BEAVER CREEK — Growing up in a home on the backside of the Squaw Valley resort in California’s Lake Tahoe area, a passion for all forms of skiing took root in Travis Ganong’s soul long before he would become a world-class downhiller. Even when he was 8 years old, he couldn’t wait to get on the mountain, even in bad weather when others wanted to sleep in.
“Travis would be the first guy out and the last guy in, regardless of the weather,” said his mother, Jan. “We’d be going, ‘Oh, it’s raining, let’s stay in bed.’ He’d be at the side of our bed going, ‘Mom, Dad, get up! You’ve got to get me up to Squaw!’ I’m like, ‘It’s raining.’ He’d say, ‘It doesn’t matter, it’ll be fine up on top.’ That’s when I knew he was destined for a life in skiing of some sort.”
At the world championships here last February, to highlight a steady rise to the ranks of the world’s best. He was third in the first downhill of the season last week at Lake Louise, Alberta, and will be one of the main attractions in Friday’s downhill on the Birds of Prey, where top speeds will approach 80 mph.
As a boy, Ganong would see his father go to work by skiing up the backside of Squaw Valley and then down the other side to the medical clinic at the base, where he is a doctor. Now Ganong sometimes trains by doing the same thing. He was a good cross country skier in high school and would explore the backcountry with his dad, learning how to telemark. He even tried freestyle skiing at one point before focusing on alpine racing.
“Travis is the quintessential Squaw Valley athlete,” said Julia Mancuso, a four-time Olympic medalist who also grew up there. “He grew up with the passion of skiing, not ski racing, just every level of skiing. He has the Squaw Valley vibe.”
Ganong has a lot in common with another Squaw Valley skier, Daron Rahlves, who won World Cup races here twice and claimed a gold medal in super-G at the 2001 world championships. Both are small for downhillers, a disadvantage in gliding sections. Both are quietly fierce competitors.
“The number one thing I like about Travis, he has a passion for tearing up the mountains,” said Rahlves, who retired after the 2006 Olympics. “He’s a hearty kid. He’s just got a lot of soul. He’s humble and he works hard. It’s the way I carried myself, with the same sort of interests I had in skiing. There’s a link there.”
Rahlves, 15 years older than Ganong, was an inspiration to him.
“He was a smaller guy, but he made up for his size with technically perfect skiing and pushing the line where people would be holding back,” said Ganong, 27. “His whole style of ski racing, I really liked and could relate to it. It’s crazy I’m kind of doing that and following in his footsteps in a little way.”
It usually takes years of experience on the World Cup for a downhiller to figure out how to succeed. For Ganong, it started coming together two years ago. At the notorious Hahnenkamm in Kitzbuehel, Austria, he had a breakthrough, finishing seventh in downhill and sixth in super-G, career best results at time.
Two weeks later he was the . In the first World Cup downhill after Sochi, he scored his first podium.
He knew he belonged when he came here for the the world championships last February. He missed the gold medal by only 0.24 seconds and became the first American man to claim a world championships medal in downhill since Bode Miller and Rahlves went 1-2 in 2005.
“I never heard a crowd that loud before,” Ganong said. “It was amazing. Just so stoked to be able to perform on a stage like that on a day like that. I think it was the largest live crowd at a ski event in U.S. history, people all over the U.S. were watching on TV — just a great day for U.S. skiing.”
Ganong knows he belongs, but he remains humble and hungry.
“I’m feeling pretty confident in my skiing, but every day I wake up and I feel like an underdog, I feel like I have something to prove,” he said after Wednesday’s training run. “I’m still younger than all these legends that I grew up watching. I still have a lot of work to do, and feel like I’m still working my way up.”
John Meyer: jmeyer@denverpost.com or @johnmeyer
Ganong’s rise
Travis Ganong, 27, has been a fulltime racer on the World Cup since 2010-11 but emerged as a podium contender in 2014. A look at his top five results:
Feb. 9, 2014: Fifth in downhill at the Sochi Olympics
Feb. 28, 2014: Third in World Cup downhill, Kvitfjell, Norway
March 1, 2014: Fourth in World Cup downhill, Kvitfjell
Dec. 15, 2014: Fifth in World Cup downhill, Beaver Creek
Dec. 28, 2014: First in World Cup downhill, Santa Caterina, Italy
Feb. 7, 2015: Second in world championships downhill, Beaver Creek
Nov. 28, 2015: Third in World Cup downhill, Lake Louise, Alberta
Nov. 29, 2015: Fourth in World Cup super-G, Lake Louise
