From frozen lakes to the Olympic stage: Maïa Schwinghammer’s road to Milano-Cortina

Maïa Schwinghammer’s Olympic journey didn’t begin on a mountain. It began behind a snowmobile, being towed across Christopher Lake in Saskatchewan. 

“I grew up here, in Saskatoon” Schwinghammer said. “My parents used to run the local hill, Mount Blackstrap, and that's really where I learned how to ski.”

Blackstrap wasn’t big. But it was enough.

“That’s definitely where I learned how to ski and gave me all those basic skills to kind of progress to where I am,” she said. “It was definitely the building blocks.”

Schwinghammer’s father, Rick, was deeply involved in her life and in freestyle skiing — a passion that shaped much of her early exposure to the sport.

Saskatchewan being the flat land that it is, ski trips became a part of her life. At eight years old, she was juggling school with weekend drives, long nights and spending holidays on the hills.

“We would go to Calgary, Banff, Sunshine, Lake Louise, you know, the West Coast of Canada. I've skied in Fernie and Red Mountain,” Schwinghammer said. 

Milano-Cortina will be her first Olympics in the bib, but not her first Olympic experience. 

“Watching the Olympics in 2010 was really my ‘aha’ moment,” she said. “I was eight years old, but it definitely had a lasting effect.

“I want to do that. I want to become an Olympian.”

When Schwinghammer finally had the chance to ski with top athletes in Whistler, she felt the difference immediately.

“I remember some of the kids going, ‘Ohhh … I don’t know if she can ski with us,’” she said. “I definitely didn’t have the mileage everybody else had.”

But she stuck with it, making the provincial team at 15. Two years later, she made the national team. 

“And I’ve been traveling so much ever since,” she said.

Chile. France. World Cups