Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I have all these things I want to do, but I don't have to do them right away. Because it's not just about winning, it's about succeeding, which to me are two different things.
My parents never pushed me to ski race. It was my choice and something I really wanted to do. I would have rebelled if they had pushed me, and I wouldn't have had the same passion.
Everyone saw me on TV or read articles, and it was all about my great marriage, the white picket fence, all this success and my perfect life. But behind the scenes, it was a struggle.
Vail's a very important place for me. Everyone kind of took me in and accepted me in that town, and they still have to this day. I wouldn't be a downhill skier if I hadn't been there.
When you're young, you develop ways to win, and you think they will always work, but then you get to the top, competing against the other top athletes, and sometimes things don't work.
I just have tried to adapt to the constant changes that happen all the time in my schedule and try and find any sort of mini-predictability and balance within my very unpredictable life.
To me the Olympic spirit embodies the magic of competition, hard work and coming to a point in your career when you're around the best athletes in the world, and having the whole world watching.
When my parents were getting divorced, I just said to myself, 'Go to sleep, and tomorrow you can go skiing.' I cried myself to sleep, and in the morning I was up on the mountain, and I was good.
I may have become a world champion quicker than most, but people should look at me and realise there are all kinds of ways to get where you want to go. Because we didn't plan it. We just did it.
Olay BB Cream is a lifesaver, and I wear it every day while I train and compete. Twenty-four-hour hydration and sheer color helps me look flawless even when faced with that unforgiving Jumbotron!
When I first moved to Vail, it was like I was a little celebrity. You know, everyone knew my accomplishments. I was a young, fast teenager and making waves in the ski world. And it was really cool.
During the season, one of the most important things to eat is the carbs. Protein's really important, too, but it's the carbs that are important because I have to consistently refuel for the next day.
When I get on the World Cup tour, I'm kind of disconnected from the world. I just kind of get wrapped up in my world and wrapped up in trying to ski fast every day, and I forget about everything else.
The Olympic Games are always in the head of every sports athlete. We work for that. The Olympics are the most important race. They're each four years, and everybody wants to show their best performance.
I always ate healthy, but it wasn't scientific. Now it's a high-protein diet and no carbohydrates. I have more consistent energy, and I don't get tired after a meal. It does take a very detailed meal plan.
I'm not trying to race the whole men's tour; I just want to race one time. If you know me, which most people on the World Cup do, they know that this is a legitimate goal of mine and not a publicity stunt.
It's hard to give tips to skiers if I don't know how they ski, but I think the most important thing in skiing is you have to be having fun. If you're having fun, then everything else will come easy to you.
One of the biggest misconceptions is that carbs are bad. It's a fad right now. Full disclosure: I'm sponsored by Barilla. But I've always been free about saying I love carbs, including pasta, in moderation.
I do doubles on Monday and Thursday, take Wednesday off or do easy cardio, do doubles on Thursday and Friday, and the weekend I just get outside and get active - jog or bike ride, or play tennis with my mom.
When I get back on snow, it's almost like I travel back in time to that feeling I used to have. That youthful, 6-year-old, 'nothing else matters,' 'you're sort of the center of the universe' kind of a feeling.
My parents strapped a pair of plastic skis on my boots when I was two years old and sent me down our driveway in Vail. Of course, they were holding on to me the whole time, but that was my first experience 'skiing.'
Unfortunately, we both lead incredibly hectic lives that force us to spend a majority of our time apart. I will always admire and respect Tiger. He and his beautiful family will always hold a special place in my heart.
Facebook and Twitter have changed how people follow ski racing. In past Olympics, you couldn't stay in touch with the fan base that followed you during the Olympics. They thought they had to wait four years to reconnect.
Whether it's learning to hit a backhand in tennis, learning high school chemistry, or getting better at ski racing, I really believe with hard work and analytic preparation, you can skip a few steps and find the faster way.
I'm excited to watch slope style and halfpipe. And then, of course, when my events are done, I get to go to hockey, which is always entertaining. I also like figure skating. I think every girl grew up watching figure skating.
A part of me is missing when I can't ski, but I've learned there's more to define me and make me happy, like stand-up paddling and Jet Skiing - things I'd never done before. Or being with people I love and just enjoying life.
The truth is, the sport of skiing takes so much effort, setting up and traveling with equipment, that you can only train for a certain number of days in the summer. Most of my peers ski between 40 to 60 days. I ski about 55 days.
Records are the only thing that remain of an athlete, the only thing that people will remember. If I want to ensure that people don't forget me, I can only stop once I've set the bar as high as possible for anyone coming after me.
There is a dessert dish in Austria called Kaiserschmarrn - it's kind of like a sweet raisin pancake with eggs and sugar. It's definitely not something I can eat often, but if I've done well at a race, sometimes that's my celebration treat!
I enjoy just showing people other sides of me, especially everyone always sees me in my helmet and ski suit. It's nice to just show everyone me, just me in my everyday clothes or just me in high heels or just me not in my ski gear, basically.
I wouldn't eat a 1,000-calorie bowl of spaghetti for dinner, but I've always loved pasta and think it's a good addition to any meal and a great base for pretty much any vegetable. It's also great when I have a nervous stomach before race day.
I don't really have time or interest in doing a lot of the crazy things that some of my teenage peers do, mostly because I have such a hectic life that I don't need to add to that chaos by creating my own teenage drama like a lot of teenagers do.
It's incredible in our sport how small the differences are, and we are all aware of that. We're all on a high level and skiing well, and at the end, it's just hundredths that count. Maybe it's just one finger or a hand can change the color of a medal.
If you strive toward the perfect run, accepting that you will always come up short of that is very intriguing. It makes me think about how in life in general, we always want to strive toward perfection, but sometimes perfection would be the worst thing.
I get this adrenaline rush from just going down the course and feeling like I made a really great turn and I'm going to do it again and again and again. That feeling can't be replaced, and that's the feeling I'm striving to get every time I go out there.
I always practice, even on the cat tracks or in those interstitial periods. My dad says, 'Even when you're just stopping, be sure to do it right, maintaining a good position, with counter-rotational force.' These are the kinds of things my dad says, and I'm like, 'Shut up.'
For sure, 2010 was the best year I've ever had. It couldn't have gone any better for me. Even if I just won the Olympic gold medal, that would have made it the best year of my career and the best day of my life, period. Winning the World Cup races and the overall title just topped it off.
It's like a puzzle or a painting or music. When I ski, it's like a song. I can hear the rhythm in my head, and when I start to ski that rhythm and I start to really link my turns together, all of a sudden there's so much flow and power that I just can't help but feel amazing. That's where the joy comes from.
Here's the thing. You can't get ten thousand hours of skiing. You spend so much time on the chairlift. My coach did a calculation of how many hours I've been on snow. We'd been overestimating. I think we came up with something like eleven total hours of skiing on snow a year. It's, like, seven minutes a day.
We're really friendly. The cool thing about skiing is you're competing against the clock. Even though you're competing against your teammates, it's not head-to-head. And we can all do better. You can always do better. You never really have a perfect run. And someone beats you. So you can't really blame anyone.
Something I still work on today is ankle flexion—ankle pressure in your boots. There is no way to turn or have your skis carve unless you’re going down the hill leaning forward, and that puts you in a good athletic position to do whatever you want to do on your skis—make quick turns, make long turns, or absorb bumps.
Roger Federer and my boyfriend, Tiger Woods, inspire me. It's incredible what they've done in their respective sports, especially Roger. He is the nicest and humblest guy. You would never know that he's the best tennis player of all time. And Tiger is so mentally tough. He can block everything completely out and stay in the moment.
The thing is I have no ACL. So unless I get surgery, there's nothing really magical that I can do that's going to make it better. I just can get my leg stronger, my muscle stronger and try and support it a little more. But that has a small impact. My knee is loose, and it's not stable, and that's the way it's going to be from here on out.
It's cool when people ask me about my gold medal and they say it will last forever. I will try to promote skiing and show everyone it's not just about competition. It's about having fun with your friends in the snow. I want to bring people with less opportunities to the snow, try to use my gold medal to support programs to bring more people to the snow.
For me, it really just feels calm. When you're going fast on a downhill course, it's typically where it's wide open. I think it's kind of like driving a car. If you're going really fast and it's straight, everything seems to slow down. In general, racing downhill involves bigger turns and everything sort of slows down and you have a lot of time to think.
One of the cool things about ski racing is there is never a perfect run so it's hard to be satisfied in that sense, you can always go that extra step, i don't think any of us have the realistic goal of having the perfect run. Ski racing is the most variable sport out there, conditions change run-to-run, we only get one chance at it and the margin for error is tiny.
My goal, for almost my entire career, has been to promote ski racing not just in America, but across the world. I think it's an amazing sport. I am happy to be an ambassador for the next Olympics and I will do my best to honour the Olympics spirit and to hopefully encourage kids to participate in sports, especially in Asia and Korea and I am looking forward to an amazing Olympics.
I was skiing fast in training, but that really doesn't count for anything until you actually do it in a race. So to finally get to prove how fast you are skiing is an added bonus that goes along with winning the first race of the year. Any race win is a good win. I don't really care where it is. I've been on the podium a bunch of times here, but it's always good for your confidence to start off the year with a victory.