Sports

Anchorage skier follows his head, not his heart, to retirement

During a mountain race last month on the Alyeska ski slopes that helped mold him into a national champion, Kieffer Christianson took what he described as "a few gentle falls on my butt."

Happens all the time in mountain races. Christianson wasn't knocked out of the race and he didn't need medical attention after it.

But later that day, the concussion symptoms that had plagued him all year returned. Lights seemed brighter than normal. He felt tightness in his skull. His focus wavered.

That's when Christianson, 25, knew it was time to quit ski racing.

"I don't view it as a decision," the Anchorage man said Thursday. "Just a reality."

Christianson, the 2016 giant slalom national champion and the 2017 bronze medalist in the same event, announced his retirement a month ago on Instagram. He has since returned to Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, where he has two terms left before he graduates with a degree in psychology.

Calling it quits six months before the Winter Olympics wasn't easy. Making the Olympic team was far from a given – last season Christianson raced independently after losing his spot on the U.S. Ski Team — but ski racing was his passion, and success at the world level was his dream.

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But his brain had other ideas.

"I could hardly ski without my brain feeling hurt," Christianson said.

A ski racer for most of his life and a member of the national team for four years, Christianson suffered a couple of concussions over the years due to bad falls while racing or training.

In the summer of 2016, he incurred another one after taking a spill while water skiing.

"It didn't seem very bad at all," he said, "but the symptoms persisted for six weeks."

Since then, the symptoms have come and gone, sometimes for seemingly no reason at all.

"I was at the point I could pass the cognitive test," he said. But the tightness in his head, the sensitivity to light and the struggles with focus and memory kept coming back.

He wondered if he was imagining things, and he felt frustrated that doctors couldn't explain what was going on. The inexact science of brain injuries and concussion management forced him to assess his future as a ski racer.

"I spent a lot of time thinking this spring," he said. "Then right after that (mountain) race, I knew I was in trouble.

"(Retiring) wasn't like a big decision. I said if I have any more symptoms, I'd stop. When it happened in August off the ski slopes, (I knew) I was not going to ski more World Cups."

A slalom and giant slalom specialist, Christianson has been speeding past gates on race courses since he was a kid. He said he tends to hit them with his head instead of his shoulder, a habit that is "nothing irregular" in the sport, he said.

"I figured if I wore a helmet I was good," he said. "My brain definitely took a lot of trauma."

Christianson doesn't want to scare kids away from ski racing – in fact, after the fall term of Dartmouth, he's coming home for the winter to work as a coach for the Alyeska Ski Club. He said he'll tell kids not to hit gates with their heads.

He said he looks forward to coaching because it will put him back on the slopes in a training environment, but at a level where he isn't risking injury. And it will ease him into his post-racing life.

"The last couple of years I really learned – and this sounds like a cliché – but I learned how to enjoy the process, enjoy training, enjoy working out, enjoy eating right," he said. "It was like living with a purpose. It's paying attention to detail and figuring out how to do your best every day with the thought it will pay off with a tenth of second."

Christianson opened the 2016-17 season with six top-10 finishes in his first eight Nor-Am races. He won one race and was second in three others to claim the early points lead in the North American racing circuit that ranks one tier below the World Cup.

That was in December. By January, the concussion symptoms returned. He canceled a trip to South Korea for the Far East Cup at the Yongpyong Resort, which would have given him a chance to ski on the mountain that will host Olympic races in February.

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The chance to travel the world is one of the things Christianson said he will cherish most about his career.

He leaves ski racing with frustrations and some regrets. He was never a full-time member of the U.S. Ski Team's World Cup team, which made it hard to develop consistency and confidence.

"I didn't achieve what I wanted to," he said. "I wanted an overall championship on the World Cup, and I fell short of that. I wanted to score World Cup points, and I fell short of that."

Those things will haunt him, Christianson said, but he's OK with that.

He's not ending his career on his own terms, but he knows he's ending it for the right reason. His brain is telling him that.

Beth Bragg

Beth Bragg wrote about sports and other topics for the ADN for more than 35 years, much of it as sports editor. She retired in October 2021. She's contributing coverage of Alaskans involved in the 2022 Winter Olympics.

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