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Michael Roberts: From ���ϳԹ��� Magazine, this is the ���ϳԹ��� Podcast. 

If you're a sports fan, there are certain moments that stand out in your memory. The best, of course, are the victories: the gold medals and world championships and, especially, the come-from-behind wins. Those great feelings last.

But, unfortunately, so does the sting of defeat.

And then, there are those more confusing experiences. Like, for example, when an amazing athlete at the very top of their game suddenly calls it quits. While this can break our heart, it mostly makes us... confused. I mean, why would someone bail when they're the best?

Well, turns out the answers aren't what you might expect. For today's episode, producer Paddy O'Connell digs into the curious case of an elite mountain athlete who decided she was done.

Angel Collinson: So I just wrote this piece and it's a really important one for my life, so I'm just gonna read it.

Sometimes things break us. Sometimes we break open. Sometimes we break down. Sometimes we break free. Sometimes it's all three.

Paddy: In October 2021, professional big mountain skier Angel Collinson sat below deck of her 40-foot sailboat, the Sea Bear, and recorded this video for her Instagram account.

Angel: I feel stuck. How do I get free? I don't trust myself. I'm scared.

I know what it is to reach mastery and I still feel like an imposter.

I know sometimes the things that free us also can cage us. Sometimes we outgrow our boxes.

Is my life meaningful? Is life meaningful?

Paddy: This public reading of a journal entry is notably different from the retirement speeches we have come to expect from famous athletes like Michael Jordan, Carli Lloyd, and Serena Williams. But this is how Angel Collinson chose to tell the world she was quitting.

Angel: It's time to say to skiing, it's been real. It's been a hell of a ride. And new and more expansive horizons await the other side.

To leave skiing behind is terrifying, and it's terrifyingly exciting.

Paddy: Angel's announcement in no small terms shocked the skiing world. She is one of the most talented, most famous big-mountain free skiers of all time, with a storied career marked by dream-like successes: scores of sponsors, two time winner of the Freeride World Tour, countless magazine covers, the first woman to win Powder Magazine’s coveted Line of the Year award, and the first woman to nab the opening and closing segments in a ski movie.

When I first watched Angel's retirement video I had two reactions. First, I was sad that we weren't all going to get to see her skiing artistry and mastery any longer. And second, considering she quit at the height of her powers, was...well, why? 

So, I asked her.

Angel: Giving up skiing was really hard, cuz my entire life and identity and everything was wrapped up in it. But it wasn't like I set out to be a pro freeskier. Like it kind of happened slowly by accident.

Even at the height of my career, I was like, Hmm, this isn't it. Shoot.

It wasn't bringing me fulfillment, it wasn't scratching that deep itch that we all have to do the thing that does the thing for us.

Paddy: That's her short answer. To get the full explanation of why an elite athlete gives it all up at the peak of her career for nothing in particular, we have to look back at Angel's path to skiing super stardom.

And, extra fun for you, me, and especially Angel, we're gonna have this conversation while she's on her boat.

Angel: Breathe it out. It's fine. All right, dude. Thank you for your patience.

Paddy: No problem. I totally get it.

Angel: Supposed to be in the water three hours ago and it's been a whole thing. Then the boat started taking on water.

Paddy: This is a very uncharacteristically frazzled Angel Collinson, who I spoke with back in January amidst the hectic launch of her sailboat in a boatyard in Boca Del Toro Panama.

Paddy: When I hear “boat taking on water” that I feel like that's like a fancy way of the boat is sinking.

Angel: Yeah. It's very slowly sinking though. The goal of the boat is definitely to keep out water and to float. So we're not, we're not exactly achieving our prime objective.

Paddy: Have you just already used all of like your f words and Dear God, help us prayers?

Angel: Definitely quite a few F bombs and a cold beer. So nothing that those can't really solve temporarily anyways.

Paddy: Since June 2021, Angel and her partner Pete have been living on their sailboat full time with no particular goal in mind other than exploring different locales around the world. That kind of loose framework is exactly what Angel says she needed after her highly scheduled life as a professional skier. 

However, it makes answering the question–who are you, what do you do–rather difficult.

Angel: my name's Angel and I'm from outer space. What is a job? I'd actually have no idea what I say to that question currently because I've kind of been taking a sabbatical.

Yeah. It's kind of weird to not have like a canned answer when someone says, what do you do?

I don't remember life without skiing, until now.

Paddy: The truth is that skiing is Angel's birthright and part of her family's identity. Angel grew up in employee housing at Utah’s Snowbird resort, where her father Jim worked as a ski patroller and her mother, Deb, homeschooled her and her brother, John.

Angel: Skiing was what we did, whether I liked it or not. You know, it was like, you didn't really have a choice. There was no like not liking skiing, or not not doing skiing. 

So pretty quickly I was like, all right, well I'm, and just with my personality, I'm like, I'm gonna just be as good as I can at it.

Paddy: Angel was clearly talented as a child and dedicated herself to ski racing, which in her view was much more than a sport.

Angel: I grew up really poor, you know, on ski patrol salaries, like never had new clothes, never ever went out to restaurants or movies or fairs or any, anything like that. You know, and I started racing. I was good at it and I realized like, this is my ticket out. Like I, if I make the US ski team, if I make the Olympics, like this is how I get out of here. But then free skiing when I was racing was like my sanity, my saving grace, my play, my self expression.

Paddy: Free skiing, if you don't know the term, is a form of the sport that leans heavily on creativity and style: jumps, tricks, some healthy showboating. It's what you do with your friends on the mountain. It's not like racing–at all.

Angel: I feel like my first memories of really being like, wow, this is amazing. When I was older, I remember really, really starting to love it, I think when I was like 12. And I got a pair of Jeremy Nobus, like Dina stars, the white skis with the wooden stripe down the middle. There was life before those skis and life after, like they changed my life. It was like I could ski in a way that I'd always wanted to, but like couldn't quite get there before.

Some of my most treasured childhood memories were definitely like in my teens angsty as all get out. So mad at my parents and everybody and putting my headphones in listening, like raging at some machines and absolutely shredding snowbird solo and all of a sudden I was like, I loved skiing.

Paddy: After narrowly missing the US Ski Team in 2009, Angel put not only racing but all forms of skiing on the back burner. She enrolled at the University of Utah on a full-ride academic scholarship and planned to become an environmental attorney. But in 2010, Angel's brother John convinced her to sign up for the Freeride World Tour, the most renowned big mountain ski comp on Planet Earth. 

Her first year on the tour, she won it. And then won again in 2011. After dropping out of school to compete in the US tour and the European tour, she took 2nd...in both.

Angel says that at this time her relationship with skiing was in its honeymoon phase. She was making money for the first time in her life, she was standing atop podiums, but most important to her, she was pushing her athleticism and artistry to their limit.

But honeymoons don't last forever.

Angel: It was really hard to separate the joy piece from the workpiece and like my work ethic and my drive almost ate away at the parts that I liked about it until it was indiscernible.

And all of a sudden this thing that had been my creative outlet and my place for joy and self-expression with no expectations, really quickly it became my job.

Paddy: In the winter of 2011-2012, Angel received a phone call that skiers dream of: an invitation from ski film company Teton Gravity Research, to come to a shoot in Alaska.

Angel: It was storm day at Snowbird. It's blizzarding, it's windy, it's bad light. No one's really around. It's the end of the day. It's my favorite.

It was like 3:45, so it was like the last tram or maybe the second to last tram. And I'm like fumbling with my stuff about to get ready for the turnstile and my phone's ringing and I almost ignored it.

They were like, do you wanna come to this our spring Alaska Heli trip with, you know, with the boys. It was Seth Morrison and Sage Cattibriga-Alosa and Dana Flahr. 

Paddy: Just a couple of guys who kinda ski.

Angel: Yeah, pardon my French, but that was a holy shit moment. It was like maybe the biggest one in my life. I was like, wait, do you even know who I am? I've never been in a helicopter, bro.

I think I was just a rock hard yes. Immediately like fuck yeah, right off the bat. But then afterwards I was like, do they really know what they're getting themselves into? I don't know what I'm doing. I'd never filmed before. I was very nervous. 

But I was like, well, I mean, whatever they've seen of me they've liked, even though I've never met 'em. So I'm definitely not gonna say no. But I was terrified

Paddy: On her inaugural Alaska trip with TGR, Angel did what she would become famous for: combined power, speed, aggressiveness, and technicality with flow, poetry, and kick-you-in-the-gut beautiful sweeping arcs. It earned her a recurring roster spot in TGR films. Her segment in 2014's Almost Ablaze was the first ever female opening segment in a TGR film and won her heaps of awards. Angel's portion in the follow-up film, 2015's Paradise Waits, is considered one of the greatest film segments by any skier ever. By any measure, Angel had reached the top of skiing.

But at the same time she was finally understanding what skiing legend Sage Cattibriga-Alosa told her back on her first film shoot in Alaska in the spring of 2012.

Angel: He was like, Angel, I'm just gonna be honest with you. If you really love skiing, do not be a professional skier. And I was like, huh, that's so funny. I've worked so hard to get here. I'm in Alaska now with you. This is a dream come true.

And I just had like kind of tunnel vision on being as good as I can. And I was like, all right, I'm gonna like, I'm just gonna do this better and better and better. Then pretty quickly I realized what he was talking about.

So when I started becoming a professional film skier, you do a lot less skiing and a lot more standing around waiting on weather windows, traveling.

Time on the computer working with sponsors, doing sponsored trips but not actually skiing. Or it like even on our film trips in Alaska, like if you get four solid runs, that's a good day. So pretty quickly I was like, well I'm actually getting worse as a skier now cuz I'm not skiing as much. I'm not getting the mileage.

I was struggling to hold onto the joy of it and I was really not loving standing around all the time.

Then I started to miss those teenage days, no pressure, no stress free skiing is just for me

And I started kind of fantasizing about like, okay, what would it actually look like if I just decided to be a barista or work at a bartender and just go full dirt back and just go like back to the roots.

Paddy: Angel didn't pull the plug right away. She began to question life as a pro skier in 2015. It would be another 6 years before she posted her retirement video on Instagram. When she did, her fans and people throughout the skiing world were shocked. That included journalist Anna Callaghan, who assumed that Angel had the best job in the world.

Anna Callaghan: You can't tell when you watch her ski that maybe she was struggling with not really liking it because it looked pretty magical. And how can something that looks so magical not be fun?

Paddy: As Anna watched Angel's Instagram video, she started to think there might be a bigger story here about what drives professional athletes–and what makes them want to walk away.

Anna: When she posted that video

She said, is there something that you're longing to move toward but don't know where to start?

I thought it was interesting. I was like, wow, Angel quit skiing. That's wild.

 I was curious and immediately wanted to pursue it.

Paddy: We'll be right back

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Paddy: After skiing superstar Angel Collinson posted a retirement video to Instagram in the fall of 2021, the collective jaws of the skiing world dropped to the ground. Why would the best skier in the galaxy hang up her boots at the height of her powers? 

Well, Among those asking this shared question was journalist Anna Callaghan. So she set out to find the answer.

Anna: The first time I talked to her she said it was like I was carrying this dirty little secret. I don't love skiing that much and I'm kind of over it. That revelation was interesting to me. And then sort of like the tension that followed, kind of explained the rest.

Like she was like, I thought that made me unappreciative or ungrateful and I wasn't it just like I never wanted to talk about it cuz it was everybody else's dream, but it wasn't mine. And sort of that was the tension of like not liking something you're really good at and how to deal with that.

The truth is that she didn't really like skiing and didn't wanna do it anymore. But like that truth was one that she had a hard time accepting.

Paddy: Anna's story, "Why Did One Of The World's Best Skiers Quit?," was published by ���ϳԹ��� Online in the fall of 2022. In her piece, she points to two flag-in-the-ground moments that finally pushed Angel past the breaking point.

The first occurred during an Alaska film trip in 2019. Due to foggy morning weather, helicopters couldn't fly which meant Angel had time to fill. She decided to write down a list of goals and dreams. Skiing didn't make the list. Maybe that surprises you, but it didn't surprise Anna.

Anna: Skiing in Alaska as part of a film trip sounds to me like objectively terrible. Um, it's expensive. You're sitting around a lot. It's stressful. You're trying to figure out the weather and the pilots and then you are skiing for a camera and there's this pressure. Like, that does not sound fun to me.

Paddy: Angel told me she was tired during that trip: physically, emotionally, spiritually. And a few hours after writing the life's goals list that notably made no mention of her current career path, it was time to ski. That afternoon, a helicopter dropped her off atop a thousand-foot line in the Chugach Mountains with fellow pros Nick McNutt and Griffin Post

Angel: I'm just kind of off my game trying to shake it. I just, yeah, distinctly remember looking over at Griffin Post and being like, you know, I'm just so tired of being scared all the time. 

Trying to make friends with your fear, your visceral fear in that way all the time,  was not my jam anymore.

Paddy: While descending the near 50-degree rocky slope, Angel's ski punched through an unexpected ice layer. She was whipped around backwards and spun into a violent cartwheel. As she rag-dolled down the face, she heard a loud pop in her knee. She'd torn her ACL, MCL, and meniscus.

What followed was surgery, months of recovery,plus a breakup and a move from Alaska back home to Salt Lake–all while questioning her career. Angel felt like she was in a fist fight, and losing.

Angel: You know, when you're in those times in your life where like things just keep giving you the sucker punch and you're like, what life? Like what, what, what am I doing wrong? What are you trying to tell me?

Sometimes you have to break down to break through. And it was full breakdown and it wasn't pretty. Um, drank a lot of wine. I ate a lot of chocolate and cried myself to sleep a lot at night. Listened to Beyonce and mended my heart.

Paddy: Yeah.

Angel: Then decided that I was gonna twerk my way through rehab.

Paddy: Twerk as in like the booty shaking dance?

Angel: Yes. I went into my physical therapist's office and I was like, 

Paddy: Let me show you something!

Angel: You’re not gonna believe what I’m working on!

She was like, well, show me how you dance. Like how, like because I just wanted to make sure I wasn't like tweaking my knee in a way that was gonna put stress on the ligament in the wrong way.

Paddy: Of course you wanna twerk but not tweak. I totally understand.

Angel: Exactly. We're going for twerking, not tweaking here.

I was just like, fuck it. I'm gonna have fun with this

Paddy: Angel's, ahem, unconventional approach to rehabbing her knee worked. She was soon back to full strength, and she had done it her way. That felt like the start of something new. Later that year, Angel met her partner Pete. They quickly fell in love, bonding over their shared passion for the outdoors, climate activism, and a desire to sail around the world. Angel figured she could ski in the winter and sail in the summer.

But on a day in the winter of 2021, that dream came crashing down. Angel was set to film a ski segment at Alta, Utah, with her brother John–also a professional skier–and Pete. It had all the trappings of those long lost, beloved ski days from her teenage years. But there was one thing missing: joy.

Angel: It should have been so stress free and so awesome. And instead I found like, it just felt like pulling teeth. As soon as I thought about pulling a camera out and having to do the whole thing, I was like, Ooh. That was a throw up noise for anyone listening. Sorry.

It was so visceral. It was so physical. It was nauseating. I was like crying. I was like, why am I even crying? This doesn't make sense. But sometimes, or it's like our soul or our body just starts being like, hello, hello. I'm trying to get your attention here. This is not the thing. And I was like, okay, I'm done.

And I didn't film anything else after that, that entire season.

It felt like a relief.

It's like a feeling of foundation crumble as you're standing on it. it's not like looking down at your feet as it's crumbling and going, no, no, no, no, no. But it’s like damn, this is actually happening right now. Okay.

Paddy: Angel and Pete started their sailing adventure in June 2021. She told her sponsors she was retiring in August and then told the world two months later. Angel now has an Ayurvedic health coaching business, she is taking music lessons, and when she and Pete are not removing rust from the hull of their boat, fixing its wiggling mast, and plugging leaks, they're enjoying boat life. Sort of. Angel says they plan to find a place on land to put down roots sooner than later.

Paddy: Do you feel like you are fulfilled? Do you feel like you are scratching the itch?

Angel: I really feel like I'm now actually in control of steering my own ship. You know, it feels really great. I don't feel like I'm sort of on a train that I can't stop or can't control.

Paddy: Do you think that you will ski again?

Angel: Yeah. This winter when I visited home for Christmas, I was like, ok, skiing, I see you. I feel a little desire for it, but not enough to do it, but it's there.

So I feel like it's a slow, slow build.

Paddy: I have a couple theories and one of the theories is that the worst thing to ever happen to your skiing or your love of skiing or your love affair of skiing was being a professional skier.

Angel: Yeah, definitely. Yep.

Paddy: Is that hard to realize?

Angel: For a while I was sad. When it was happening, I was sad. I'm not, I'm not sad anymore about it. But yeah, for a while I was like, oh, damn it, I'm losing this thing. And I couldn't figure out how to get it back the way that I wanted to

It has been my, one of my most intimate, like partnerships, in some ways. And it's gone through many iterations.

Skiing was like this conduit for so many things in my life, right? Like it opened all these doors. It, it brought me to places, you know, professionally, financially, independently, like all of these, all of these things skiing provided for me. And I also got to learn that I never want to make my hobby, my job again.

I never want my life to live off of me needing to perform out of something that I do for fun. 

And maybe that's the lesson. I guess I'm looking for a more balanced lifestyle. Is that even possible? Will I be able to achieve it? Probably not. Do I want it?Yes. 

Balancing stability and intensity and adventure, I guess is what I hope for.

Paddy: As Anna Callaghan sees it, there's a lesson here for all of us.

Anna: It's just a nice reminder that you can always reimagine yourself. I think a desirable state is to be constantly seeking, even though she is like a professional athlete and an extreme skier, like that's not super relatable. But she's going through this very relatable process.

Paddy: Do you think it's okay to quit something that you're so gifted at? Like, is it okay to be the best in the world and say, you know what, this is not for me.

Anna: Yeah, it definitely is. It's okay to quit. 

I think like maybe framing it as like, you should follow the things that interest you.

What's important to realize and sort of what Angel's trajectory shows us is like the, that it's real, it can be a really long process, and that the answers might not come very quickly.

But I think like the, the seeking is really important.

And I think a, a definition of seeking could be just like, living with a question.

Paddy: Ultimately, Angel Collinson's life post skiing is yet to be revealed. And she's ok with that. And I can't help but think that the same things she used to master the steepest, most technical skiing in the world will help her in this next chapter. She'll embrace the fear, drop in, and artfully navigate whatever comes next.

Angel: What I was optimizing my life for was freedom. Like whatever I can do to have as much freedom as possible so that I can really figure out like, all right, who am I?

What do I love to do? Because so far I've really gotten to know skiing well, but I pretty much suck at everything else. So it's been like a big learning process to be a beginner at so many things.

I feel like now I get to choose that's actually what's important in this moment. And I wouldn't say I'm like scratching the ultimate itch, but I feel like I'm on the path. I'm fulfilled. I'm happy.

I'm right where I need to be.

Michael Roberts: If you want to follow Angel Collinson's ongoing adventures, her Instagram is @angelcollinson.

This episode was produced by Paddy O'Connell and edited by me, Michael Roberts. Music by Robbie Carver.

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