Words Megan Michelson Lauren competed four seasons for the University of Utah NCAA Division I team. After her sophomore year, she suffered an ankle injury, but three ankle surger-ies and18 months off-snow later, Lauren returned to competition, co-captaining the team to its 11th NCAA Championship in March 2014. Photo: Justin Samuels LAUREN The same year she won her J2 championship, the high school sophomore attended a preseason fitness testing at the U.S. Ski Team’s Center of Excellence in Park City, UT. When Lauren broke the record for highest vertical jump and crossed the finish line as one of the team’s fastest sprinters, whispers circulated: “Of course she can jump. She’s Black.” She tried not to let comments like that get to her. “In ski racing, you will lose more races than you win,” Lauren says, now 28. “For every person who says you can’t do it, or that your goal is too high or not possible, there will be multiple other people who will tell you the opposite. I had to find those people.” Throughout her ski-racing career, Lauren found support through the National Brotherhood of Skiers, an African American ski club that’s been around since 1974. Lauren was 9 years old when her family—her dad, David, who’s Black, her mom, Heidi, who’s white, and her older brother, Justin—at-tended their first National Brotherhood of Skiers Summit, a picnic and party on the slopes for the organization’s members. They traveled from their home in Minneapolis to Snowmass, CO, where thousands of Black skiers congregated on the snow for the biennial gathering. As Lauren remembers it, a DJ was spinning tracks while a chef cooked ribs and burgers over a barbecue. People were dancing in ski boots and wearing Mardi Gras beads over their local ski-club jackets. At that first event, Lauren and Justin met such ski legends as racer Andre Horton, the first Black male skier to make the U.S. Ski Team, Errol Kerr, who would go on to compete at the Olympics and X Games in ski cross, and Ralph Green, a decorated Paralympian. Samuels has always been fast. A dedicated and uncompromis-ing athlete, she was the J2 National super-G and overall champion in 2009 and she raced at the U.S. Nationals and World Juniors in 2012. At age 15, she made the U.S. Ski Development Team, earning a coveted spot as a next-gen future Olympian, while becoming one of just a handful of Black skiers in the history of the U.S. Ski Team. “Before then, I’d never seen another Black person skiing besides my dad and brother,” Lauren says. “I remember thinking, ‘Wow, there are other Black people who ski. Why do people think we don’t ski?’” The Samuels family returned to National Brotherhood of Skiers events for years after that, and eventually when Lauren and Justin became elite ski racers in their teens, the organiza-tion offered financial help to cover the cost of training and travel, as well as moral support. “There’s nothing like having a couple of thousand people cheering on a young athlete and telling them they’re special,” David Samuels says. “I remember Lauren at a young age going to those Summits and saying, ‘Dad, it’s like having your own cheering squad.’ It’s amazing what you can project into a person when you praise them like that.” Lauren was a successful competitor, but it didn’t come easily. The roadblocks she encountered—ranging from racially-tinged comments to often being overlooked or criticized unfairly—felt different from those of her mostly white peers. There were com-ments from her schoolteachers about being “lazy” because she missed school due to a ski race or her racing peers saying, “Well, you’re not really Black.” She carried their words in silence. Still, Lauren never let any of that slow her down. She’s re-tired from ski racing now but is back with the U.S. Ski Team. This time, instead of sliding up to the starting gate, she’s chan-neling her experiences, both good and bad, to help change things for the next generation of skiers. In other words, after navigating the glaring problems within both the casual and competitive realms of our sport, Lauren has decided to be part of the solution. Lauren Samuels 073
The Ski Journal Volume 15, Issue 2: Page 73
