Making Team USA: Meet Michelle Roark

When Michelle Roark was five, her father, Mike, took her to his job site. He was a construction engineer building a natural gas plant outside Coalville, Utah, 25 miles north of Park City.

The bright lights at the construction site and all the mud intrigued the little girl with blonde curls. Then she saw a blonde woman wearing a hard hat who was "telling all the men what to do."

"I said, 'Daddy, Daddy, what does she do?'" Roark remembered asking.

Her father told her that the woman was a chemical engineer, and Roark announced, "That's what I want to be."

But she didn't just want to be a chemical engineer. She wanted to be an Olympian too.

Thirty years later, Roark has realized both goals. She competed in the 2006 Olympics, finishing 18^th in moguls. And she has almost finished her degree in chemical engineering, with a focus on petroleum refining. She is already putting her knowledge to use. In 2005, she launched her first perfume, called Confidence.

"I tell people I'm refining a different type of oil, the essential kind," she said.

She now owns a workshop in downtown Denver, where she moved with her family when she was young, and a nearby spa/salon/parfumerie called Voila.

With seven employees minding the store while she is training and competing, Roark has her eye on qualifying for her second Olympics. And she hopes Confidence will carry her to the podium at age 35.

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Roark was first captivated by the Olympics after watching figure skating on TV during the Lake Placid 1980 Olympic Winter Games, where Americans Linda Fratianne and Charles Tickner captured silver and bronze medals.

For two years, Roark practiced on roller skates in the driveway. Her dad finally took her ice skating when she was 7, and she rapidly improved.

"I was super competitive in it," she said, "and I loved it - the costumes, the outfits, everything. I loved it!"

At one event in the mid-80s, she remembered standing on a podium with eventual national champion and Worlds bronze medalist Nicole Bobek in a competition at Vail, Colorado.

"She wanted to be the first female to land a triple axle," remembered Mike.

But figure skating became a financial burden on the family. When she was 15, Roark quit and focused her talents instead on her dad's favorite sport, skiing.

"I still wanted to go to the Olympics, so I started competing in freestyle," she said.

Her dad was a moguls skier, and he had Michelle and her brothers Scott and Matt on skis early. An instructor with the Eskimo Ski Program - the oldest children's ski and snowboard instruction club in Colorado - Mike took the kids every weekend to Winter Park Resort, where the program runs.

By age 10, Roark was skiing at the program's highest ability level - called top black (the club uses a color code rather than number scheme to distinguish the various ski abilities). Once they get to top black, they are very good skiers, explained Mike - "in fact, they're better than the majority of the instructors."

"As far as I know, Michelle is the youngest girl to make that level," said Mike, who was an instructor with the Eskimo Ski Club for 19 years. "She may be the youngest ever to make it to that level. The boys were 12 when they reached top black."

"Her skating really helped her skiing," he added. "Basically, it's the same edge control, just the skis have a longer blade than a skate. So it was a natural transition."

In 1990, her first year competing in moguls, Roark won the junior national moguls title. She was named to the U.S. Development Team but injury forced her to sit out two seasons - a theme that has carried through her 20-year ski career. She missed both the 1998 and 2002 Winter Olympics with injuries. Over the years, she has undergone six knee surgeries, three per knee.

In her down time - and even some years when she was competing - Roark did not just sit around and watch TV. To this day, she doesn't even own a TV. She enrolled at her father's alma mater, the Colorado School of Mines, a hard-core school of engineering located in Golden, Colorado. Her major: chemical engineering with a focus on petroleum refining.

"She can focus better than anybody I've ever seen," said Mike, when asked if he was surprised at his daughter's career choice. "Her powers of concentration are pretty amazing. For her to decide to do something - whatever it is - she'll end up doing it well."

She has taken classes at Mines on and off for over 10 years but is still two classes shy of a bachelors degree. Asked what she has left to complete, she said senior design and heat transfer.

Her choice of major conjures up images of white lab coats and safety glasses. But 5-foot-tall Roark, with thick curly blonde hair, looks more like a short fashion model and confesses that she would like to be a "Dancing With the Stars" champion one day.

Even when wearing a U.S. Olympic team jacket, she "girls it up" with a flowered silk scarf, gold ruffled blouse, skirt, and shiny red wedge pumps.

"I love clothes, I grew up in figure skating, for crying out loud!" she said, adding that she used to design her own figure-skating outfits, sparkles and all.

In shapeless ski clothes, she said she feels "like a short, fat boy."

But what her ski team outerwear lacked in style, her skiing made up for. In the past decade, she has stood on the World Cup podium 15 times, earned a silver medal at the 2003 World Championships, and won two national titles, the most recent last March.

Roark's career took a turn in 2002, thanks to U.S. Ski Team sports psychologist Karen Cogan, who advised Roark to visualize what it was like to ski well with all five of her senses - hear it, feel it, see it, taste it, smell it.

"I could do all of them but the smell," said Roark. "I had no idea what it smelled like to ski well."

Smells, in fact, are known to be strongly linked to memory. A unique odor, such as freshly mown grass or the smell of a certain cleaning agent, can trigger distinct memories from childhood or from emotional moments - positive or negative - later in life. These findings were documented in 1991 by Richard Axel and Linda B. Buck, who received the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work.

So why not wear a perfume that would conjure up memories of winning?

Roark set out to find a perfume that she would wear only for skiing. It would be her "scent of competition," she said. But she quickly realized that commercial perfumes wouldn't work.

"They would evaporate within an hour, or they would give me a headache," she said. "So I decided to use my engineering background, and I invented a natural carrier base with no alcohol or fillers."

Using information she found on the Internet and in books, she researched the medicinal properties of essential oils so she could combine ingredients that would invoke energy, confidence, and focus.

In the fall of 2005, she launched her company, Phi-nomenal, and introduced Confidence, a floral-citrus blend of rose oil from Bulgaria, Bergamot from Italy, with a "pink grapefruit twist."

The Phi-nomenal website (www.phi-nomenal.com), where Roark also sells her perfumes, describes the rose oil as "60,000 petals to create one ounce" and Confidence as a "firecracker scent."

Wearing Confidence, Roark had her best season ever in 2005/06, winning five World Cup medals, including three gold, and she qualified for the 2006 Olympic team. At the Torino Games, she qualified fourth for the moguls finals. But in the finals, she missed the landing on one of her jumps and ended up 18^th.

The following season, Sho Kashima asked Roark if Confidence would help him during his rookie season on the U.S. moguls team. She gave him a pink sequined neck gator doused in the perfume.

"I smelled like a girl," Kashima joked.

"I skied almost that whole season with it on, with the exception of a few warm events," he added. "It's hard to say if it helped. But I had a pretty good rookie season."

Whether or not the perfume helped is debatable. But during the 2006/07 ski season, Kashima competed in 10 World Cups, finishing as high as fourth. He also took seventh at the 2007 World Championships. He still has the gator, he said, but he hasn't worn it recently.

Since then, Roark has added five more perfumes to Phi-nomenal's line: for Focus, Balance, Adventure, Imagination, and Grounding. She also has created a men's cologne called For Real, which she joked should be called Chick Magnet. She said her husband, Mike Hormell, is only allowed to wear it when he's around her. Hormell was not available to comment on his wife's scents.

Even her dad wears For Real and says, "It's great."

Even with a successful business, Roark has maintained her focus on skiing. During the past season, she took second at a World Cup in January, competed at the 2009 World Championships (finishing 16^th), and won her second U.S. title in March.

"Michelle does a great job balancing all that is required," said Jeff Wintersteen, head coach of the U.S. Freestyle Team. "To be honest, we see very little of what she does with her business because when she shows up for camps or comp, that is her complete focus."  

Whether or not Confidence can carrier her to Vancouver remains to be seen. Wintersteen said that Roark is bringing her momentum from last season but that "the slate is wiped clean, meaning last year's results don't matter in who will qualify for the Olympics."

"Since we have one of the very best mogul teams in the world, our athletes are faced with not only making the team, but then being successful in the Games," he added.

But if she is successful, Roark may be asked to describe what victory tastes like.

Because everyone will now know what it smells like.

Peggy Shinn 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.