Making Team USA: Meet Alice McKennis

 

Alice McKennis is fast.

 

Fast enough to step into her long white downhill skis, blast out of the starting gate at Lake Louise, Alberta, on December 5 and – in only her third World Cup start – snare a 10^th-place finish against the best skiers in the world.

 

To put the feat in perspective, that day’s winner – the world and World Cup champion Lindsey Vonn – required 44 starts before she was able to crack the top 10 in a World Cup race.

 

“It’s all about making sick turns!” McKennis texted her former coach Casey Puckett after the race.

 

By earning two more results in the low 20’s this season, McKennis has also fast-tracked her career. She has gone from making the US development team to qualifying for the US Olympic team in just 19 months.

 

And if the World Cup rookie is named to the Olympic team on Monday, as expected, it would enable McKennis, 20, and Puckett, 37, to walk together in the Opening Ceremony in Vancouver (provided doctors clear Puckett to compete after a recent shoulder-collarbone separation).

 

Puckett, for one, would be thrilled. “I never would have guessed I would be able to compete in Vancouver with an athlete I coached,” said the four-time Olympian.

 

It would be just as meaningful to McKennis, the blonde speed racer with the brilliant blue eyes who grew up on a hay and cattle ranch near New Castle, Colorado, about 50 miles northwest of Aspen.

 

Her father, Greg, would also be proud. He taught McKennis to ski when she was 2.

 

“She took to it right away,” he said. “I hung my pole out to the side and taught her to turn. Then I looped a rope through her suspenders, put her in front of me, and in a couple weeks, she was on her own. Even then, she wanted to go fast. She wanted the fall line."

 

At 5 Alice followed her older sister, Kendra, into racing, but her career began inauspiciously. In Alice’s first race, she hooked a gate with her ski tip and spun out.

 

A more profound loss was yet to come. That summer, in 1995, her mother, Jill, was in a fatal car accident. While driving to a horse show in Wyoming, her Jeep rolled over and she died from the resulting injuries.

 

Afterwards, Greg maintained the ranch with the help of his two daughters, and the three of them formed a tight bond through their busy and itinerant lifestyle.

When Alice wasn’t skiing, she was an equestrienne who excelled in three-day eventing (an Olympic discipline that includes cross-country, show jumping, and dressage). She competed at the regional level until she was 14, against riders from Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico. Sometimes, Alice would enter three horses at a single competition and ride each of them, one-at-a-time over obstacles, against the clock, and in front of judges. It was a grueling day for a horse, but maybe even more so for Alice.

 

She was so serious about riding that she almost gave up ski racing a few times. "I kinda hung in there with skiing,” she said, “and I'm glad I did.”

 

In the winters, Alice bounced from ski club to ski club in search of the best racing program. She spent one year in Vail at age 9, then one year at Steamboat, two years in Summit County, two years with a private coach, and finally, two years in Aspen where she worked with Puckett, before moving on to Utah’s Rowmark Academy where she grew even more dedicated to the sport.

 

Interspersed with Alice’s athletics, schoolwork, and ranching, there were far-flung family adventures. Greg took the girls climbing in Bolivia and the Himalayas, on horseback safaris in Kenya and Botswana, and even scuba diving in the South Pacific. On one of these trips, it struck him that Alice might be physically gifted.

 

“We were trekking in Bhutan,” he said, “and one afternoon, the guide said we’d be camping in the valley, and pointed to a spot several miles below us. As we jumped from rock to tree down this mountainside, she kept up. Alice must have been 9 or 10. I felt, ‘This kid’s got it. She’s going to make it all the way. She’d been [ski] racing maybe three years by then. Just watching her, I felt like, ‘This girl really is going to go the whole way.’”

 

However, there were times when Alice wanted to quit skiing.

 

She mentioned it to her father every year for three years, and the season before she made the team, she told him, “I’m done.”

 

“I think she was frustrated that she’d worked so hard and didn’t make the team,” Greg said. “It was too much work and not enough fun.

 

“I told her, ‘Why don’t you just go to the US camp at Mt Hood [Oregon], try it, and see how you feel?’ In retrospect, thinking that it may be her last season allowed her to aside the quest for results and focus more on having fun.”

 

McKennis’ attitude shift had a dramatic effect on her racing. Her 2008 season was full of breakthroughs that forced US coaches to reconsider her potential. That February, at the Canadian National Championships in Whistler, B.C. she placed fourth in the downhill and captured a bronze medal in the super-G three days later.

 

The bronze “was pretty big for me,” she said. “I hadn’t even podiumed in a Nor Am race yet,” (the North American minor-league circuit).

 

Two weeks later, on the biggest stage in her nascent career, she placed ninth in downhill at the junior world championships in Formigal, Spain.

 

That May, McKennis was named to the US Development team but she was still under the radar.

 

“We sort of knew of her,” said US women’s head coach Jim Tracy. “But until [the young ones] really do something, we sort of wait and see.”

 

In December 2008, McKennis proceeded to start the Nor Am season with four consecutive victories in five days: two downhills and a super-G at Lake Louise, and another super-G in Panorama, B.C..

 

“That was huge,” she said. “I hadn’t won a race since I was 14.”

 

In March 2009, McKennis returned to the Junior World Championships, in Garmisch, Germany, and placed fourth in the downhill – just .02 seconds away from a bronze-medal tie.

 

That result was as meaningful as it was heartbreaking because the slope didn’t favor her style. “It was a shortened course with barely any gliding,” McKennis said, and McKennis is a masterful glider.

 

She has such an uncanny touch on the snow that her teammate Keely Kelleher, says, “I think she’s the only girl who can gain speed on the flats.”

 

At the end of last season, when the 2009 Nor Am points were tallied, McKennis was the top-ranked woman in both downhill and super-G which meant she was guaranteed a start in those disciplines on this year’s World Cup.

 

Although McKennis must continue to work diligently to improve the basic technical aspects of her skiing (for example she tends to put too much weight on her uphill ski, according to US women’s development team coach John Hale), she has successfully weathered the transition onto the World Cup. And she has demonstrated that she belongs there leading up to Vancouver.

 

For all the focus and hard work McKennis is applying to keep her career on an upward trajectory, her father said, “She’s keeping this thing in perspective.”

 

And she hasn’t let success or pressure stifle her youthful exuberance.

 

During her breakthrough race in Lake Louise, McKennis competed with kitten whiskers and “Meow” written on tape that protected her cheeks, nose, and chin, from the cold. At the finish line, she squealed when she heard announcer say 10^th place – and immediately turned to the scoreboard to double check. After she took off her skis, she faced an enthusiastic crowd of kids asking for her race number.

 

“It was the first time anyone’s wanted my bib,” she said, and threw No. 50 over the fence and into a sea of small mittens.

 

A few weeks later, in Val D’Isere, France, when the team drew Secret Santas, McKennis had only one item on her wish list: a Snuggie – one of those goofy blankets with sleeves that is heavily promoted in TV informercials. Not only did she receive it – in a leopard print pattern – but she was also given an adult onesie with monkey feet.

 

“She was so excited,” Kelleher said, “and it was made of crap material! She was wearing it for the rest of the trip” – and France is known for high fashion, not Snuggie chic.

 

No matter.

 

McKennis is not only fast, but she’s one of a kind.

 

Aimee Berg is a freelance contributor for teamusa.org. This story was not subject to the approval of the United States Olympic Committee or any National Governing Bodies.

 

Tags: Alice McKennis, Audi FIS World Cup, Making Team USA, US Ski and Snowboard, Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games