Ted Ligety sounds immediately familiar when he answers the phone. We haven’t spoken before, and have never met, but the two-time Olympic champion has been a constant voice in my head for three days, and I owe him a debt of gratitude for shaping up my own, far less heroic, efforts on the slopes.
Ligety is speaking from his base in Park City, the resort in the Wasatch Mountains where he grew up. The boy who learnt to ski in the heart of the Rockies became the dominant giant slalom talent of his generation, with 25 World Cup victories and five World Championships, in addition to those gold medals from Turin in 2006 and Sochi in 2014.
