Athlete Bios
Freestyle skiing- Skicross
Rahlves: champion skier of all seasons
Last Updated: Monday, February 8, 2010 | 1:40 PM ET
New York Times for CBC Sports
Skicross racer Daron Rahlves, of the United States, won the X Games in 2008. (Streeter Lecka/Getty Images) Daron Rahlves is the most decorated American men’s downhill skier in history.
He spent 13 years on the United States ski team, competing at three Olympic Games, before retiring from World Cup competition with 12 victories, including the prestigious Hahnenkamm downhill in Kitzbühel, Austria.
A year later, Rahlves shifted to a newer freestyle discipline called skicross, and quickly became one of the world’s leading competitors, winning the event at the 2008 Winter X Games and joining the United States skicross team.
Born and reared in Northern California, Rahlves, 36, spent his formative years at his family’s Lake Tahoe compound, skiing and racing Jet Skis.
In 1993, he won the world Jet Ski championship in the expert division, and considered a career racing Jet Skis, but chose ski racing instead. One year later he qualified to ski on the World Cup circuit.
At 5-foot-9 and 180 pounds, Rahlves was smaller than his peers in ski racing, many of whom are the size of NFL linebackers. Heavier racers travel faster on straightaways, so Rahlves concentrated on form and perfecting the timing of his turns. His focus on technique translated into fast times.
During his alpine career, Rahlves made 28 World Cup podiums in downhill and super-G.
In 2001, he won the world championship in super-G. But his most prestigious win came in 2003 on the harrowing Hahnenkamm downhill course — 3,000 vertical feet of ice, air, and hairpin turns at 140 kilometres per hour.
Rahlves became the first American to win the title in more than 40 years. The next year, he won the Hahnenkamm super-G. All of which secured his legend in Alpine.
Still, Rahlves struggled on ski racing’s biggest stage. He competed at the Olympics in 1998, 2002 and 2006. In 1998, he placed seventh in super-G at the Nagano Games in Japan, his best result.
Missing out on an Olympic medal was “the biggest hurtful moment of my career,” Rahlves once said. “I put my whole life, my whole career into downhill ski racing, and that’s what I wanted the most.”
With his downhill skills diminishing, Rahlves retired from Alpine racing after the 2006 Winter Games, at age 32.
A year later he took up skicross, a freestyle discipline featuring fantastic crashes where four jostling competitors speed down a course while negotiating bumps, jumps, berms, and rollers. At the 2008 X Games final, Rahlves used his Alpine speed to surge past more seasoned skicross racers for the win, marking him as a top competitor in a sport that will make its Olympic debut at the 2010 Vancouver Games.
Although skicross competitors travel about half the speed as the fastest downhillers, “it does make me more nervous than alpine racing,” Rahlves once said. “With all the close combat, sometimes at the finish line it’s almost like you want to start boxing someone.”
