MOUNTAIN LIFER
WHISTLER MUSEUM & ARCHIVES
words :: Ace Mackay-Smith
Passing the torch
Stephanie Sloan
Hot doggin' and freestylin'—vintage Sloan.
I just can’t imagine not being a “ski bum” (thanks, mom and dad!), so it was a real treat to sit down with one of Whistler’s greatest. Not everyone knows about her (which is kind of crazy considering she had a combined 24 World Cup podiums in 1980 and 1981), but anyone who knows anything about the history of freestyle skiing will have certainly heard the name Stephanie Sloan. And for the rest of you… It really all started in the spring of 1972 with a patch of mud on the last run of the last race of the last day of the season at Stephanie’s hometown ski hill, Osler Bluff, in Collingwood, Ontario. Nineteen years old at the time, Stephanie had been skiing since age two and racing seemed like her set path—she’d even booked a spot to train “way out west” at a summer race camp, which had just relocated from the Kokanee Glacier to rising-star ski hotspot, Whistler Mountain. But on that patch of mud, fate intervened. “I broke my ankle,” Stephanie says, “so I got my swimming certificate and went to teach swimming to kids in Haida Gwaii for the summer instead.”
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