Sights and Sounds From Ski Ballet's First Competition In Nearly 30 Years

This story originally appeared in the print magazine POWDER 2026 Photo Annual. Copies are still available while supplies last. Click here to get yours.

Ballet is Back!

Kathryn Wadsworth is dressed as a butterfly. More precisely, the Event Manager at Monarch Mountain Ski resort is in a monarch butterfly costume, made of lift tower pads she says were stitched together by “our tower-pad guy.” It’s a befitting look, considering we are watching a ski discipline known for sequins and silly outfits. This is the inaugural Ski Ballet on Freeway, the first ski ballet competition held on U.S. soil in 25 years. 

Monarch Mountain observed its 85th birthday in 2024-25, Wadsworth notes. “We celebrated all season with retro activities. What better way to finish our 85th season than with ski ballet?” she asks. 

“Umm…lots of resorts do pond skimming in Spring…” I think to myself, but refrain from saying out loud. Certainly, Monarch and co-sponsor WHEN radio could attempt something simpler than resurrecting an oft-ridiculed genre of competitive skiing that perished decades ago. 

We turn our attention to the course. A contestant named Andy Tocke drops in. Looking Old School Dapper in wool pants, neck kerchief, and beret, Tocke skis with elegance and panache. He deftly crosses skis back and forth over each other. He adroitly links a number of 360-degree spins. Tocke, 53, learned ski ballet as a child in Western New York. “Back then,” he says, “ballet was part of being a well-rounded skier. My mom was really into it, and had me take lessons at 8 years old.”

The 1st Annual Ski Ballet on Freeway registered 18 entrants; some individuals, some multi-person teams. A few—like Tocke and Kat Carillo—have clearly Done This Shit Before. They honor the damn difficult practice of dancing dramatically on skis, smoothly executing acrobatic maneuvers that even the finest skiers at your home resort would struggle to replicate.  

But unlike Tocke and Carillo, many of the contestants are in their 20s—far too young to have witnessed real ski ballet, much less practiced it. They sashay sloppily, haphazardly across Freeway, spinning a bunch. They attract attention by frenetically waving their arms around…but so do traffic cops.  

A telemarker calling himself Tele Titan drops in. Unlike locked-heel normies, Tele Titan can lean far over his boards and grab his tips. Which he does, before sliding backwards toward the crowd, thrusting out his butt and twerking it like a stripper. 

It’s hard to believe, but back in the day, ballet carried sufficient ski cred to appear in the 1988 and 1992 Winter Olympics as a demonstration sport. Has it really been reduced to this? Going fakie and mooning spectators? I ask Wadsworth if many Monarch entrants actually claim much ski ballet experience. “No!” she cackles. “Nobody in America does.” 

I suppose not. After all, it’s not 1978 anymore.

Me? I was 15 then. After five family trips from Kansas to Vail, I considered myself a true blue skier. Plus, I religiously moistened my teenage lips with Cherry Chapstick. As such, the legendary “Suzy Chapstick” TV commercial enchanted me. 

First aired in February ’78, the ad begins with a voiceover announcing “Suzy Chaffee has changed her name.” Chaffee, a downhill racer for the US Ski Team at the 1968 Winter Olympics, launches a colossal spread eagle, then slashes a hockey stop. She turns to the camera. “Call me Suzy Capstick,” she chirps, blue eyes blazing and blonde hair fanning. “This is real Chapstick weather!” 

Then comes action utterly alien to the general public: ballet on a ski slope! Suzy and an unnamed male partner hold hands and twirl down a gentle run, keeping one ski on snow while holding the opposite leg straight out and gloriously aloft—much like my prima donna dog does when kicking grass and leaves over her digestive effluvium.

“Suzy Chapstick” became a pop culture touchstone. Virtually everyone knew of her. The long-running campaign created national attention for winter sports (and, presumably, lip balm). Some consider it skiing’s greatest marketing effort ever. Bigger-name athletes signed on to also “change their name.” NBA legend Julius Erving, aka Dr. J, declared he should be addressed as “Dr. Chapstick.” In short, a commercial featuring ski ballet went as viral as anything possibly could in 1978. 

The International Ski Federation (FIS) recognized ski ballet as a worthy competitive discipline the very next year.

Along with moguls and aerials, ballet fell under the umbrella of freestyle. The inaugural FIS Freestyle World Cup took place in 1980. For a while, ski ballet thrived, spreading round the world, holding dozens of comps every winter. No-nonsense judges critiqued athletes according to degree of difficulty, innovation, choreography, and technical execution. (Compare that to Monarch’s somewhat looser criteria: “artistic movement, technicality, and overall enthusiasm and vibe.”)

Ballerinas undertook huge jumps and seriously difficult gymnastic moves, such as flipping over their poles, that thrilled spectators. The genre became a fan favorite, proving America’s insatiable appetite for talented athletes performing stunts, whether in 19th century Barnum & Bailey circuses or 21st century X Games.

By the late ’80s, however, ski ballet had grown less and less relatable. Participants employed poles longer than their skis, for crying out loud! They minced and pranced down ski areas’ flattest slopes. Then there was the off-putting word “ballet.” In a desperate attempt to stay relevant, ski ballet officially changed its name in the early ’90s. As I wisecracked in this magazine at the time, the discipline would henceforth be known as “Cindy.”

No, not really. In truth, ski ballet was rechristened “acroski.”

The new appellation failed to stave off inevitable doom. The concomitant rise of a trendy winter sports diversion (snowboarding) didn’t help, either. Yes, the Albertville Games of ’92 featured acroski, but it should be noted that Albertville is in France. With grunge all the rage in 1994, the International Olympic Committee informed acroski ballet it was no longer welcome. Instead, Lillehammer added its estranged sibling—freestyle aerials—as a full medal event. Four years later, Olympic snowboarding debuted.

THE REIGNING US ACROSKI CHAMPION is a 53-year-old woman who lives in Nashville, Tennessee. Lara Rosenbaum took first at the 2000 US Nationals, which turned out to be the final match in these United States. Following that season, FIS killed competitive acroski once and for all. Rosenbaum is in Monarch not to defend her title but to serve as the competition's lead judge. 

She entertains Monarch patrons before the contest with a dizzying array of tricks. Riding 130cm Harts, she elevates above snow for tip vaults, then spins everything around (a tip roll). There are multiple Whirly Birds (somewhat self-explanatory) and Tin Mans, in which she plants a tail in the snow and pivots around it. Rosenbaum gleams especially bright after nailing her first cartwheel since 2008, when a fall off a horse cracked her skull. “You can’t do handstands or other inversions with a brain injury,” she says. “Too much vertigo.”

A limber, 5-foot-3 sprite with a perpetual smile, Rosenbaum seems preternaturally suited for the performance art that is ski ballet. She learned to ski as a toddler at Waterville Valley, where her dad was an instructor. Early on, coaches noted her “Suzy Chapstick” talent and nicknamed her “Lara Lip Balm.” She competed on the World Cup at age 17, won every event she entered in 1991, and qualified (fruitlessly) for Lillehammer. When FIS obliterated her sport, she was devastated. 

“I’d worked my whole life to be in the Olympics,” she sighs. “Suddenly, all that work meant nothing. It seemed like FIS was just a bunch of old white guys making decisions about stuff they didn’t know. One [of the deciders] had never even seen ski ballet!”

Rosenbaum and teammates prayed and hoped that 2002’s Winter Games, held in Salt Lake City, USA, would include acro; after all, freestyle was born in America. But no. “All the bribery and wrongdoing at those Olympics tabled lots of plans because sponsors were pulling out,” Rosenbaum says. “I knew then ballet was done.”

She bristles that the wintersports brotherhood largely dismisses her chosen discipline as a frilly aberration of true skiing. “I was pulling 720s when most women stopped at 540s. We (acroskiers) were in such good shape. We did the same physical training as other US Ski Team members, studied the same sport science. Axels and flips are hard at altitude! My body fat measured 13 percent then, which is really low for a woman.”

March 2025 found Rosenbaum in Verbier for “Winter Waltz: A Ski Ballet Extravaganza.” Organized by deep-pocketed Swiss skiwear maker MGG, Winter Waltz reunited 28 former ski ballet all-stars, an international collective with more than 450 World Cup medals to their credit. A DJ blasted Euro EDM, and pros gamboled about with one ski in the air. MGG’s website currently pictures 1992 Olympian Annika Johansson doing the splits below a bright yellow and pink caption screaming: “BALLET’S BACK. Lose yourself to style.”

Whether anyone wanted this, the genre formerly known as acro is seemingly coming back. Attests Rosenbaum, “These days, the response to ballet is mostly positive, which was not the case back when I was really good.”

Which is to say, the era before Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. 

“Social media has definitely keyed the comeback,” she says, “because it’s so easy now to watch and experience ballet. It’s really catching on.” Indeed: Olympic gold medalist Jonny Moseley is now posting ballet tutorials from Lake Tahoe. Videos of freestyle legend Wayne Wong are resurfacing. No need to travel to mountains anymore: You can dive deep into ballet from your mom’s basement. 

Rosenbaum regularly presents ski ballet content on social media. On Instagram, footage of her pirouetting at Deer Valley “went viral pretty quickly and has 1.2 million views and close to 25,000 likes,” she says. Wow.

One might think the many eyeballs belonged to snarks bent on ridicule. The Instagram comments, however, are all positive, and others were at least open-minded, such as kmackie79 on Reddit, who wrote: “I clicked this thinking it would be ridiculous...It is actually pretty entertaining and something I would probably watch!”

It remains to be seen if the surge in awareness will translate to boots on the snow. Almost all ballet veterans from the ‘80s lament that the visually arresting sport never generated many participants. Still, there’s no questioning ballet’s comeback in the viral space. For instance, Bogner recently hired Rosenbaum to “spin around for their website in a pink one-piece.” Within 24 hours of the video posting, Bogner’s pink suit sold out.

THE COLOR PINK EMBELLISHES just about everything in the realm of acroski ballet. Here at Monarch, we find pink on: Rosenbaum’s beanie; ski poles parked near purveyors plying free booze in Monarch’s parking lot; the hula skirt and ski helmet of a bushy-bearded ski ballerina; various streamers and pom-poms; retro fart-bags, of which there are many, worn by competitors and bystanders alike; and the chalk board of vendor Sex, Plants, Rock & Roll, which provides complimentary, plastic-free glitter to ski ballet fans seeking optimal face sparkle. 

Goth, it is not. According to Google, “The color pink, particularly vibrant shades like flamingo pink, is often associated with flamboyance, joy, and playfulness.” Which sounds a lot like the ski ballet scene. 

Pink also colors the headband of Lisa Ledwith, executive director of Salida community radio station WHEN. The station and Monarch resort are co-sponsors of today’s competition. Ledwith got the idea to revive ski ballet from watching Chaffee and her ilk in old Warren Miller flicks. She and Wadsworth ran with the concept. Remarks Ledwith, “Honestly, when we first planned this event we did not expect to get so many people who were passionate about traditional ski ballet.”

A cynic (like me) might counter that there’s less traditional ski ballet happening on Freeway than end-of-season silliness in goofy costumes, abetted by gulps of Fireball. You know, the same kind of frivolity that governs most ski resorts come April. 

To be sure, the costumes deliver far better eye candy than the on-snow exploits. One team features women dressed as cops pursuing a lawless T-Rex. A few minutes later, some bears hunt down Goldilocks. There are cowboys, as well as a gaucho. A low-rider in a Zoot suit. More butterflies.

I meet a couple of young women disguised as wolves. As a wolfpack with two members, they—duh—call themselves “Team 2Pac.”

Seems ski ballerinas have an innate urge to dress up. Rosenbaum, for instance, found the plain, navy blue clothes of the US Ski Team too drab. So she went rogue, and hand-sewed sequins onto her uniform for World Cup bouts.

Kat Carillo is costumed—natch—as the Cat in the Hat. She came all the way from New Mexico to throw down. An uber athlete who learned to ski and ice skate before turning 3, she dreamt of joining the Ice Capades and actually teaches ski ballet at Angel Fire. She sessions Freeway (on 130cm Head Ambitions) better than anyone. She finishes third but should have won. 

Today’s champion is a Minnesotan dressed as Slash of Guns N’ Roses, complete with bejeweled top hat, curly black wig, and shirt with the sleeves cut off. His routine is synchronized to “Sweet Child of Mine.” He boogies the entire course with a cigarette dangling from his mouth—absolutely crushing the “overall enthusiasm and vibe” criteria.

From the judging stand, Rosenbaum witnesses scant expertise or talent. But that’s OK. The eternally sunny US Ski Team veteran reasons, “It’s always good to see people having fun with ski ballet, even if some came just to drink beer and wear costumes.”

She adds that, in 2026, Monarch may establish a “separate judging category for costumes. That way, it doesn’t take away from the athletic performances.”

A cynic (like me) agrees wholeheartedly with this idea. Once you witness ski ballet in person, you realize that its soul lies in artistic impression and dramatic flair, not scoring. There’s no debate, whatsoever, that this foofy nonsense has no place in the Winter Olympics—any more than the pond skim does.

Yet, ski ballet makes for entertaining visuals and seems like a fun thing to do. And in a landscape that’s increasingly becoming cut-and-paste, it’s a refreshing addition to a resort’s nutty springtime calendar.

This story originally appeared in the print magazine POWDER 2026 Photo Annual. Copies are still available while supplies last. Click here to get yours.