U.S. Ski once cut Paula Moltzan. Now she’s one of their Olympic bright spots

CORTINA D’AMPEZZO, Italy — So here’s the thing about Paula Moltzan, the only American Alpine skier at these Olympics who both already has a medal and still has events left — she almost got away.

Ask Mikaela Shiffrin who the best giant slalom skier on the U.S. team is right now. There’s a decent chance she will name-check Moltzan, a medal threat anytime she is in the starting hut, a longtime friend, and a once-and-again teammate. Shiffrin is slightly ahead of Moltzan in the season standings for giant slalom. Moltzan failed to finish two races, but has been on the podium three times this season. Shiffrin has been on the giant slalom podium just once.

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Also, Moltzan skied a darn good slalom run Tuesday to clinch the bronze medal in the team combined for her and Jackie Wiles. Shiffrin struggled with the wet snow and flat light and fell to fourth with Breezy Johnson after Johnson won the downhill leg.

And to think, 11 years ago, the U.S. ski team cut Moltzan. A collection of people who have a pretty good reputation for talent-spotting looked at Moltzan and didn’t see enough of it.

Moltzan was 21 at the time. She’d spent the better part of a decade pursuing her dream, including lots of national junior camps and then a couple of seasons trying to cut it in pro races. The higher minds of the U.S. ski team looked at her results and her limited progress, and told her it wasn’t going to happen for her.

She went to the University of Vermont, where she starred as an NCAA skier while majoring in biology and minoring in chemistry with a plan to go to medical school. Then she put that dream on hold and scratched and clawed her way back onto the national team and became a star.

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“I can’t imagine this team without her,” said Anouk Patty, the chief of sport for the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association.

It all sounds very clean and inspiring now. A little like Michael Jordan getting cut from his high school team as a sophomore, the moment that supposedly lit the fire and turned him into the world’s greatest basketball player.

Except that wasn’t the plan.

Moltzan can put a nice spin on it, since she did love attending UVM. But scratch a little more, and you hear this:

“Am I grateful for how my departure of the U.S. ski team was? No, I absolutely hated them,” she said one evening in December in Mont-Tremblant, Quebec, ahead of an early-season World Cup race. “They told me they didn’t believe me and they didn’t think that I had a future in the sport.”

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Turns out she did. Moltzan won a gold medal in the team event at the world championships in 2023 and a bronze in the giant slalom last year. Now she has an Olympic medal, too.

Bill Reichelt, the head Alpine coach at UVM, said his assistant coach at the time, Tim Kelley, was the first to notice just how good Moltzan was. Kelley is part of the Cochran skiing family that owns Cochran’s Ski Area and just collected another Olympic medal thanks to Ryan Cochran-Siegle’s second silver medal. Ryan’s mother won gold in slalom in 1972.

Kelley had been on the U.S. team. He knew what a good skier looked like.

“He came over to me and said, ‘Dude, she could make second runs in a World Cup, 100 percent,’” Reichelt said during a recent interview. “She had the speed, and the technique.”

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Moltzan got that growing up in Minnesota at Buck Hill, learning from Erich Sailer, who also taught Lindsey Vonn how to ski. All she was missing was what Reichelt calls “the governor,” the mental switch that would tell her when to push and take chances and when to hold back.

“You don’t have to go 100 percent all the time, and there’s some places where you can take chances,” he said.

Moltzan skied at UVM for three years, winning the NCAA title in 2017. She knows she learned a lot about time management and being a good teammate.

She knows she almost fell through the cracks. She takes some ownership of that. Maybe she wasn’t a good enough athlete then. Maybe she didn’t appear talented enough. Maybe she could have worked harder. She wasn’t earning World Cup points and meeting the criteria at the time to retain the funding and support that skiers on the team receive.

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She’s also pretty sure the U.S. team could have given her the sort of support that young skiers get now. As she remembers it, she was tossed in the deep end of the pool and trained with Shiffrin, who was far more advanced, and Resi Stiegler, a veteran. She’s envious of the individualized training programs that younger American skiers receive, and the full-time coaches who work with skiers on the lower-tier pro circuits.

“I didn’t ever feel like I had a mentor,” Moltzan said. “I was just like an addition.”

All events have concluded. See full medal count.

Paul Kristofic, who was just starting as the head women’s coach when Moltzan was cut loose, called her “a good lesson for everybody.”

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“Nobody is perfect in decision-making,” he said. “You try to do the best with what you have in front of you every time as a leader and a coach. That was for sure a difficult time for her, and for me, you know, and for all the coaches that worked with her.”

Kristofic and U.S. Ski & Snowboard do things a little differently now, with far more nurturing and coddling of their young.

Moltzan was too early for that, though, or maybe too late.

Three years and an NCAA title later, Moltzan was out of college eligibility and ready to give it another go as a professional. She’d been dabbling in pro races during her final year of college and having some success. Her boyfriend and now-husband, Ryan Mooney, who also skied at UVM, was willing to become a coach and equipment manager, tuning her skis and making sure she had the right set-up to fit her style.

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Funding was an issue. The U.S. ski team wasn’t asking for her to come back. Fortunately, Mooney’s parents — entrepreneurs and ex-athletes — were supportive, giving them a credit card to help cover travel costs. His mother had nearly been an Olympian in kayaking. His father had played college baseball.

“They saw it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Mooney said. “They probably didn’t envision this. But they were like, ‘You should definitely give it a shot.’”

Moltzan said she was still on the fence. She wasn’t convinced this was how she wanted to spend her life — again.

That changed when COVID hit. All that time at home made her miss what she couldn’t do. Ski racing was what she wanted to be good at. This was the basket where all her eggs were going to go. She still had about a year of college left, but that could wait. The world had exploded. It felt like the right time to give her dream one last shot.

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She used her paltry race money to help cover some of their travel expenses. She scrounged around for independent sponsors to cover some other costs. From April through August each year, she and Mooney worked for his parents’ whitewater rafting company.

Magnus Andersson, a Swedish coach who had come in as the U.S. women’s technical team coach the year after Moltzan was cut, spotted her at a Nor-Am race on pro skiing’s third tier and liked what he saw.

“She was one of the few that could ski very well,” he said. “She was the best one.”

He’d worked in Sweden, where skiers earn their spots through time trials rather than having them protected because they’d been named to a squad. He got Moltzan a time trial in the fall of 2018 in Colorado for a spot in the World Cup race in Killington, Vt. She qualified and finished 17th. Pretty good.

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Andersson, who now coaches at Palisades Tahoe in California, said the COVID months changed a lot for Moltzan. She got stronger and trained hard. Others stagnated or worse. She came back stronger than ever.

She sat down with Andersson, looked him in the eye, and said, “Tell me this is not possible.”

By the 2020-21 season, she was consistently scoring World Cup points and back on the team. Mooney has been handling her equipment ever since and has no plans to stop.

She’s already achieved something big. Now she’s on the cusp of something bigger.

After winning her bronze medal on Tuesday, she reflected on her journey over the past decade. Lots of people had believed in her and helped her get from there to here, she said.

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Patty said Moltzan embodies perseverance. “Never giving up and always just in there and wanting to fight to be able to do what she loves, which is compete,” she said.

She’s suffered nasty injuries — thumbs, hands, both shoulders — and she’s in the starting gate the next day.

She’s also someone they can point to now when they are evaluating another young talent who might be struggling.

“Athletes can have a bad year, we’ll still support you,” Patty said. “Paula’s a star of this team, for sure. And she’s really been the driving force in the culture of that women’s tech team.”

A U.S. ski team without Moltzan is now nearly impossible to conceive of.

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“Whatever happened in the past, it’s made her who she is today,” Patty said. “And I’m just grateful for that.”

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

Olympics, Global Sports, Women’s Olympics

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