Ski Ace Ligety bows out of Olympics. Will it be for good?

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February 18, 2018 3:14 PM

PYEONGCHANG, South Korea — At 18, Ted Ligety thought about giving up ski racing so he could study engineering in college. No one, most especially the coaches of the U.S. ski team, tried to talk him out of it.

But Ligety spurned college, and three years later he was at the 2006 Turin Olympics.

After one run at the Alpine combined, he was 32nd behind the race leader, Bode Miller. In the second stage, which was two runs of slalom, Ligety tugged on his hot pink gloves and placed his hot pink goggles over his eyes before shocking the ski racing community with a comeback that won the gold medal.

Twelve years later at the Pyeongchang Games, Ligety, now 33, was again far behind at the halfway mark of what will probably be his last Olympic race, the giant slalom. This time, he was the defending champion, but there was no magical rally.

Ligety on Sunday finished in a tie for 15th, more than 3 seconds behind Marcel Hirscher of Austria, who won his second Alpine gold medal here in Pyeongchang.

Henrik Kristoffersen of Norway was the silver medalist, 1.27 seconds behind Hirscher. Alexis Pinturault of France won the bronze medal.

“Bad time for an off day,” Ligety said.

Ligety has vowed to race for at least one more winter, largely because this season was his first back on snow after two years spent recovering from serious knee and back surgeries. Ligety said another Olympics in four years, when he will be 37, was not “out of the realm of possibilities.”

But his eyes betrayed him. His wife, Mia Pascoe, and 7-month-old son, Jax, were standing in the finish area. Ligety added: “When you have a family it kind of changes your perspective. We’ll see how it goes there; there are other priorities in life now besides ski racing.”

If Sunday was the last Olympic appearance for Ligety, he leaves a legacy as a vital force in skiing in the United States.

He is the only American man to win two Alpine Olympic gold medals. He has won five world championships across three different events, he is a four-time Olympian, and his five World Cup season-long titles in giant slalom make him one of the greatest racers in the history of that discipline.

He introduced giant slalom techniques that were considered revolutionary.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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