feature || hometown snow bunnychampion
Launch Pad From a slow start on a tiny ski hill in Minnesota, Lindsey Vonn raced to the peak of her profession with a little help from her father and her first coach. | by DAVID MAHONEY
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n a drizzly Saturday morning in November, dozens of kids charge up a brown ski run at Buck Hill. The local racing season is still more than a month away, but these young racers have been doing dry-land workouts several times a week since early October. Once there’s enough snow, they’ll start running gates on skis — over and over and over again. With its rope tow–served practice hill, this modest mound rising barely 300 feet above I-35 in suburban Burnsville might not seem like a world-class training site. Yet it has spawned a surprising number of international-caliber skiers. It was here, running 400 gates a night with her fellow Buck Hill Ski Racing Club members, that Lindsey Vonn (born Lindsey Kildrow in St. Paul on Oct. 18, 1984) laid the groundwork for the amazing string of successes that would take her to the pinnacle of her sport. Was it her drive or her DNA that led to an Olympic Gold, more overall World Cup titles than any other Americanskier (man or woman), and widespread belief that she just might be the greatest ski racer ever — no qualification of gender or citizenship required? Neither, jokes the man who first taught her a proper tuck. “Without me, there would be no Lindsey Vonn,” says Erich Sailer in his modest office at Buck Hill, where he has presided over the ski racing program since 1969. Actually, he appears to be only half joking. His claim isn’t based solely on the fact that he coached Lindsey for the first several years of her racing career; he also coached her father, Alan Kildow, to three junior
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| Winter 2013
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