Words TOM KELLY Highway 13 is a lonely country road, coursing along the Rio Blanco in western Colorado. Pick-up trucks full of ranchers and natural gas field workers are usually the only traffic, but every January, Utah pro-fessional skiers like Joss Christensen traverse the empty thruway en route to X Games in Aspen, CO. That’s exactly where Christensen found himself in January 2014, piloting his Subaru through a snowy morning, out of cell range as thoughts bounced through his head. Despite winning the final Olym-pic selection event a week earlier in his hometown of Park City, UT, it wasn’t enough to punch a ticket to the freeskiing debut in Sochi. The solitude was playing mind games with him. Would team USA get a fourth spot on its new Olympic freeskiing team? If it did, what were his chances against his childhood buddies Alex Schlopy and McRae Williams, or Utah transplant (and Olympic favorite) Tom Wallisch? His good friend Gus Kenworthy, who along with Bobby Brown and Nick Goepper had already clinched spots, had texted him earlier that morning, “Hey, I think you got this.” Kenworthy was in the car ahead, the caravan leapfrogging their way toward the Rockies. Christensen’s phone came alive as he hit a narrow band of cov-erage. It was U.S. Freeskiing Head Coach Skogen Sprang. “You better pull off the road for a minute,” Sprang said. This can’t be good , Christensen thought. But through the static of the call, somewhere in the middle of nowhere, Colorado, he got the news that would change everything: Christensen had indeed punched his ticket to the 2014 Sochi Olympic Games. Collecting his thoughts while on the side of the road, he called his mom. The normally calm and cool Christensen jumped up and down in the cold afternoon air, beaming as he shared the news. After the death of his father to heart disease just five months earlier, Christensen knew the Olympic nod was a new start, but he had no idea the heights it would take him to next. STATE 070 The Ski Journal
The Ski Journal Volume 16, Issue 4: Page 70
