The Ski Journal - Volume 15, Issue 3
FIORE: Arianna Tricomi’s Mountain Garden Grows
Words: Drew Tabke 2021-12-01 06:48:09
A rare moment of calm for Arianna Tricomi on the Stubai Glacier in Tyrol, Austria. Since jumping on the Freeride World Tour in 2016, the 29-year-old has traveled the world collecting podiums and accolades at freeskiing’s highest competitive level, including earning the first successful overall title threepeat in FWT history. Photo: Tobias Haller/Nodum Sports
The garden at my house right now is just a mega, mega real image of myself,” Arianna Tricomi says in her unhurried, lyrical voice. “It’s a little wild, but the garden just grows and grows. Like me. I’m a mess, but I keep on growing.”
Tricomi is sitting on her patio, drinking a beer and marveling at her garden while the sun sets on the surrounding pastoral alpine landscape. After six years spent living in the vibrant city of Innsbruck, Austria, she bought this place in the quaint village of Tulferberg in 2020. It’s walking distance to the tiny Glungezer ski resort.
North across the Inntal valley, the Northern Limestone Alps cut a jagged line across the horizon, demarcating the border between Germany and Austria. Stretching imposingly across the southern horizon are the Central European Alps, including the nearby Ötzal, Stubai and Tux ranges. Farther south still, sit the fabled Dolomites, which cradle Tricomi’s childhood home in Alta Badia, Italy.
Taken as a whole, this is Tyrol; home to an embarrassment of world-class skiing—over 120 ski resorts packed in close proximity to one another. It may be the most fertile place on Earth for growing world-class skiers like Tricomi, but at the moment she’s more into talking about her own unruly patch of dirt and vegetables. Still, a cursory look at Tricomi’s accomplishments testifies to the abundant personal yield she sees reflected in her garden. Three-time champion of the Freeride World Tour. The 2018 European Skier of the Year. Global Red Bull athlete. Rising star in a variety of ski films and productions such as La Luce Infinita: Tales from the North. Fluent in six languages. Certified physiotherapist. Aspiring alpine climber and mountain guide. And to hear her tell it, accomplishing all of this was quite easy. Natural. Unsurprising. Of course, in reality, such achievements are anything but easy. Although Tricomi exudes a disarmingly easygoing vibe, peppering her stories with cliché Americanisms you’d hear in any tram line in the American West, those three world champion trophies didn’t simply sprout from the proverbial dirt one morning. A seed that developed into a generational talent, Tricomi credits her success to her unique alpine environment and the hands that nurtured her ambitions from an early age, letting her grow wild and change the trajectory of freeskiing in the process.
“I owe everything to my mom,” Tricomi says. “She was who I looked up to most growing up, and she’s still a mega-big inspiration for me. I don’t know anyone else that loves skiing as much as her.”
Tricomi’s mother, Maria Cristina Gravina, competed for the Italian National Team in downhill for over a decade and skied in the 1980 Olympics in Lake Placid, NY. Instead of slowing down following her racing career, she dedicated herself to skydiving for the next 20 years. But skiing remains her true love. Today she instructs and guides skiing in the winters and hiking in the summers. And, though her skydiving days are behind her, she helps run the paragliding and skydiving center near her home in Alta Badia.
When Gravina took my call, she asked to call me back in five minutes. A rescue helicopter was landing outside and she needed to check that the paragliders and helicopter were coordinating use of the shared airspace. She called back as promised, and just as Tricomi described, her love for skiing was apparent. From her own alpine resume, to pride in her daughter’s accomplishments, she exuded a rapturous, borderline-religious enthusiasm for sliding downhill in all its forms.
“I would take [Arianna] with me anywhere she wanted to go,” Gravina says. “I found tele gear for her when she was 6 so we could go off-piste together. She went diving in the Maldives when she was 8. She started surfing when she saw locals riding waves on the Mediterranean Sea when we were on a sailing trip. She would see me going up in the plane and returning to land in a different place with my parachute. So my poor kid,” she laughs, “did a tandem skydive with me when she was 8.”
“It was [my mom] who showed me the pow, and I guess I just fell in love deeply, not knowing it would become my life one day,” Tricomi says. “I used to skip training on powder days and my mom would be pissed. But I was like, ‘Mom, you showed me this!’”
In addition to her mom’s athletic pedigree, Tricomi’s father was a pilot in the Italian Air Force. Though separated from Gravina and not much involved in Tricomi’s childhood, both Arianna and her mom see his calm, focused demeanor manifested in Tricomi’s approach to big mountains and competition.
Despite a knack for athletic endeavors and an indefatigable curious streak, for Tricomi, it has always been skiing first. When she went to study abroad in New Zealand for her final year of high school, she got caught skipping school with increasing frequency. The terrain park at Cardrona was too convenient and close, and far too fun for her classes to stand a chance. Though she did finish her missed classes when she got home.
She didn’t stay in the terrain park for long, entering her first Freeride World Qualifier event in 2013. By 2015, she won the qualifying series and secured a spot on the Freeride World Tour.
As a FWT rookie in 2016, she provided an immediate infusion of energy and style, winning the event in Fieberbrunn, Austria, and placing third overall. In 2017, she finished third again, securing tour wins in Arcalís, Andorra, and Haines, AK. A year later, she pieced together a dominant FWT season, winning the 2018 overall crown with victories in Arcalís; Hakuba, Japan; and Verbier, Switzerland. She would go on to defend that title for the next two years—the first and only skier to earn a threepeat in the competition. Yet it was her 2018 performance that signaled a turning point not just for Tricomi’s career, but arguably for women’s competitive freeriding as a whole.
“I’ve definitely been inspired by Arianna’s skiing,” FWT overall champion Elisabeth Gerritzen says. “She helped create the blueprint for a lot of what’s going on in women’s freeride today. The 360 she did in Arcalís in 2018 felt like a mini earthquake. It was a turning point for me personally because it was like, ‘OK, I can either quit now, or I can push myself to keep up.’”
“It was my mom who showed me the pow, and I guess I fell in love deeply, not knowing it would become my life one day. I used to skip training on powder days and my would be pissed. I was like, mom, you showed me this!”—Arianna Tricomi
Recently, Tricomi has learned that her place atop the freeski world comes with its own set of responsibilities, moments that require her to be more than just a professional skier. This was heart-wrenchingly made clear via an avalanche fatality she witnessed while skiing near Innsbruck. In an Instagram video, she recounted her experience as the second responder to an avalanche that buried a 15-year-old local skier. In addition to expressing the trauma of witnessing such an event, she also suggested that social media, and the pro skiers who use it, are at least partly to blame.
“We have such a bigger responsibility toward kids with the social media we produce,” she said. “We show mostly only the beautiful side of things and the hype of skiing a line, but most of the time there is no explanation of why we chose to ski this line. Or why we chose not to.” Her voice breaking, she continued, “It’s really hard for me to share this here, but I can’t not say anything.”
Tricomi understands that sometimes to make the change, you need to lead by example. As an athlete raised in a cradle of world-class skiing and mountaineering, she grew up surrounded by mountain guides, an elite group tasked with not only keeping clients safe in the alpine, but also with setting the standard for how to move and act in the mountains. Now in addition to holding down a full-time ski career, she is working to join the ranks of those guides. The 29-year-old has spent her last few summers improving her climbing, training to become an internationally certified (IFMGA/UIAGM) guide.
“The approach of finding a line on a big wall, finding the easiest, more aesthetic way up, I love it,” she says. “You become a part of the history of climbing, imagining where the first mountaineers in 1915 with their old shoes and old ropes would have gone. When I’m a guide I’d like to bring girls out there to experience this aspect of finding lines in the vertical realm, too.”
“I’ve definitely been inspired by Arianna’s skiing. She helped create the blueprint for a lot of what’s going on in women’s freeride today.”
—Elisabeth Gerritzen, 2021 FWT Champion
Even for a gifted athlete like Tricomi, with access to the necessary time and resources, the path to becoming an internationally certified mountain guide is not an easy one. Despite her transcendence of gender boundaries, the fact remains that only about 1.5 percent of the roughly 7,000 internationally certified mountain guides worldwide are women. “The most difficult part is the curriculum, which is your resume to even start out as an aspirant. It’s hard,” says Tricomi with a rare tinge of uncertainty. “Mixed climbing, ice climbing, ski touring above certain benchmarks of distance, climbing, duration. You have to be strong at everything. I’ve already learned so much this summer, but there’s so much more to learn.”
Despite the daunting challenges, there is little reason to doubt that Tricomi will accomplish her new goal with the same gusto and quiet confidence that have put her in the upper echelon of big mountain freeriding. It’s a mentality that has brought her to the top of the ski world, helping inspire other women in mountain sports to push their disciplines in new ways. Tricomi may have never set out to be a standard-setter, but she’s begun to appreciate it, acknowledging her mountain roots as her garden continues to climb higher.
“When you climb big walls in the Dolomites, you’re actually climbing what was once an ancient seafloor. You see the ancient lava and corals and shells, you imagine where they came from and how they came to be mountains,” she says. “This has always been my home. But now I’m seeing it through new eyes.”
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