x Games

American Dreamers Find Snowboarding

By Michael Conniff, 1-26-06

You take your American Dreams where you can find them, and here in Aspen you can always find the dreamers slipping and sliding their way to something better.

Take Chris Klug, the bronze Olympic medal winner, trying to wedge his way into the 2006 Turino Winter Olympic Games even though he came up just short and a dispute has ensued. There’s Gretchen Bleiler of Aspen, the reigning X Games superpipe champeen who is one Olympic medal away from becoming certifiable as America’s sweetheart. And don’t forget Farrah Keenaaina, a snowboarder with all the hair of her telegenic namesake, but also a woman who walked in the door to qualify for the X Games the old-fashioned way.

Klug has done everything the hard way. In 1998 he was a member of the first Olympic snowboarding team. In July 2000 he needed a liver transplant. Less than two years later he took home an Olympic bronze.

“I thought that was going to be the end of my life,� he said in a published interview. “I wasn't really thinking too much about snowboarding at all that last month leading up to my transplant. It was a pretty scary time, you know 16 people a day die waiting on transplant lists and I thought I was going to be one of them. So I wasn't really thinking of my dream to be able to return and go to the Olympics, I was just praying and hoping that I would be able to return to life as I knew it, being able to hang out with my friends and family. It definitely put things into perspective. It really made me realize the important things in life, and how lucky we are to be out there, riding every day. I don't take a single day on the slopes for granted any more.�

Bleiler too has had to come back from a crippling knee injury, but she recovered in time to win the 2005 X Games competition and returns this weekend to defend her crown on home pipe. She owns a place almost literally across the street from the X festivities at Buttermilk, and she wears the mantle of young superstar as lightly as you please. I did a photo shoot with her for the Aspen Daily News before the 2003 X Games, and I was amazed at her ability to make shot after shot good enough for the cover: my guess is that out of hundreds of pictures, 95 percent were good enough to use. If she wins at Turino this winter, I would not be at all surprised to see Gretchen Bleiler on the cover of Vogue or Vanity Fair.

Farrah Keenaaina, in contrast, is the working class hero, working two jobs in Aspen to make her snowboarding work. Everyone in town knew she was gunning for X Games TEN and everyone wished her well without thinking much of it. Like the U.S. Open in golf, any civilian can qualify for the X Games if they can make it through the brutal qualifiers. Without sponsors to speak of, Farrah had to wait tables at Jimmy’s An American Bar & Restaurant and the Cirque on the Snowmass Village Mall. She actually worked the Cirque job to get the ski pass that goes with it.

If by some miracle she wins the Snowboarder X event, it would be the equivalent of a duffer winning the U.S. Open. Stranger things have happened in the world of sports, where heroes come and go faster than big wraps at the Big Wrap downtown. In Aspen, perchance to dream, we like our heroes homegrown.

Like this story? Get more! Sign up for our free newsletters.