One Hundred Champions: Howelsen Hill and the Olympic Tradition
Near Steamboat Springs, Colorado
In nineteen fourteen, a Norwegian immigrant and circus performer named Carl Howelsen built a ski jump on a hill just west of the Yampa River in downtown Steamboat Springs. He had come to Colorado to perform, had fallen in love with the mountains, and wanted to share the skiing culture he had grown up with in Norway. The hill he built, which still bears his name, became the oldest continuously operating ski area in Colorado, and the training ground for what would become one of the most remarkable concentrations of Olympic talent in North America.
Howelsen Hill alone has produced nearly ninety Winter Olympians, an astonishing number for a town this size, and it has been sending athletes to the Winter Games for generations. The disciplines span the full range of winter sport: alpine skiing, Nordic combined, ski jumping, freestyle skiing, cross-country skiing, and biathlon.
Among the most accomplished are Billy Kidd, who in nineteen sixty-four became the first American man ever to win an Olympic medal in alpine skiing, taking silver in the slalom at Innsbruck; Todd Lodwick, a six-time Olympian and World Champion in Nordic combined who remains one of the most decorated winter athletes in United States history; and Johnny Spillane, a four-time Olympian who won the first American Olympic medals in Nordic combined, three silvers at the twenty ten Vancouver Games.
The Olympic heritage runs so deep in Steamboat that it has become almost unremarkable to locals. It is simply a place where many people grow up to compete at the highest level in the world, because the hill is there, and has been training champions, for more than a century.
