Billy Kidd

The south westerlies were freshening, fanning out of the canyons with twenty knot winds. Billy Kidd leaned back over the rushing lake water, applying his body weight against the rail to counter the force of the increasing wind against his sail. With a big smile and firm hand on the tiller he maneuvered the sailboat through a swelling sea with the deft touch of a slalom skier. Loose sail blew full, the hull heeling with another strong puff. The thirty - foot, carbon fiber sloop glistened in the warm light from trucks to waterline. Kidd's trademark cowboy hat remained securely on his head despite the breeze and powerful downdraft.

About the hats, Billy says,"If you grew up in the 50's you grew up with Roy Rogers and TV Westerns. With a name like Billy Kidd you dreamt of being a cowboy in the West. Steamboat is an authentic historic cowboy town. After I finished racing and came to Steamboat I discovered everyone wore a cowboy hat so I bought one, too. By this time of my career, if I want my kids to go to college, I wear the hat."

Lake water is a strange place for one of the world's most recognizable skier to feel so at home, but Kidd grew up on the shores of Lake Champlain, Vermont. As a youth he'd go explore the lake on his sailboat and remains an avid sailor. Known more for the western image he's maintained as Director of Skiing at Steamboat, Colorado, the mariner turned skier loves to confide that he's a distant relative to Captain Kidd, the same sailor, who, 300 years ago, on May 23, 1701, was hanged in Wapping, England for piracy.

"I rather doubted it myself," says Billy's wife Hollis, "but I went along with the premise first for fun. And then I saw a print from a book at the British Museum in London of Captain Kidd...and there was Billy's nose! So I'm a believer. Have a look at Billy's nose, and you'll see that it is most, um, distinctive."

Ask Billy Kidd how many cowboy hats he owns and surprisingly he tells you only eight - each being a "Billy Kidd Stetson Hat", made by Stetson Hat Co. The hatband features pheasant feathers with a small turquoise stone. The hat's most distinctive feature is the stampede strap (rawhide) which keeps his hat perpetually on his head whether in the gates, on the water, or some other daily adrenaline rush. To have only eight hats on the Billy Kidd Tour- Through- Life seems as odd as another mythical hero, Willie Nelson, having that one beat-up guitar you always see strapped to him in concert - then again, the great ones don't need much inventory.

He might appear to some as a hip-hop dude sporting the ever present trademark chapeau, however, cowboy or pirate, Billy Kidd is a friendly interdimensional being who really wants to help us out.

More than anything he loves being Billy Kidd. He's lucid and cuddly and has a friendly glow about him like a radioactive camp counselor. He loves kissing babies, shaking hands, having his picture taken and making new friends. Beaming, handsome as an action figure, and backlit with a 24 karat smile, when he rides off into the sunset typically he's left behind in people a kind of full-body weeping desire to be part of something larger. He steamrolls you with his energy and good vibes, the gist being that we're all connected, and that life is good.

But for a moment let go of his Billy-the-Kid cowboy image. Try to forget his corporate trysts. Forget his sailing ability. Even forget that he won a Silver medal in the 1964 Olympics and a Gold six years later at the World Championships, despite taped ankles and a special corset bracing his back - a show of toughness that carried his habitual heroism to the edge of greatness.

Focus instead on his implacable sunny character and his credo of universal positivity.

"I had a different approach to competition," he explains. "All I ever wanted to do was to go faster to the finish than anybody else, to do my very best. At the same time, I wanted Killy and the others to do their best. I didn't want to psych someone out, or have them have a bad day, or see them fall down. I'd have made a terrible boxer. I never thought of competition as beating the other person down."

By winning the Gold Medal in the Combined at Val Gardena, Italy in 1970, Kidd became the first American male to be World Champion in skiing. The day after his victory he turned pro and two weeks later he won the World Pro Championship in Verbier, Switzerland, becoming the first person to win both Amateur and Pro World Championship titles in a single year. Not bad for the University of Colorado graduate who always figured he'd move on to business school after his racing career ended.

"Ski racing was more fun than anything in my life, but not what I was going to make my living off of. In those days if you won a gold medal - that and a quarter would get you a cup of coffee. It didn't change your life," remembers Kidd.

It was in early February 1964 during the IX Olympiche Winterspiel at Innsbruck, Austria that twenty-year old Billy Kidd, starting in 16th position, negotiated quickly down the tight, bone-hard slalom set on the Patsherkofel track.

Gaining momentum, Kidd zipped into the final combinations on the steilhung, propelling himself solidly into second place, only .14 of a second back of Pepi Stigler's gold medal winning time. Teammate and best friend Jimmie Heuga soon followed only .25 of a second back to place 3rd.

"Everybody was stunned," recalls Jimmie Heuga. "Billy began punching me in the arm. Bob Beattie was so excited he ran down from the start of the course to reach us in the finish corral. He was in shock."

As Kidd kicked out of his skis an estimated crowd of sixty thousand roared in disbelief. Kidd had won the Silver and Heuga the Bronze. For the first time ever in Olympic alpine competition, American men had triumphed over their invincible European counterparts.

"I missed the Gold Medal by a blink of an eye," says Billy. "The Silver wasn't too bad, but a blink of an eye over two minutes of racing? I spent the next six years trying to make up that .14th of a second. That's how good I wanted to get, but that was the beauty of it."

And that's the beauty of Billy Kidd. Effort is tonic for the soul, the thing that mocks "I could have been, but..." to open up a person's frontier. The gold medalist never made it to business school. The ski world continued to beckon. Kidd remains possibly the hardest working ambassador in the ski business. Winter months he's on the road 10 days per month, attending fundraisers, ski trade shows and corporate outings. Although he's made a career out of shaking hands, it's always been with an intent to give back, inspire, and shed some light into a person's life. When you get down to it, all the smoozing, all the corporate image stuff, all the cowboy buckarooing doesn't a hold a candle to a day on the water or a powder romp through the trees, or encouraging people to go after their dreams.

"I try to keep BK at home on Sundays during ski season, so he won't have to "be" Billy Kidd," says wife Hollis. "He is usually thrilled to sit on a couch and watch sports on TV during those (rare) Sundays that he is free. However, if anyone asks him to ski that day - and I mean ANYone, he will. If there are three skiers in town from the Shussboomer Ski Club, and the only day they can make it to meet up with BK is Sunday, Billy will meet them. If there are young people from the Richmond, VA Special Olympics chapter who land in town for a day of skiing on a Sunday...you guessed it. What's remarkable about Billy is that his home phone # is listed in local directory - and people really do just call him up and ask him to go skiing. And he (often) does!"

Is it harder for him to roll out of bed at age 58? It must be, but, as he explains, "How can you call it 'work'?" Billy Kidd loves, after all, being Billy Kidd.

"I wasn't that good of an athlete, but I worked really hard," he says riding off into his personal sunset." If you think you can't do something then you probably won't do it. And maybe it's the same in everyday life. Don't get distracted. Focus on what's important and get rid of things that aren't important. Focus on what you really like to do. I've been lucky. I found something that I really love and been able to pursue for a long time. I've been so lucky to go to the places I've visited and meet the people I've met. Skiing's been the common thread to tie everything together."