The sprawling, powder-covered ski resort near the top of Killington Peak, deep in Vermont's Green Mountains, resembles tiny Buck Hill, a couple dozen yards from a freeway in a Minneapolis suburb, in the same way that Yosemite and Fenway are both parks. Yet as she stood atop a Killington starting gate on a gloomy November Sunday in 2018, Paula Moltzan summoned the spirit, and the expertise, gained at that curious, bare-sloped training ground back home.
By doing so, she reignited a languishing international career — and skied the first few turns toward Beijing.
Moltzan, born and raised in Prior Lake, Minn., and enjoying the best season of her World Cup career, will ski in the women's giant slalom on Monday and the slalom on Wednesday, at age 27 making her Olympics debut four or eight years later than she once dreamed. It's the seventh consecutive Winter Games that will include a Buck Hill beginner, someone who roared down that bumpy 260-foot knoll so often that mountain peaks and medal podiums eventually beckoned.
