a squatter on national forest land.
“I was kicked out of the house,” Roark said. “My mother said, ‘You have to leave.”‘
Roark lived with her father while attending Ranum High School for one year then set out on her own for Winter Park.
Ski towns are full of adolescents running from reality, in search of powder days and bluebird skies, because that’s easier to find than answers to life’s big questions. There might be a stack of dirty dishes in a restaurant sink or an endless pile of snow to shovel, but the poverty always is framed with a million- dollar view. It took a village in Grand County to transform Roark from lost teen to Olympic qualifier.
“Winter Park is my favorite place in the whole world,” said Roark, one of 57 graduates from Middle Park High School’s class of 1992.
After roaming the planet in search of the perfect mogul- bashing line, she believes there’s no better place to tackle the bumps than in a sleepy Colorado mountain town, where Roark simultaneously held down jobs at a bakery, the single-screen movie theater and a T-shirt shop to keep from starving on her skis.
“Most kids in her situation drop out of school and slip through the cracks. She didn’t. That’s pretty amazing,” said Middle Park science teacher Wayne Benesch. “What I remember most about Michelle was she was real short. But she had a big sense of responsibility.”
Competitive mogul skiing is a painful gurney ride down the mountain waiting to happen. Derailed by torn and tattered knees so many times it makes her wince, Roark scraped together the money to hire respected coach Cooper Schell as a private tutor and went off to South America last year to give the Olympics one last shot after seeing her dream go bust in 1998 and 2002.
“There’s some sort of tenacity I seem to have,” she said.
Roark clinched a spot on the U.S. Olympic team by winning a World Cup event in Utah last month. She studies chemical engineering at Colorado School of Mines and sells perfume through a website.
Maybe Roark is too old to be living the nomadic existence of an athlete whose sport is often small type and no hype in the newspaper. When she thinks about the Winter Games, however, the smile grows so huge the lines of hard experience that crease the skin near her eyes almost disappear.
“At any age, there’s nothing like putting yourself out there to do something you never thought you would be doing,” Roark said.
The natural state of the world according to Roark is chaos. So there’s no choice except to take charge. Grabbing the pen wobbling against the cast of this reporter’s broken right hand, Roark tapped on the fiberglass wrapping, delighted to hear somebody else old enough to know better had cracked bones skiing.
“There’s something about maintaining that ‘kid’ aspect. This cast. This pain. That’s living. I mean, you’re alive,” Roark said.
Currently ranked No. 3 in the world, Roark could be the first American woman at the 20th Winter Olympics to win a medal. More precious than gold, silver or bronze is the fact forgiveness has healed the deepest fissures in the family tree, and her father will be among the crowd at Sauze d’Oulx when the moguls are run by the world’s best.
And what of the mother who threw a heartbroken girl out of the house in Denver?
“My mother has never seen me ski one day my whole life,” Roark said. “I don’t hold any animosity. People get in bad situations. Get out of them the best way they know at the time. That’s life.”
Staff writer Mark Kiszla can be reached at 303-820-5438 or mkiszla@denverpost.com.
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By Mark Kiszla, Denver Post Staff Writer
Turin
The bone-rattling, mind-numbing ride of mogul skiing is nothing compared with the hard road 31-year-old Michelle Roark traveled to arrive at the Winter Olympics.
How far is it to the top of a mountain in the Italian Alps from the desperation of being homeless in Colorado?
