It's hard to give tips to skiers if I don't know how they ski, but I think the most important thing in skiing is you have to be having fun. If you're having fun, then everything else will come easy to you.
I work a lot with my ski sponsor, Head, to develop new technologies.
I don't think there's a direct correlation between my sexuality and my skiing ability. But I think because I was so concerned about it being found out, it was a distraction.
I ski very aggressively, and the angles that I create with my body are similar to some of the male racers.
Here's the thing. You can't get ten thousand hours of skiing. You spend so much time on the chairlift. My coach did a calculation of how many hours I've been on snow. We'd been overestimating. I think we came up with something like eleven total hours of skiing on snow a year. It's, like, seven minutes a day.
It's good to ski for fun, but I still want to win races as often as possible.
Ski racing is not about how much you weigh. If weight was the key, everybody would be sucking down food.
There are times when one certain snow condition is great for one particular brand of skis.
I wanted to feel that precision and control and then try to apply it to tele. That's what I've looked for in my gear development through the years, and today, tele is very precise, very high-performance.
I use men's skis because, honestly, they work better for me. They're longer, they're stiffer, they're harder to turn - but at the same time, they're much more stable.
I had to think about ankle torsion, where the screws are on the ski, how that affects the forces going into the ski and how the ski bends, your leverage points. It was a challenge. I was having the greatest time, making the mistakes, crashing.
I just - I fell in love with the sport when I started to ski gates. Once I was allowed to start training gates around 6 years old, then I really fell in love with it.
Skiing is always so huge, you need so many talents to be fast and be good at this sport.
My attitude on skis is different now. I have learned to put less pressure on myself and on the edges of my skis when I'm racing, to be keep myself more under control.
I'd encourage anyone at any level to take lessons, as it really can turn you into a different kind of skier.
