Ted Ligety

Ted Ligety: The Man Who Rebuilt the Turn

At the 2013 World Championships in Schladming, Austria, Ted Ligety won the super-G, the super combined and the giant slalom. No male skier had taken three golds at a single world championships in forty-five years — the last was Jean-Claude Killy in 1968 — and no American ever had. He won the giant slalom by 0.81 seconds over Marcel Hirscher, which in a discipline decided by hundredths is not a victory so much as a different event.

Salt Lake City

Ligety was born on 31 August 1984 in Salt Lake City, Utah, to Cyndi Sharp and Bill Ligety, both real estate agents. He was on skis at two and racing competitively at ten. He attended the Winter Sports School, graduating in 2002, was named to the U.S. Skiing Development Team, and took silver in the slalom at the 2004 Junior World Championships.

His World Cup debut came on 22 November 2003, aged nineteen. His first World Cup podium was a slalom at Beaver Creek in December 2005. Two months later he was an Olympic champion.

Turin, 2006

The combined at the Turin Games was an upset in the fullest sense: the favoured racers failed to finish, and a twenty-one-year-old American nobody had marked won the gold — the first Olympic alpine gold won by an American man in twelve years. It also gave him capital, and he spent it immediately, co-founding the eyewear and helmet company Shred Optics later that year. He designs the products himself and raced in them.

Mr. GS

What followed was a decade of specialisation so complete that it became his name. Ligety won five World Cup giant slalom discipline titles — in 2008, 2010, 2011, 2013 and 2014 — and of his 25 career World Cup victories, 24 came in the giant slalom. The other was a super combined. Across eighteen seasons from 2003 to 2021 he stood on 52 World Cup podiums. The database Ski-DB ranks him among the three greatest giant slalom skiers of all time.

He added a world giant slalom title at Garmisch-Partenkirchen in 2011, the Schladming treble in 2013, and a third consecutive giant slalom world title at Beaver Creek in 2015, finishing with seven World Championship medals, five of them gold.

The Rule That Was Meant to Slow Him Down

In autumn 2011 the international federation announced a radical change to giant slalom equipment: out went the deeply hourglass-shaped skis of the previous era, in came longer, straighter boards closer to those of a generation earlier. The intention was safety. The effect, many assumed, would be to dismantle the advantage of the man who had mastered the old shape better than anyone alive.

Ligety objected loudly and in print. His stated argument was biomechanical: to reproduce the turning radius of the old 27-metre ski, a racer would have to tip the new one roughly seven degrees further, which meant greater knee angulation and, he contended, greater injury risk. He was clear afterwards about his motive — he protested, he said, not because he thought the change would hurt him, but because it drained the joy out of ski racing.

Then he went and destroyed the season anyway. He podiumed in all eight giant slalom races and won six of them. The adaptation was not luck. His existing style — engaging the edge unusually early in the turn and releasing it unusually late — happened to suit longer, straighter skis better than the technique of anyone else on the circuit, and he rebuilt his physical preparation to match, abandoning general strength work for near-exclusive muscular endurance training on a dryland circuit of heavy squats, leg presses and quad extensions. The new skis simply demanded more of the legs, for longer.

His own summary of the margin involved is the best sentence anyone has written about the sport: if you ski with 95 percent intensity, you lose a second and you're out of it.

Sochi

The 2014 Olympic giant slalom completed the case. Ligety won it — the first Olympic gold ever taken by an American man in the discipline, and the second of his career, making him the first American male ski racer to win two. He competed at four Games in all: 2006, 2010, 2014 and 2018.

Why Ted Is Called a Genius

Ligety's claim is unusually easy to specify, because it consists of one physical idea executed better than anyone else has managed. His style, as described by those who studied it, was early edge engagement and late release: he set the ski on its edge far higher above the gate than convention allowed, and held the carve well past the point where other racers had let go. The effect was a rounder, cleaner arc where his rivals were scrubbing off speed with corrective skidding. He was, in effect, turning in a different place on the hill from everybody else.

This is craft rather than intellect, and it is worth being precise about what the craft consists of. It requires the strength to hold a body at an angle where the forces are working against the outside knee, the balance to sustain that angle when the snow surface changes underneath it, and the spatial anticipation to commit to an arc before the gate is close enough for instinct to help. Get it fractionally wrong and the run is over. Ligety did it repeatedly enough to win 24 World Cup giant slaloms and five discipline titles, and the database Ski-DB rates him among the three best the event has produced.

The strongest evidence for genius is the 2011 rule change. A governing body altered the fundamental equipment of a discipline, in a way widely expected to nullify the dominant racer's advantage, and the dominant racer promptly podiumed in every race that season and won six. That is not a talent surviving a shock; that is a man whose understanding of the underlying mechanics was deep enough that the shock turned out to favour him.

The counter-case is the obvious one. Ligety was a specialist in an era of specialists, and 24 of his 25 World Cup wins came in one event. He never won an overall World Cup title, finishing third in 2013 at his best. Outside giant slalom his record at the highest level is thin: an Olympic combined gold won in a race where the favourites failed to finish, plus the Schladming super-G and combined, and very little else. What Ligety has instead is depth without breadth — and in a technical discipline, being the best there has ever been at one thing is a defensible definition of the word.

After the Gates

The body gave out first. He tore the ACL in his right knee in training at Oberjoch, Germany on 27 January 2016, needed surgery, and lost the season. Back surgery ended his 2017 campaign. In February 2021, having withdrawn from the World Championships with injury, he announced his retirement after eighteen World Cup seasons.

He remains a businessman — Shred Optics has outlasted the racing career that funded it — and a father of three, with a son born in 2017 and twin sons in 2020. His competitive legacy is the turn itself — the demonstration, repeated across eighteen seasons and five discipline titles, that a giant slalom gate can be attacked from further out and held for longer than the sport believed. He was told his equipment was being taken away, and answered by proving he had never really needed it.