COPPER MOUNTAIN RESORT — On a snowy Saturday in Summit County, U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association (USSA) president and CEO Bill Marolt isn’t exactly in his element.
He isn’t far from it, however, watching from the corner of his eye the nearby throngs of skiers scratching their way down the firm, manicured snow of Copper’s Main Vein.
Marolt is first and foremost a skier — a ski racer, to be precise — who grew up in Aspen and trained at the University of Colorado under pioneering coach Bob Beattie before competing at the 1964 Olympics in Innsbruck, where he finished 12th in the giant slalom. Later, he would coach the U.S. men’s alpine team, eventually returning to take the USSA’s top job after a stint as CU’s athletic director.
But Marolt’s primary focus today is on the superpipe, the modern stunt ditch where even America’s foremost authority on ski racing can see the future foundation of American success at the Winter Olympics — in snowboarding.
“I was gone from USSA for about 12 years, and when I came back I really didn’t know that much about snowboarding. So I had to learn a lot myself,” Marolt said at last weekend’s U.S. Snowboarding Grand Prix competition at Copper.
“But we set out with the approach of figuring out how we were going to put our best riders in the Olympic Games. And I think the success the snowboarders had at the Olympics in Salt Lake City really surprised the entire industry. I don’t think they realized how big the Olympic Games were, how big the Olympic market is or how powerful the Olympic brand is. I mean, every event was sold out. In that sense, we’ve all learned together.”
By his second snowboarding Olympics in Turin — the third to include halfpipe since its 1998 debut in Nagano — Marolt, and the world, had a much better idea of what to expect. The American trio of Ross Powers, Danny Kass and J.J. Thomas had swept the men’s halfpipe competition four years earlier in Salt Lake. American Kelly Clark had topped the women’s podium, and Aspen’s Chris Klug fulfilled an improbable dream of reaching the podium in parallel giant slalom racing shortly after undergoing a liver transplant to cap the medal count among American snowboarders at five.
With Shaun White, Kass and Clark leading an even stronger halfpipe team and two new opportunities to medal with the addition of men’s and women’s snowboardcross races in 2006, expectations were high, to say the least. When the U.S. Team racked up seven more medals — four in the pipe, two in snowboardcross and a bonus PGS bronze — those lofty expectations were met, as snowboarders accounted for 75 percent of an otherwise lackluster USSA medal tally.
Marolt is quick to credit USSA’s snowboarding director, Jeremy Forster, with much of that success. Forster has been saddled with the difficult task of corralling the top talent in a notoriously individual discipline and unifying it once every four years as a team. With just more than a year to accomplish the feat once more at Vancouver 2010, the stakes are increasingly high for a guy whose success is measured in precious medals.
“I’m going to put a lot of pressure on Jeremy,” Marolt said with a smile directed squarely at Forster. “But what’s been really cool is that the staff has been really effective in developing plans that make sense for the right reasons. They’ve gone out and figured out the best way to do this stuff so that we send our very best athletes to the Olympics. . . . Yeah, we have a high level of expectation, we’re going to set high goals, and the snowboarding team buys into it.”
Fortunately for Forster and the rest of the U.S. snowboarding staff, the old adage of success breeding success appears to hold true. The former clashes between the sport’s rival organizing bodies (USSA and USASA) seem to have been resolved, and the current crop of young talent that has grown up watching role-model riders like Powers, Clark and White know nothing but respect for the Olympic ideal as they line up atop the superpipe at one of three Grand Prix events used to select next year’s team.
So in some ways, the job is getting easier. In others, it only gets harder.
“We’ve had great success in the Olympics, but the one thing we won’t do is take that for granted,” Marolt said. “In spite of what everybody says about our country, everybody still looks up to us, and everybody still measures themselves against the things that we do. Snowboarding is a prime example. Snowboarding is growing, and it’s going to be a big part of the Olympic Games. That’s because we bring a lot to the party. Everybody wants to beat the Americans.”
