I’ve never felt that way before or since. It seemed like 100 things just clicked into place. I was sitting on top of the gate and the whole country was watching. All I had to do was smile. – Shannon Bahrke Happe
SALT LAKE CITY — It’s a different country than when Shannon Bahrke Happe won the first American medal of the Salt Lake Winter Olympics. Yet in some ways, it’s exactly the same.
“I am so proud to be an American,” she said in 2002.
“What an amazing country we have,” she says today.
When you’ve worn the flag on your back, you’re all-in. She cried when she got her U.S. Ski Team uniform.
“I slept in it that first night,” she says.
Fifteen years ago on Thursday, Bahrke won a silver medal in moguls at Deer Valley. It was only fitting she would be the first American to the podium. She was straight out of central casting, wearing red, white and blue glitter on her face. You could see her smile from space.
Just like now, the world wasn’t a perfect place. Terrorists had taken down the Twin Towers the previous September. A few days before the Games began, President George W. Bush was calling Iran, Iraq and North Korea “the axis of evil.” A student shot six people in Virginia. An American journalist was kidnapped in Pakistan. The United Nations froze the assets of Al-Qaeda.
In sports, the Patriots were on their way to winning the Super Bowl.
Sound familiar?
Meanwhile, Bahrke, a former University of Utah student, was going for the gold. She missed it by one, but it would be hard to tell. She still gets choked up talking about Feb. 9, 2002.
“It was for all of America,” she says.
Now a married mother of a 3½-year-old daughter, she has launched a business called Team Empower Hour, in which former Olympians work on corporate team building through activity. Like many other former Olympians, she’s not hurting for speaking engagements or public appearances. She is on the board of the Youth Sports Alliance in Park City and a ski ambassador for Montage Deer Valley.
America remains a place of opportunity, she says, but people get mired in issues of money and politics and forget “what an amazing place it is.”
“I just think, Oh my gosh, people die on boats to be able to live in this country and to believe in something bigger than yourself,” she says. “I feel so privileged.”
The day that changed her life began inauspiciously. She, two other Americans and a Norwegian made it through qualifying, as expected. Bahrke says until then, she had no particular sense of karma. But that changed on the second run.
“I’ve never felt that way before or since,” she says. “It seemed like 100 things just clicked into place. I was sitting on top of the gate and the whole country was watching. All I had to do was smile.”
She skied well enough to move into first place, though Norway’s Kari Traa — the world’s top moguls skier — claimed gold a few minutes later. That’s the thing about the Olympics: second counts practically as much as first. You still stand on the podium, land endorsements and become famous.
Bahrke isn’t naïve about the Olympic movement. She says the IOC must not allow sites to be abandoned after use. She suggests the Games guarantee money to keep facilities operational.
She goes on to say professional athletes who turn down Olympic invitations are missing a lifetime experience.
“I understand their (contractual) obligations,” she says, “but … I think the Olympics represent so much more than sports.”
If she had known at age 21 what it meant, she says she would have been more nervous that day. The medal set the course for her life. Now she says she is “instilling values of the family and of being a gracious winner and loser” in her daughter.
The second week of February never passes unnoticed. She thinks about 2002 daily.
“You try to leave politics out, and all these outlying things and it’s just sports — a raw emotion that you can’t describe to people,” she says. “If you talk to anyone who was at the Salt Lake Games, everyone says it was the coolest feeling ever, no matter what country they’re from. That type of spirit and passion transcends pro sports.”
The best part for her is that it transcends time, too.