This year’s honorees include pioneering ski jumper Lindsey Van, World Cup downhill skier Steven Nyman, and skiing advocate and innovator Earl Miller, who is being inducted posthumously.
Van grew up in Park City and broke barriers as one of the first women to compete—and win—on the international ski jumping circuit. In 2009, she made history by becoming the first-ever women's World Champion in ski jumping at the Nordic World Ski Championships.
She was a fierce advocate for gender equality in sport and was instrumental in the fight to include women's ski jumping in the Olympic Winter Games, a battle that eventually culminated in the event’s debut at the Sochi Olympics in 2014.
Steven Nyman grew up in Utah and learned to ski at Sundance where his father was the ski school director. He said that’s where he learned to become one of the best gliders in the world.
I learned a lot of that touch came through chasing the BYU ski team all over the mountain,” Nyman said on KPCW’s “Local News Hour” on Wednesday, Aug. 14. “I didn't understand physics or anything like that when I was a kid, but going from the back mountain to the front, there's a big, long, flat cat track, and I always had to try and keep up with these bigger people that had that momentum. And I think that's where I gained that touch for speed.”
Nyman won the World Junior slalom title in 2002 and was later named to the U.S. Ski Team where he skied for 21 years. He holds the record as the longest tenured alpine skier on the U.S. Men’s speed team.
While on the team, Nyman won three World Cup victories – all at Val Gardena, Italy.
“I'm actually the first American to ever win there, but we have a lot of success there, and I think that's due to the jumps and the blind rolls and the conviction that you have to have on that course,” he said. “We kind of started the terrain park movement here in the US, and growing up in this Intermountain region, I played a lot in the terrain parks, and I grew up watching a lot of the ski movies and becoming comfortable in the air and throwing myself over these jumps and these cliffs.”
Nyman competed in four Olympic Games – 2006, 2010, 2014 and 2018.
His commitment to promote the sport has continued beyond his competitive career. Today he serves as an ambassador for the Sundance Resort and Fischer skis. He’s a team manager at Spyder and still spends a lot of days on skis with corporate ski days, private clients and his children.
Earl Miller was inducted into the U.S. Ski Hall of Fame in 1994. He graduated from BYU and later became its first ski coach. He was a ski area designer and planned the original Sundance ski resort in Provo Canyon. He was also the resort’s first ski school director.
A leading inventor, Miller held more than 100 patents and trademarks and according to his Hall of Fame tribute, he had more inventions beneficial to skiers than all other ski inventors in the world combined.
