Christin Cooper (1959 - )
Christin Cooper combined a go-all-out competitive nature with unbending tenacity to reach ski racing's highest honors.
Christin’s impressive career started at age 10 when she joined the Sun Valley Ski Team and began honing her skills on the Intermountain junior racing circuit.
At age 16, Christin was named to the U.S. Ski Team and competed in five Alpine World Cup disciplines for eight seasons. She won five World Cup races in three disciplines, competed in two Olympic Winter Games (1980 & 1984) and two FIS World Championships (1978 & 1982). She became the first American skier to win three medals in a single World Championships, earning a bronze and two silver medals in 1982.
A severe compression fracture from a crash in 1983 ended her season, but Christin soon returned to win the giant slalom silver medal in the Sarajevo Winter Olympic Games in 1984, and took third overall in that season’s World Cup GS standings.
A remarkable World Cup record of five victories, 26 podiums and 65 top tens, one Olympic and three FIS medals, and six US National Championships led to her induction into the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame in 1984, the same year she retired, at age 24, from international racing.
But Christin wasn’t through leaving her mark on the sport. As alpine skiing’s first female expert analyst, she began a nearly uninterrupted 30-year run as the voice of women’s alpine skiing, calling decades of Olympic, World Championship and World Cup events until her retirement in 2015.
