River Radamus Rocks Nationals

It could be argued that the overall winner of the U.S. Alpine National Championships in Sun Valley, Idaho, last month was the mountain. The week of competition included ruthless, exhausting, across-the-hill courses on a hill so steep that the original course plans had to be changed to avoid exceeding FIS regulation maximum speeds and vertical drop.

A successful run required maintaining a flawless line gate-by-gate all the way to the finish, drawing on every day of strength conditioning since high school, and acquiring an in-course state of focus more unshakeable than the Dalai Lama in meditation. Carrying out all three of the aforementioned elements for up to two minutes is hard on athletes of all levels — so almost every course had the capacity to spit out half the field.

In fact, on Saturday, March 26, so many men got booted out of the first-run GS that the popular pick-up line among some of the young women watching was, “So, what’re you doin’ second run?”

But 18-year-old River Radamus of Vail was one of the few juniors to show some mastery over the merciless hill. He continued to showcase the exceptional skiing he had demonstrated a couple of weeks earlier at the Youth Olympics, finishing on the junior podium for every event aside from the slalom, which he did not finish.

All told, Radamus walked away from the week with a seventh-place overall finish in the alpine combined (first place among juniors), another seventh place in the super G (second junior), and a 12^th-place overall finish in the GS (second junior).

He almost makes it look easy — but Radamus had to battle against Bald Mountain’s unrelenting pitch and corresponding remorseless course sets just as hard as the rest of the field. “It was a really technical course, one of the toughest I’ve ever seen,” River said after the first run of GS on March 26. “I knew it was going to be tough; I just had to have the mindset that I had to stay high on the line and hit the fall line well. I was steering into a lot of turns, but it was keeping me ahead of the course and keeping me ahead of trouble.”

“It was a really technical course, one of the toughest I’ve ever seen.”

Coming off of his Youth Olympics hat trick, Radamus might have raised the bar of pressure on his performances, but he personally chose not to make any premature assumptions. “Like I did with Youth Olympics, I tried to come in with no expectations and trust what I was doing in my training and know that if I executed well, I would have good runs,” he said, “focusing more on the process and not on the result was really the key for me these last couple weeks.”

Radamus added that his focus on the day of the GS was to “ski his race and stay solidly in contact with the snow.” That game plan paid off.

Ultimately, Radamus had a great week on the formidable race hill to begin wrapping up his season. How did he like skiing Sun Valley? “Oh, it’s beautiful,” he said with a smile. “The crowds have been amazing and the mountain is awesome.”