The Ski Journal • Volume 15, Issue 2 • CHANGING LINES WITH STAN REY

Never short on jokes, Stan Rey is all smiles in the mountains. Here, he rocks a face full of gratitude at Whistler Blackcomb, BC. Photo: Guy Fattal

Stan Rey is not afraid to cry. “That’s why I love watching sports,” he says. “They show their emotions. It’s so beautiful to see someone in tears of joy from accomplishing a lifetime goal.”

He cried three days before we talked because his recovery from a fully torn ACL was slower than he’d wanted. He cried when he got married. He cried when he proposed. He cried when his wife, Kelsey Serwa, won an Olympic ski cross gold medal.

Sure, he may attribute it to his 14 concussions (“I’m an emotional person because of all those brain injuries,” he jokes), but Stan has always had a big heart and been willing to ride the ups and downs.

For a professional mountain athlete like Stan, that heart is a superpower and liability rolled into one. It might have kept the pro skier, former ski cross racer and big sender from his own Olympic medal, but it helped him win him a lot more—love, friends, fans, longevity.

Stan is proof that nice guys don’t have to finish last, that a willingness to cry is not an impediment, that sometimes the cream rises to the top simply because it’s creamier, not because it ruthlessly beat everyone else down. Stan’s competitive energy is generative rather than destructive, a refresh on an elite-level sport that doesn’t always skew that way. It might be why Stan ended up on top of the mountain instead of the podium.

As a young man, Stan was a freakishly talented athlete with endless energy and a competitive switch that, to this day, refuses to turn off. Stan’s social bike rides often turn into punishing races, and even Settlers of Catan games get explosive. Once, he challenged his former alpine ski racing teammate Kevin Drury to a wrestling match and almost chose a broken back over conceding defeat.

“I was a tiny little kid in school, ” he explains. “I had to try and prove myself, and I think I let sports do it.”

It’s a chip Stan has carried his entire life. Stan can’t remember a time when he didn’t want to be an Olympian. His grandfather and personal idol, René Rey, was a Swiss National Champion in alpine skiing and competed in the Olympics in slalom. Now several Olympic medals are tucked in the drawers beside his bed. None of them belong to him. Stan is consistently in awe of his wife’s Olympic accomplishments, but he’d be lying if there wasn’t a pang of envy. To understand that intersection is to understand Stan—the confluence of grace and personal drive with no hint of slowing down.

The Rey family moved from Europe to Whistler in 1996. His grandparents bought the house next door. They spent their summers in Whistler, but rented out the house in winter to pay for young Stan’s ski racing.

Whistler in the mid ’90s was more of a community of mountain-lovers than a destination resort. As recent arrivals to a new country, Stan’s dad, a baker, worked as a ski instructor, his mom as a bank teller. Stan joined the Whistler Mountain Ski Club to train gates, but a foot of fresh snow would usurp training and Stan spent much of the season freeskiing into Whistler’s secret spots with legendary coaches such as World Cup-winning racer Rob Boyd.

After the BC Ski Team moved a 21-year-old Stan out of the training group to bring in more young talent, his competitive streak needed a new outlet. Not ready to give up on his Olympic dream, he spied an opportunity in ski cross, set to debut as an Olympic sport at the Vancouver 2010 Games. He worked as a ski technician for the Canadian Ski Cross Team to pay his way around the circuit and get enough starts to earn a spot on the team. It wasn’t an orthodox approach, nor was it welcomed by the other athletes, but it got him to the World Cup. He won a Canadian national title, and, though he missed out on his Olympic debut, he took fourth place at the 2011 Winter X Games.

The sport of ski cross was in its infancy. Size and weight of a skier were big factors, and the internal team dynamics were so toxic that a consultant would later be brought in to mediate among athletes. Stan’s performance and athleticism were starting to gain him the respect of his teammates, but the rift caused by his season spent working as their technician had was tough to bridge.

Serwa, who was also competing at the time and would go on to win a silver medal at the Sochi Games and gold at Pyeongchang, thinks Stan’s big heart held him back. “Stan is such a nice guy and he took that niceness into his sport,” she says. “He was always afraid of hurting other people. He wouldn’t want to make a move on somebody to pass them if it might throw them off or land them in the fence. He was more worried about hurting someone else than hurting himself.”

So, in 2012 after his second World Cup season that ended with a torn groin and lower abdominal muscle, Stan left the team—and his Olympic dream—behind.

He was publicly gracious when he retired from racing, but he had hated his time on the team and was stepping into uncertainty. A social animal, he’d been ostracized by the teammates he’d set out to help. Eventually the mistreatment consumed him clouded an Olympic dream that had always appeared so clear. It was a tough initiation to the elite level of his sport, teaching Stan that a person can only absorb so many body blows before being knocked out or leaving the ring entirely. Stan chose the latter. It was time to search for untracked lines.

Refocused on freeskiing, Stan, who is also a licensed carpenter, offered himself up as free talent for Whistler Blackcomb’s marketing department. He wasn’t picky about what he did. “They have such a good audience, it was a no-brainer to do everything I could with them,” Stan says.

He pitched the idea of doing a GoPro edit of skiing Spanky’s Ladder and they spun that into a bigger campaign, called the GoPro Any Day Lines. He made mainstream headlines in the Vancouver Sun: “Stan Rey throws massive backflip on Spanky’s Ladder.”

Stan’s first big break came in the lineup at Blackcomb Mountain’s Glacier Express quad. A high school friend, Jay Trusler, was filming Into the Mind with Sherpas Cinema and invited Stan to join for the day. “I did a few backflips off a cliff and that kind of kick-started my career,” Stan says.

Another old high school friend, Blair Richmond, was working with Switchback Entertainment and had mentioned his name. Stan was on the call list when Salomon Freeski decided to make Moment’s Notice, a film about what might happen if your buddy called to ask, “It’s storming over in Japan. Can you drop everything and leave tomorrow?”

“My name shouldn’t really have been in there. I was just sponsored by our local Salomon rep at the time,” Stan says. “But when Josh Daiek didn’t pick up the phone, they called the next person on the list and that was me.”

That trip is still a career highlight, the best snow conditions he’s ever skied. It didn’t hurt that he left an impression, tossing double backflips and showing a tight Salomon team that he was down to go big. When he got home, he bought a snowmobile and linked up with such skiers as Cody Townsend, Mark Abma and Chris Rubens—skiers he’d looked up to for the better part of a decade.

“We call him Stanimal, he goes so hard,” says Alexi Godbout, fellow Salomon athlete and Stan’s co-producer with the Blank Collective. “When we look at a face, no matter how flat the landing is or how big the air, he’s always going to pick the biggest line.”

Stan had finally found his place in the ski world, but when his sister got into a car accident in 2015, it shook his foundation. Stan put his life on the line every day, yet now his sister was suddenly fighting for her own.

Olivia—32 years old and the eldest of the Rey siblings—was driving on a crash-prone stretch of highway between Vancouver and Whistler during a torrential downpour when her Honda Civic flipped into oncoming traffic. Olivia’s best friend died in the crash and Olivia sustained a C6 and C7 spinal cord injury that caused quadriplegia.

“Stan was not in a good place,” Godbout says. “We had to pick him up quite a bit, take his hand.”

Stan started driving the same highway from Whistler to Vancouver multiple times a week to sit with her.

“My brother was the person who was present,” says Olivia about her time in the hospital. “He’s such a sensitive man and always has been.”

But Stan’s empathy wore him down. “Out of the three of us kids, she was the one taking the least amount of risk. And it ended up happening to her,” he says. “I felt guilty because of that and it took me awhile to get over it. You pretty much get your life stripped away from you, and you’ve got to start from scratch.”

It was the darkest winter of the family’s life. For weeks, they didn’t know if Olivia would be able to breathe on her own.

Yet he let a camera crew tag along. Even when he didn’t know what to do, or how to process his guilt or his grief, even when he couldn’t rally the energy to ski, Stan did what he does instinctively: He showed up, on camera and off, loving the people he loves, and letting others help him and lift him up or drag him out on skis. Starring in his first major freeskiing film, titled The Highway, by showcasing the lowest point of his life was hardly an orthodox way to build a profile as a pro athlete. But it revealed Stan’s unyielding zest for life and his faith in getting back up even when he felt like he’d been knocked flat.

Godbout had spent his season making the film Blank with KC Deane. The next winter, Godbout and Stan filmed a follow-up Blank project and Blank Collective Films was born.

“It was a good way to create value for ourselves and for our sponsors,” Stan says. “And it also got us into ski movies.”

For the past six years, Blank Collective Films has created another channel of opportunity for big mountain skiers looking for an outlet to showcase their talents. They’ve included a crew of up-and-comers such as Sam Kuch, Barclay DesJardins, Cole Richardson and Jordy Kidner, who Stan believes might be the next big thing in the big mountains. It’s also helped launch Stan and his high-octane act into living rooms around the world.

Serwa remembers when she and teammate and silver medalist, Brittany Phelan, were walking through downtown Vancouver in 2018 during their post-Games media tour. Stan had accompanied them and the trio was crossing an intersection at 8 a.m. A guy yelled, “Hey!” and Phelan and Serwa, fresh from the podium, figured he’d seen their race and turned to greet him. He wasn’t the least bit interested in a couple of Olympic medalists.

Serwa and Stan met long before either earned any degree of fame. They’d known each other since they were 12 years old, a couple of little ski racers riding the same chairlift together. “We were always around each other through our teenage years,” says Serwa, who is currently pursuing a master’s in physiotherapy. “He’s that person you always wanted to be around because he’s so much fun. He makes people feel really comfortable and break out of their shell.”

“She told me I had to file my taxes before she’d even think about marrying me,” Stan says.

They tied the knot at Big White, BC—Serwa’s home hill—in September 2019. She’s started to change her name to Rey on her emails and figures as her other documents come up for expiry, she’ll change them too. When asked why she’d give up the name that stood atop podiums at two successive Olympic Games, she laughs and says, “There’s probably more brand value in Stan’s name.”

Stan’s fan base is devoted. There’s something about his everyman persona, his goofy humor, his willingness to be vulnerable—not to mention the Stanimal stamina and huge lines he drops—that make him easy to love.

Olivia and Serwa attest that when it comes to Stan, what you see is what you get. The guy on the camera? That’s just who he is.

Since The Highway was released in 2016, Stan and Olivia still find time to ski together. When he finds time in his busy filming schedule, he takes a lap with her whenever she goes up the mountain on her sit ski. She got her driver’s license, launched a YouTube channel called QuadLife 101, and is earning a master’s in psychology. Stan has been there every through everything, and and visits with her at least twice a week, even when COVID policies mean he has to stand outside her window to chat. “It’s really something to see her new life unfold. She’s worked super hard to get to where she’s at,” he says.

He’s trying to adjust to having a 33-year-old body himself. “I’ve been skiing with younger kids, who are 20 and are so incredibly good. I love skiing with them because they push me… but their bodies are rubber. It might be smart for me to start to take a warm-up run before going full send.”

At the end of last season, he was helivaced out of the backcountry with a blown ACL and partial tears to his meniscus, MCL and LCL, the product of an over-rotated 360.

It’s not in Stan’s nature to relent, so it’s hard to say if he’ll take his foot off the gas when he’s back on skis. But he started meditation during the pandemic, quit beer to support his injury rehab and became a weekday vegetarian as part of a Protect Our Winters pledge. There’s also the new Blank Collective movie, a video series to film, and an Olympic ski cross race to watch from afar. Stan is pure momentum and, whether high or low, he’s not stopping anytime soon.

The Ski Journal - Volume 15, Issue 2

CHANGING LINES WITH STAN REY

Stan Rey is not afraid to cry. “That’s why I love watching sports,” he says. “They show their emotions. It’s so beautiful to see someone in tears of joy from accomplishing a lifetime goal.”

Issue List