Ryan Cochran-Siegle has done it again. On Wednesday, the 33-year-old member of Vermont’s storied “Skiing Cochrans” dynasty bounced back from his disappointing downhill performance four days earlier to seize the silver medal in the men’s Super-G at the Milano Cortina Olympic Winter Games in Italy.
RCS, as he’s known, won silver in the same race in the 2022 Beijing Olympics, the only medal the U.S. alpine ski team brought home that year. On Wednesday, he finished 0.13 seconds behind Franjo von Allmen of Switzerland, who also won gold in the men’s downhill, and 0.15 seconds ahead of von Allmen’s teammate Marco Odermatt.
RCS, the third to ski, pumped his fist after he crossed the finish line but quickly became emotional talking to an NBC reporter when it was clear that the medal was his. “I think I was just happy to ski how I wanted to ski today. I mean it’s super emotional,” he said before pausing a couple of seconds to collect himself. “It’s great.”
Cochran-Siegle’s mother, 1972 Olympic slalom gold medal winner Barbara Ann Cochran, was in Italy watching the race with his fiancée, Jessie Lucas.
Two-time Olympic gold medalist Ted Ligety, commenting on NBC, said the Super-G presents the most difficult mental challenges in ski racing. There are no training runs, he said. “You have to hope your GPS has the latest upload because you have to have every single piece of terrain, every turn memorized, and it’s one shot.”
Cochran-Siegle won his first World Cup race, also the Super-G, on the Olympic course at the Bormio Ski Centre six years ago. On Wednesday, he faced the additional challenge of having just recovered from the bout of food poisoning that plagued him before the start of Saturday’s downhill race. He finished 18th in that event.
The Starksboro native is the sixth Olympian in his family and grew up skiing at Cochran’s Ski Area in Richmond, which his grandparents started in 1961. Cochran-Siegle is a board member of the nonprofit that runs the modest ski area whose mission is “to provide area youth and families with affordable skiing and snowboarding, lessons and race training, in the Cochran tradition.” That philosophy is summed up in the mission statement’s opening line: “No child will be denied the opportunity to ski or ride.”
RCS skis there, too, when he’s home in the winter. And when the snow is gone, he hikes and bikes the trails with his dog, Wrigley.
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