Our Blog


Steamboat has produced more Olympians than any town in North America, and many of them returned home as coaches to keep the tradition alive.

With the 2022 Winter Olympics right around the corner, our local athletes are on our minds more than usual these days. Steamboat might be famous for its sizable roster of local Olympians, but one thing most people don’t know is that many of them come home to pay it forward as dedicated coaches for the Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club, helping to mentor and inspire the next generation of Steamboat Olympians.

After competing all over the world, these athletes all returned to Steamboat at the end of their skiing careers. They settled down and started their own families here, passing onto their own children the very same influences and values that shaped their own lives. In so many ways, this is what Steamboat is all about; a life shaped by the surrounding mountains, a love for skiing, family, community, and perhaps even creating the next generation of Olympians.

We caught up with four of Steamboat’s esteemed Olympians to talk about life as a world-class athlete and what happens when—and if—they hang up their skis.

Caroline Lalive Carmichael

Blood, sweat, and tears doesn’t even come close to describing the sacrifices Caroline Lalive Carmichael made for her alpine skiing career. We’re talking about blown-out knees, torn ligaments, a punctured lung, and a shattered femur and kneecap for a total of nineteen injuries, including 13 that required multiple surgeries.

Still, she kept pushing, enduring long and painful recoveries to compete at the World Cup level for 13 seasons and fighting with everything she had to remain a top-ranked skier. She went on to compete in three Olympics games in 1998, 2002, and 2006.

“I had a great career and amazing opportunities, but there are those parts that were super painful,” she says. “There were a lot of great moments and a lot of heartbreaking moments, but it has all defined who I am today.”

Lalive’s family moved to Steamboat from Truckee, California when she was 16 so she could train with the Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club. She made the US Ski Team at 18 and went on to become a National Junior Champion and a top-ranked skier on the World Cup Tour. She was only 18 when she competed in her first Olympics as an alpine skier in Nagano, Japan at the 1998 Winter Olympic Games, where she finished seventh.

“I was so young and had no expectations. I just went and lived in the moment, and I did really well.” She was at the dawn of her career and showing a lot of potential in her debut on the world stage. “I remember thinking, ‘the sky is the limit.’ It was such a cool time in my career,” she says.

Despite a successful run on the World Cup with a total of 15 top 10 World Cup finishes over the course of her career, the Olympics would prove to be her biggest challenge. As a top-ranked skier who garnered a lot of attention from the media going into the Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City in 2002, the pressure to medal proved to be too much and she disqualified.  She worked on her mental game after that, going into the 2006 Olympics feeling strong physically and mentally when a freak crash during a warmup run resulted in a shattered femur and kneecap that ultimately ended her career. She did try to come back again but blew out her other knee the following season and officially announced her retirement in 2009.

She returned home to Steamboat where she met her husband, fellow Olympian skier Nelson Carmichael. The couple have two children, daughter Freya, and son Hugo. Lalive Carmichael returned to SSWSC as the Director of Alpine Skiing but took time off when Freya was born. A professional makeup artist and medical aesthetician, she now owners her own business, Lalive Beauty and Makeup Artistry. “There’s a lack of options for places to buy cosmetics in Steamboat. My dream is to build a full-service beauty boutique,” she says.

Looking back now, she realizes all she gained from her struggles. “The one thing I’m always coming back to from my skiing career was learning about how important it is to live in the moment,” she says. “That’s something I really can appreciate now as a mother. No matter how hard it gets, everything is temporary.”

 

Ben Berend

The first thing Olympic Nordic Combined US Team member Ben Berend did when he moved back home to Steamboat was to contact his coaches at SSWSC to inquire about coaching. “I spent my whole childhood at Howelsen Hill,” says the 26-year-old Steamboat native. “It’s wild moving back to Steamboat and becoming involved with SSWSC as a coach and seeing that nothing has changed. There’s something so refreshing about it. While the town has grown and the world has changed, the experience for these kids at Howelsen is exactly the same as it was for me when I was a kid.”

Berend knew from a young age he wanted to be an Olympic Nordic skier and spent most of his life training at Howelsen Hill. He remembers when school field trips involved walking into town to watch World Cup competitions on his own training hill. “I’d see these athletes from all over the world competing right in my backyard. When I was growing up, it was such a cool sport to be involved in.”

His singular focus and hard work paid off. By the time he was 18, Berend made the Nordic Combined National Team and competed in 24 World Cups, three World Championships, and the 2018 Winter Games.

Berend retired from the US Team shortly after the 2018 Olympics when he was 22. “I started competing when I so young, I was ready to do something else,” Berend says. “I started traveling internationally by the time I was 15 for six or eight months a year and I was pretty burned out. I look back on it with great memories and had so many amazing experiences, but it was a hard way to live.”

After he retired, Berend took a job with USA Nordic but eventually decided to move home to Steamboat, where he became a broker at Steamboat Sotheby’s and coaches 7 – 9-year-olds for SSWSC two days a week. “I go hang out with these kids and it’s the highlight of my week,” he says. “It’s a great way to unwind, but it also gives me perspective. They just want to run around on their skis for two hours and have fun. It’s still so simple. It’s how the sport should be.”

 

Johnny Spillane

When Johnny Spillane purchased Steamboat Fly Fishers in 2014, he cemented his future in Steamboat as a local business owner and inched his name a few notches over into the fly fishing realm. Fly fishing is, after all, Spillane’s passion. But for the father of three, his legacy is and forever will be in combined Nordic skiing.

After all, the four-time Olympian sealed his fate—and the fate of the US Nordic Team—by being the first American to win a gold medal in combined Nordic (a combination of cross-country skiing and ski jumping) in 86 years. “Our team had never had any real success on the international level,” Spillane says. “[My gold medal victory] helped everyone’s confidence going forward that we could be successful on the big stage. We were able to break through and start winning Olympic medals.”

That’s not to say it didn’t take a lot of grit and hard work. Spillane always knew he was a good cross-country skier. Born and raised in Steamboat, he’d started cross country skiing when he was eight years old. “I was always a hard worker, and cross-country skiing seemed easy because there was a direct correlation between how hard you work and your results. But ski jumping was so random.”

He made the development team when he was only 15 and went on to compete in four Olympics before capturing gold. “My goal was always to win an Olympic medal,” he says of his career stamina. “The Olympics are only every four years so you have limited opportunity. That was my motivation.”

His passion, however, has always been fly fishing, a sport he’s enjoyed since he was a kid. “It was something I could do in my spare time that was an escape from training,” he says. He became a guide and when the opportunity to buy Steamboat Fly Fishers came up, he jumped. “I was looking to retire from competitive skiing, and the opportunity to buy the store came up so I decided to go for it.”

The father of three (Hadley, Genevive, and Wyland) is grateful to be raising his own kids in the same town that has afforded him so many amazing opportunities. “It’s such a great community for kids, there’s always so much to do,” he says. Does that mean they’ll follow in their father’s footsteps and launch of the big ski jump in cross-country skis? “They like alpine skiing,” he says. “We go every weekend. They’re good skiers. I’m going to let them do whatever they want to do.”

 

Bobby Aldighieri

For Bobby Aldighieri, the Olympics meant as much to him as a coach as it did as an athlete. After all, it was during his five-year tenure as a coach for the Canadian National Freestyle Team at the 2002 and 2006 Olympics that tasted real victory. He’d taken a team from mediocrity to the top, and the successful overall program that it is today.

“Coaching has always been a natural fit for me,” he says. “It’s something I’ve always been really passionate about. Over time, I feel more inspired to pass it on.”

Originally from New Jersey, Aldighieri attended Killington Mountain School with the dream of one day competing in the Olympics. “From the time I was young, it was something I really wanted to do. I persisted and sacrificed a tremendous amount to get there, so when I found out I made the US Team, it was a pretty emotional moment for me.”

Aldighieri spent 7 years on the US Ski Team. He won a World Cup gold medal in 1988 and went to the 1992 Winter Olympic Games in Albertville, France. He competed on the Professional Ski Tour for three years before he retired from the U.S. Freestyle Skiing Team and moved to Steamboat to become the head moguls coach for the SSWSC. “For as much as I enjoyed skiing, I wanted to give that to these kids, the joy of the process, the joy of training, and I wanted to share my knowledge and inspire kids,” he says.

In 2001, he was recruited to coach the Canadian National Team where he coached for 5 years. He then “retired” after the 2006 Olympics in Italy, joining Prudential selling real estate for a few years and then coaching a Canadian development team.

And then SSWSC came calling again.

In 2014 when Erik Skinner stepped down as Freestyle Program Director, Aldighieri decided to make the move back to the Yampa Valley. “It felt serendipitous,” he says. “My wife was born and raised here and it’s nice to back in our old house and united with our friends.”

While still passionate about youth development in skiing, Aldighieri is now a Broker Associate with Steamboat Sotheby’s where he gets to share his love of Steamboat and the community that drives him every day with his clients in his business.

 


SIGN UP FOR OUR NEWSLETTER