Two-and-a-half-year-old Lauren learning how to carry her own skis at the Snowbird Plaza in 1995. After spending the historic ‘83-‘84 winter in Little Cottonwood Canyon, Lauren’s parents decided to make an annual trip to Snowbird, UT. Lauren was 5 months old when she made her first Utah pilgrimage. Photo: Samuels Family Archive While most of Lauren’s friends went to the beach for spring break, the Samuels family always spent their vacations at Snowbird, UT. Lauren credits the tram operators for her love of the mountains, letting her sit on the operator stool to see out the tram windows. Photo: Samuels Family Archive Lauren graduated cum laude from the University of Utah College of Health, with a bachelor’s in athletic training in May 2017. Photo: Samuels Family Archive IT SNOWED A RECORD-BREAKING 688 inches the winter in 1984 that Heidi and David Samuels worked at the ski shop at the base of the tram at Snowbird, UT. The couple met in college, at the University of Minnesota Duluth, where they were both skiers—Heidi, a racer, and David, a freestyle guy. After their powder-filled winter at Snowbird, they moved back to Minneapolis where David worked as a sales rep for Salomon, and Heidi began a career in banking and finance. They got married and had Justin, and a few years later, Lauren. The children were skiers long before they could actually ski. “We got tiny hand-me-down skis and let the kids play in the house,” Heidi says. “They’d build Legos in the basement with ski boots on, then step into skis and play in the front yard.” Soon, they upgraded to the city-owned golf course a half mile from their house, which operated a small rope tow in the winter and charged $3.50 for a day ticket. Neither kid knew what a chairlift was until they happened to see one on TV during the Winter Olympics. Eventually, Justin joined the ski-racing program at Hyland Hills, the closest ski area to Minneapolis, which has a verti-cal drop of about 175 feet and is operated by the local parks and recreation department. Lauren joined the same race program, called Team Gilboa, a few years later. The National Brotherhood of Skiers began offering sup-port when the Samuels siblings were rising up the national rankings. “I started skiing when I was 9 and it took years for me to see another Black person skiing,” says Henri Rivers, cur-rent president of the NBS and longtime friend of the Samuels family. “The biggest thing we do is show these young athletes that there are people who look like them who understand and love skiing, too.” Lauren was talented from the beginning, consistently in the top tier and a steady threat in all of the ski-racing disci-plines. When a race didn’t go her way, she’d remain stoic—to this day her parents claim they’ve only seen their daughter cry a couple of times. Strength was her biggest power. As a teenager, she’d drive pairs of skis so forcefully that she’d break them on a regular basis. “Lauren always had great balance and stability, coupled with speed, power and strength. She could stand on a stability ball like a kid at the circus,” says Aaron Leventhal, a Minneapolis-based physical trainer who worked with the Samuels kids and other elite skiers during that era. “She was very mature and never shaken by all the politics that can go along with sport at her level.” Because of her travel schedule, Lauren missed 109 days of high school her junior year and didn’t have time to get her driver’s license until years later. “I was going to a normal public high school where nobody really knew what ski racing was,” Lauren says. Some of her classmates thought she was always on a ski vacation. “My peers would say, ‘What do you do?’ That was tough.” By her senior year, she transferred to Rowmark Ski Academy in Salt Lake City. Lauren lost her spot on the U.S. Ski Team after just one season, a discretionary decision that came amid an overhaul of the coaching staff and other changes to the develop-ment program. Coaches broke the news to her after a three-day dryland training camp that served as a tryout for the team going into her second year. According to her coach at the time, Lau-ren’s performance simply didn’t qualify her for another season, but Lauren’s parents can’t help but wonder what happened in that moment. “Lauren was cut by a coach who never saw her run a ski-racing course,” Lauren’s dad says. “At the end of the camp, she was told that she was not being invited back. And this is after she’d crushed the physical testing. There’s a certain pedigree of what you’re supposed to look like as a ski racer, and I believe that may have played a role.” Lauren Samuels 075
The Ski Journal Volume 15, Issue 2: Page 75
