The wiry Park City teenager stood in the starting gate on a low-lying ridgeline at Hafjell. It was the closing days of the Lillehammer Olympic Winter Games. He stood fifth after the first run of giant slalom. Teammates Tommy Moe and Diann Roffe had already won gold. Maybe this was his time?
Jeremy Nobis never backed down from a challenge.
Nobis was born in Madison, Wisconsin, just a few blocks from my own childhood home. He picked up his passion for skiing as a 4-year-old at nearby Devil’s Head and amped it up when he moved to Park City a few years later. Skiing was his life’s love.
He was the first great ski racer to come out of the Park City Ski Team, heading off to Green Mountain Valley School in Vermont to hone his skills. At 17, he won the first of two Junior World Championship gold medals. Suddenly, he was in the spotlight as the men’s U.S. Ski Team struggled to find a new hero after the retirements of Phil and Steve Mahre.
Making the U.S. Ski Team at 16, he constantly looked for ways to test his skills, always doing it his own way. He trained head-to-head with the great Alberto Tomba on icy, gnarly European race courses. He pushed himself to new levels, taking untold risks to win.
Then it was over. He left the team disenchanted in 1995, turning to the pro ski tour and mountain biking. But a chance encounter with a ski company leader led him into the fledgling sport of big mountain skiing.
It was with a bit of reluctance that he headed to Alaska, shooting for TGR’s seminal film “Harvest.” That trip not only changed his legacy but it redefined big mountain skiing with just one ski run. In true Nobis form, he defied the odds, ripping down Pyramid Peak’s spine-tingling 2,000 feet of vertical in less than 30 seconds with big, sweeping Super-G turns.
Much like his life, Nobis always skied his own line.
Over the next decade, he lived at the epicenter of innovation in style and equipment. He also forged a relationship and a respect for the alpine landscapes where he felt most at home.
He once told the late SKI Magazine writer Stu Campbell, “You go to the same mountain year after year, but each year the mountain tells a different story. So you’ve got to get up there and read the book.”
Sport can bring fame. Sometimes it brings fortune. For Jeremy, it brought a sense of personal accomplishment that meant something to him.
It sent him globetrotting around the world from Kitzbühel to Greenland, from the peaks of Alaska’s Chugach Range to the Himalaya. Helicopters became a second home. His exploits as a skier took him to alpine ridgelines of which we mere mortals can only dream. He did things no others had ever done, pioneering new frontiers for himself and his sport. His image graced the covers of magazines and was captured on the silver screen by TGR, Matchstick and Warren Miller.
Then, all of a sudden, it wasn’t there any more.
While sport may bring fame and fortune, it does not come with a roadmap. Every pro skier faces that point at which they need to translate their risk-filled turns into the stability of human life.
That didn’t come easily for Jeremy.
He knew when to quit skiing on the edges of 1,000-foot crevasses. But he just wasn’t sure where to go next.
Today, as friends and comrades, we harken back to those days of his past. While parts of us think about his daring lines down alpine peaks, I suspect our most meaningful memories are simply those of the kid with disheveled red hair, a freckled face and that wry smile which was always calculating something. We remember his bravado but we’re left more with the genuine caring in his heart for those around him.
We think back to what we might have done to help. But, today, all we can do is look forward.
If there’s a lesson here as fans, maybe it’s a better understanding that there’s a very fine line in life from being up on the stage and falling deep into that crevasse.
Rest in peace, Jeremy.