Matilda Rapaport
Extreme skier for Red Bull team Born January 29th, 1986; Died July 18th, 2016. MATILDA Rapaport, who has died aged 30, was a Swedish extreme skier for the international Red Bull team, a little lady with Nordic good looks who skied off steep, snow-clad mountain peaks she could reach only by lowering herself from precariously-hovering helicopters.
A winner of several world “freeride” (extreme ski) events, she had finished fourth in the women’s ski standings of the Swatch-sponsored 2016 Freeride World Tour which also includes separate events for snowboarders. Her stated ambition was to be Freeride World Tour ski champion next year but she was caught by an avalanche in the Chilean Andes near Santiago on July 14 and died four days later.
She had married her high school sweetheart and fellow Swede, the Alpine World Cup ski racer Mattias Hargin, on April 23 this year. Having flown from Sweden along with her mother, Hargin was at her bedside in a Santiago hospital when she died from oxygen-deprivation brain damage after being in a coma for four days. The torment Hargin expressed through tears on his website was a moving expression of love and loss and brought him thousands of messages of condolence from extreme sportspeople, fans and simply heart-broken folks from around the world.
Rapaport had appeared in many hair-raising extreme ski films or videos, including the all-female produced, directed and performed films Shades of Winter (2013), Pure (2014) and the upcoming Between, all three produced by Austrian pro-skier Sandra Lahnsteiner. Due to her healthy lifestyle (if you don’t count her death-defying profession), Rapaport was also a columnist for the Swedish magazine Women’s Health.
Extreme skiers are a special breed. To them, even off-piste skiing is not enough. Rapaport needed to get on top of mountains previously considered unskiable and then conquer them from above by descending, usually alone, via the most direct route possible. In her own words, she “charged down” rather than skied down.
Her only witnesses were a photographer and/or cameraman following her by helicopter. Fortunately such photographs and films will ensure her legacy in the wild world of extreme sports.
She had previously survived being partially-buried by an avalanche in 2014 at Haines, Alaska – site of her favourite slopes – after which she featured on the cover of the American ski magazine Powder for an article on the balance of risks for extreme skiers.
Commenting on that Alaskan experience in an interview last year, she said: “I was dragged all the way down the mountain, partially-buried and couldn’t get myself out. That was a very scary experience. But I don’t want (to dwell on) memories of being scared of avalanches. The best moment in skiing is when I’m in the middle of a line and I know what’s in front of me and what’s behind me, and I know I can charge all the way down.
“I want to exceed expectations. Of course I’m afraid sometimes. But the moment I put my skis on, I feel confident. I know which way to go and how to get down.”
Since Rapaport’s exploits were extremely real and extremely dangerous, it is ironic that she died promoting a new virtual ski game, Steep, by the French company Ubisoft.
To provide realistic footage and publicity for the video game, Rapaport was descending, alone, a steep Andean mountain above the Chilean village of Farellones near the capital Santiago after a heavy snowstorm had cleared. The powder snow was perfect for her and the filmmakers. But it was loose. Even beneath her crash helmet, she would have heard the thunderous roar of an avalanche. But she may have heard it too late, before the snowslide, faster than any skis, swept her away and buried her. She had apparently tried to outrun it but avalanches follow gravity faster than humans.
She was carrying the standard extreme ski avalanche safety equipment – a homing beacon, a small shovel and even a modern “air bag” inflated by pulling a rip cord.
“She did not have time to release the airbag because she was so focused on outrunning the avalanche,” said her manager Hakan Hansson.
She was buried for at least half an hour before rescuers dug her out, unconscious, in a coma from which she never woke up. Simply put, she died from suffocation.
Matilda Rapaport was born in Stockholm on January 29, 1986. She started skiing at the age of two with, as she recently said in a blog, “my ski bum dad and my ski instructor mom.”
She studied at Are Alpine Senior High School, where she met Mattias, before graduating with an MBA from the Stockholm School of Economics.
She was planning to do a PhD in business management before deciding professional skiing could be her most lucrative business and moved to St Gallen, north-east Switzerland. She later moved to Engelberg in the Swiss Alps, her base for the rest of her life.
For three years, she managed Ski Lodge Engelberg, a hotel catering specifically to skiers not inclined to stick to the pistes.
Her first big extreme ski win was in 2011 at the Scandinavian Big Mountain Championships, which claims to be the world’s first “Big Mountain” or extreme skiing event, at Riksgransen on the border between Sweden and Norway andabovetheArcticCircle.
But her greatest success was winning, in 2013, the Xtreme Verbier competition in the famous Swiss winter resort, beating the world’s best in what is considered one of the “sickest” (in ski jargon, that means great or wild) events.
When recently asked what she loved outside of risking her life on mountains, she replied: “steak tartare, reading really fast and snoozing.”
She set up a PR and marketing consultancytoencouragetourismtoEngelberg and the Swiss Alps. In that same interview last year, she said: “I will always be skiing, maybe not the way I do now, but I think I’ll be skiing when I’m 80.”
Matilda Rapaport is survived by her husband Mattias, also 30. Among her other known survivors are her mother and her younger sister Helena, a professional skier. Their aunt Alexandra Rapaport is a leading Swedish actress.