Young enough to believe, good enough to realize her dreams, Resi Stiegler aims for the top

Young enough to believe, good enough to realize her dreams, Resi Stiegler aims for the topResi Stiegler arrived at the start of the 2003 World Championship slalom race with a bent ski pole and a sheepish grin. This particular slalom happened to be only the sixth start against a World Cup field for the 17-year-old native of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and her first crack at a major championship event.

But rather than nervously eyeing the slalom course on her final chairlift ascent to the start-house, Stiegler’s gaze shifted elsewhere. “I never had noticed the halfpipe above the start before,” Stiegler explains. “I got so excited, I just had to try it. But when I got in it, I crashed hard and bent my pole.”

When she got to the start, Stiegler was mum to her coaches about the u-shaped pole, grabbed a new one, and blazed down the course to place an American best 19th. There’s no doubt Stiegler is having fun fulfilling her destiny.

For Resi (pronounced Racy), convergent forces of genetics, geography and grit have left little to chance. Stiegler has been hard-wired for ski racing since infancy. Her father, Pepi, was a three-time Olympic medalist for Austria in the 1960s. Her mother, Carrie, was a ski school director and taught Resi to ski. Plunk this prodigy at the foot of one of the most challenging mountains in the country, and top that with a full dose of tenacity, and you have a bubbling teenager with a 1,000-watt smile, who has already scored an 11th in a World Cup slalom, collected two World Junior Championship medals and earned two World Championship results (19th in slalom and 10th in combined).

For Stiegler, this is no big deal; it’s simply what’s supposed to happen. “My whole life I’ve had a passion to go to the Olympics and win and be at the top,” says Stiegler. “I was just born that way. Skiing’s my life, it’s something I know I can do it’s just a feeling I have.”

Skiing every day after school and all day on weekends, Stiegler still could never get enough. “She was always the first to get there and the last to leave,” says Nathan Emerson, one of Stiegler’s coaches until she was 12. “There was hardly time to take a breath. On one occasion, we were halfway down the mountain when she asked where she could go to the bathroom. Before I could answer, she had already ducked into the woods. She didn’t want to waste any time.”

Emerson reels off tales of Stiegler beating all the coaches in a fun race at age nine, jumping off the cliff into Corbet’s Couloir at 11 and skiing the crud until her legs begged for mercy. “Her eternal flame is stoked full bore, but she seems to have a good balance of enjoying life and being focused for competition,” Emerson says.

By the age of 13, after scoring a pair of fifths at the international J III Whistler Cup races, Stiegler had caught the notice of the U.S. Ski Team development program. The following summer she made her first trip to a physical conditioning project at Colorado Springs, Colo. John Ethen, the development coach at the time, recalls, “On the first day of camp, I was awoken by pounding on the door at 5 a.m. I crawled to the door, and there was Resi, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to go, wondering when we were going to start training. She had 10 times the energy of the coaches at the beginning,” remembers Ethen, “but she sets a great atmosphere, and after a few days we managed to put a dent on her energy levels.”

It was at this time that Stiegler came to the realization that one does not simply sign up for the Olympics, that there’s a long, involved process required to be named to the team. “The coaches had us write out our goals, and I wrote down that by 19, I already had won an Olympic medal,” says Stiegler. “I didn’t even know enough to put down any World Cup racing. I didn’t have a clue as to how to get there, but I knew I would get there.”

Getting there required a change of venue, so in 2000 Stiegler enrolled in the Winter Sports School in Park City, Utah, during the spring of her sophomore year. The school, which is in session during the spring, summer and fall months, offers unfettered access to racing and training during the winter season. Her mother came to Park City to live with her during her first two years of school. Even so, with training camps scheduled throughout the “off-season,” staying on-track academically was a challenge, one Stiegler has met with the same discipline she puts into her skiing. “We load her up with assignments before she goes and then communicate by email” says Stiegler’s English teacher, Marilyn Heinrich. “Resi’s very organized about doing her schoolwork. She’s one of the few to be competing at this level and still graduate on time.”

With only a bit over a month to go until graduation on November 17, which coincides with Stiegler’s 18th birthday, the young competitor finally sees the light at the end of the tunnel. “It’s a really big deal not to have to go to school. It just takes up so much time. Now I can focus on skiing,” says Stiegler, who plans to pick up college credits in the off-season and then study design when her ski racing career concludes.

Neither Stiegler nor her coaches, however, are planning on the conclusion of her racing career any time in the near future. “She’s a great athlete and will go far,” says Ethen. “Her feel for the snow is amazing. She has an ability to carve, even though she might not always be in balance.” Then he adds, “She also has the ability to just go for it. She can put anything out of her mind and just race.”

Patrick Riml, Stiegler’s Europa Cup coach last season, and her coach this year as she moves between the Europa Cup and World Cup, agrees with Ethen’s assessment. “She can be a big one. She’s one of the fastest in the world; some of the others just have more experience.” But like all young racers, there’s still much to be learned. Says Riml, “She’s a race horse when you put a bit in her mouth, but she has a hard time slowing down, and tactics can be a problem.”

The other problem Riml notes is that at times, Stiegler can love her day job too much, leaving little time for rest. “The first thing she packed on the way to Europe was her free-ride skis,” says Riml. “She’s a fun girl, and there’s nothing she likes more than skiing. It doesn’t matter what the weather she’s out there after training and on her days off. Skiing is her passion.”

Stiegler shows no sign of reducing the speed of her ascent up the international rankings. She’ll continue to focus on the technical events, despite showing a recent aptitude for speed, with the goal of earning a spot among the top 25 and an invitation to the World Cup Finals. Who knows? The next stop could be Torino, Italy, site of the 2006 Olympics. Whatever the outcome, with Resi Stiegler, it’s guaranteed to be a fun ride.

For Stiegler, the ears of the tiger

Some may claim to have the “eye of the tiger,” but no one can dispute that Stiegler has the “ears of the tiger.” Stiegler was feeling a bit bummed about not qualifying for a second run in her first World Cup start at Sestriere, Italy, in December of 2002. When Stiegler and teammate Julia Mancuso arrived at the next World Cup site, Lenzerheide, Switzerland, they did what all teenagers do when they need a lift — they went shopping. While browsing the shops, Stiegler spotted a set of tiger ears — perfect accessories to her racing helmet. “They were sweet — they just kicked ass,” gushes Stiegler. With an eye on adding a little levity to the all-so-serious European racing scene, Stiegler showed up the next day for inspection with tiger ears protruding from her helmet. The coaches trimmed her ears before the race, but with her astounding 11th place and third fastest second run, the ears became a good luck charm and made their racing debut at the slalom at the Chevy Truck U.S. Alpine Championships. Despite a second run mishap, which bumped Stiegler from third to seventh in the f
inal results, Stiegler says, “I’m not ready to give up on them yet.”