Ted Ligety, the only American man to win two Olympic gold medals in alpine skiing, met his 3-year-old son, Jax, after preschool last month and quickly learned that Jax had won a medal in a ski program afterwards from school.
“Jax showed me his medal and I said to him, ‘Daddy has some medals too,'” Ligety said in an interview last week.
It took Ligety 30 minutes to find her Olympic awards at her home in Utah, but as soon as she introduced them, Jax had a suggestion: the Ligety family’s ski medals should be together, perhaps framed on a wall.
“It was really cute,” said Ligety, who told the story to help explain another recent family decision: his retirement from the sport.
After seven victories at Olympic and world championships and 15 years as one of the elite ski racing artists, Ligety, 36, will announce his decision on Tuesday, saying he wants to spend more time with his growing family.
“My priorities have changed,” said Ligety. In addition to Jax, Ligety and his wife, Mia Pascoe, have twin children who were born seven months ago.
“I don’t want to be away from home for five weeks of training or running,” said Ligety, whose last race will be on February 19 at the world championship in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy. “And I don’t feel like I can’t do everything at the level that I wanted.”
A magnetic personality on the Alpine World Cup tour, he has been a respected provocateur, using his voice to defend athletes’ rights and at the same time urging the former ski establishment to embrace a younger vibe.
At his peak, Ligety developed revolutionary snow techniques that made him almost unbeatable in the giant slalom for a few seasons. But Ligety, a four-time Olympian, was not a one-man pony: he won the super-G, the super-combined and the giant slalom in nine days at the 2013 world championships, something no male skier had done in 45 years.
Along with Lindsey Vonn, now retired, Ligety will be remembered as a trusted star who bridged the Bode era in American ski racing and the Mikaela Shiffrin era.
Ligety became an overnight sensation – at least among American sports fans – during the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, when he won his first major ski victory, a shocking surprise at the combined event. Bode Miller, who was due to win several medals at the 2006 Games, was the pre-race favorite and kept the lead in the middle of the event. Ligety, then 21, came in 32nd place.
But in the finals, Ligety, wearing attractive hot pink gloves and goggles, shot ahead to win for more than half a second.
“When I think about the 2006 Olympics, I still get goosebumps,” said Ligety. “I am in shock and amazement.”
Two years earlier, Ligety had not been ranked among the top 300 skiers in the world. While most pilots had corporate sponsor names displayed on the flaps of their helmets, Ligety taped his tape and wrote, “Mom and Dad”. Back at his home in Utah, his parents, Bill Ligety and Cyndi Sharp, still assumed that their son would soon be in college, studying to become an engineer.
The Olympic triumph turned out to be a harbinger, not an aberration.
Ligety rose rapidly in the world ranking and became especially dominant in the giant slalom, winning the one-season championship in this discipline five times.
In addition, in an attempt to help change the sober ways of ski racing, he co-founded a company called Shred, which develops helmets, goggles and other accessories for snow sports. Ligety considered the existing ski racing brands to be “super dumb” and wanted Shred to lead the sport in order to regain some of the “cool factor” that he believed snowboarding and free riding had drained from traditional skiing.
Fifteen years later, Ligety said that ski racing “definitely has a better image now”, adding that “I hoped we had a little to do with the merging of the different worlds of snow sports”.
In 2013, with his place in the sport firmly established, Ligety took a bold stance against the governing body of his European-based sport after he decided to increase the minimum ski length that riders could use in the giant slalom. In an exciting blog post, Ligety protested the changes, which were approved without the participation of skiers.
“I had to back down,” he said last week. “I have always thought that, whatever the punishment, there is potential for more reward if it gives athletes a voice in these things.”
The change in ski length guidelines was finally reversed, but not before Ligety – in another nudge in the hierarchy eye – figured out how to use the new longer skis better than anyone. He won the opening race of the following season on new skis for almost three seconds, an unprecedented margin for a sport where races are often won by hundredths of a second.
At the 2014 Sochi Olympics, Ligety was a prohibitive favorite for the gold medal, and his victory in the giant slalom put him in an exclusive group of American skiers. Only Mikaela Shiffrin, in 2014 and 2018, and Andrea Mead Lawrence, at the 1952 Oslo Games, also won two Alpine Olympic races.
In the years that followed, knee and back operations dulled Ligety’s ability to apply the voluminous hours of training for which he had become known, and his results reflected these limitations. The last of his 25 World Cup wins came in 2015, and he did not win a medal at the 2018 Pyeongchang Games.
Ligety’s departure comes when there is a new promise for the United States alpine men’s team, which has struggled to find replacements for aging stars like Ligety.
In late December, Ryan Cochran-Siegle, 28, won a super-G race, the first World Cup victory in that event for an American since Miller won in 2006. In the past 14 months, Cochran-Siegle’s teammate, Tommy Ford, 31, has had three World Cup podiums, including a giant slalom victory. Although Cochran-Siegle and Ford have had their seasons interrupted by injuries sustained in racing accidents, Ligety is optimistic about his future.
“There is definitely a change of guard,” he said.
Asked what he hopes to do next, Ligety said he would like to dedicate more time to his company’s daily operation and continue to be heard on important competitive and cultural issues in ski races.
“I will not be invisible,” said Ligety, laughing. “But my main priority will be my family. I can be on the mountain with them. “
Which will mean more time to add to the Ligety family medal collection.