Ryan Cochran-Siegle skis to US Olympic medal 50 years after Mom

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As Ryan Cochran-Siegle set off at around noon Tuesday for a super-G run that would earn a silver at the Beijing Games — the first Olympic Alpine medal for a U.S. man since 2014 — it was around 11 p.m. Monday night back home in Starksboro, Vermont (pop. 1,756).

So his mother, Barbara Ann Cochran, grabbed a laptop and settled into bed in her pajamas to keep tabs on how the boy she put on skis at age 2 would fare.

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Mom, you see, came from the "Skiing Cochrans" family of Olympians, and was the slalom champion at the 1972 Sapporo Games. She knows all about what it takes to succeed on this stage, all about what goes through a racer’s mind at the start, middle and end of a high-velocity trek down the glassy side of a mountain with history in the offing.

"I felt pretty calm until a few people before him. Then I got those butterflies and started getting pretty nervous. I was yelling as he was going down, ‘Go, Ryan! Go, Ryan!’ I was loud. I woke my daughter up," Cochran said with a chuckle during a telephone interview interrupted occasionally so she could listen to what was being said about Ryan's result on the American broadcast. "And then came a ton of different emotions. Excitement. Nervousness. Proud of what he’s doing — and what he’s come back from."

Ryan Cochran-Siegle of the United States makes a turn during the men's super-G at the 2022 Winter Olympics, Tuesday, Feb. 8, 2022, in the Yanqing district of Beijing.  (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)

That latter phrase encompasses quite a bit for the 29-year-old Cochran-Siegel, or "RCS," as he’s known to everyone in skiing. He's always been fast, but there were so many