How skier Soar has become a contender,
Olympic hopeful Hannah Soar has become one of the world’s best
At 2 1/2, she was almost on her own, but still tethered to her parents with a long strap. She was so small, they had to make sure her boots were on tight around the ankles because they were too big.
A year later, she was on her own, exploring the hardest trails at Killington, where her parents skied every weekend for years and knew everybody.
“She would wait for someone she knew to help her onto the lift,” her father T.J. Soar said. “She didn’t stop. The [Killington] community has embraced her and still does, to this day. They’re a major sponsor of hers.”
Hannah Soar, who grew up in Somers, is the No. 3-ranked mogul skier in the world and No. 1 in the U.S. She’s 21 and a medal contender for the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.
She is passionate about skiing. Last spring when the world shut down due to the coronavirus, Soar came home from the world championships, which had been canceled, and was in Somers for about a day when she realized she was bored. So she called up a skiing friend and the two of them decided to go skinning – where skiers climb up a mountain with their skis on and then ski down. They did 18 peaks in Vermont, sometimes three in one day, in a week.
“I would equate her to the athlete where there’s a hoop in the driveway and they go out and shoot hoops until Mom rings the dinner bell or the light gets too bad,” U.S. moguls coach Matt Gnoza said. “One of my biggest concerns with Hannah is that she skis too much.”
Many high-level athletes want to take a break after the season, maybe go someplace warm for a change. Not Soar.
“She loves Killington more than any place in the world,” Gnoza said last week. “Yesterday, she was boxing up the skis she won’t travel with [to the world championships], her backup skis, and shipping them back to Vermont because she’s like, ‘I want them there when I get home.’
“She looks at that snow report from Killington every day. ‘Did you see they’re making snow on Superstar? That means we’ll ski well into May this year.’ I’m like, ‘Holy moly, I want to take a break, are you kidding me?”’
T.J. Soar was a Division I swimmer and he and his wife Sue skied at Killington for years before Hannah was born. They loved the “bumps.” Hannah loved them, too.
Her earliest ski memories, however, are not of skiing but of the massive snowbanks next to the ski area’s parking lot.
“I spent a lot of time in those snowbanks,” Soar said, from Park City, Utah, this week, where she was getting ready for the World Championships in Khazakhstan in March. “You’d take a couple runs, your hands would get cold, you’d have a hot cocoa and then one parent would watch the 10 kids play in the snowbank.”
Soar became a member of the ski team at Killington, then went to Killington Mountain School part-time in high school. She played varsity soccer as a freshman at Somers High but had to leave Nov. 1 to go to ski school so she opted out of soccer her sophomore year. Her junior year, she went to Killington Mountain School full-time.
“I tell a lot of people, I’m a skier first, then I’m a competitor,” Soar said. “The thought of getting to ski every day [at school] sold it for me.”
Gnoza was an instructor at the school and became the national team’s moguls coach in 2014. Two years later, Soar was on the team.
Her first few years were an adjustment. She tore ligaments in her ankle during her first World Cup season and had to recover. Last season, she hit the podium for the first time in dual moguls (a bronze and a silver), where two racers compete at the same time and the faster one moves on, in a bracket format. In December, at a World Cup in Sweden, she got the bronze in moguls. Earlier this month, at the World Cup in Deer Valley, Utah, she won the silver in dual moguls.
In a moguls competition, the skiers negotiate a moguls course with two jumps in the middle and the scoring is based on speed and degree of difficulty of the jumps. Gnoza said Soar is trying to perfect harder tricks and sacrificing placing occasionally.
“The hardest jump she has in front of her is going to be to go from [last season’s No.] 6 [ranking] to [No.] 1,” Gnoza said. “We’re halfway there. She went from 6 to 3. We’re continuing to move in the right direction. The plan is to get to that No. 1 right when it counts the most in 2022 at the Olympic Games in Beijing.”
Soar shrugs off the pressure. Of course, she wants to medal at the Olympics. But she also just wants to ski.
“When you’re a little kid and you’re good, everybody’s like, ‘Oh you’re going to go to the Olympics some day,’” she said. “It’s always been a goal of mine but obviously right now, my goal is to medal at those games and bring everything I’ve worked for to fruition and bring something home to all the people who have invested in me and believed in me this whole time because they deserve it.
“It’s great for the young kids at Killington to see, that it’s totally possible.”
At 18 months, Hannah Soar was on her first pair of tiny plastic skis, guided down the mountain between her parents’ legs.