Erich Sailer, a Hall of Fame ski coach who transformed a modest Minnesota slope into a launchpad for young hopefuls — including the future champion Lindsey Vonn — putting them on career paths that led to the Olympics and the international World Cup circuit, died on Aug. 19 in Edina, Minn. He was 99.
His daughter, Martina Sailer, said he died in a hospital from complications resulting from recent falls.
Sailer was the head racing coach and director at Buck Hill, a sports resort about 20 miles south of Minneapolis. It ski slope is so unimposing that the reporter Bill Pennington, a longtime chronicler of Vonn for The New York Times, once wrote that “escalators at the nearby Mall of America probably have more vertical drop.”
But with rigorous instruction, hearty encouragement and a jubilant spirit, the Austrian-born Sailer (pronounced SIGH-lur) helped create the foundation on which numerous elite careers were built, none more celebrated than Vonn’s.
Vonn began training with Sailer at age 7. At 9, she accompanied him and his wife, Ursula, to Austria to ski on a glacier there. Initially, he would jokingly call her a “turtle,” telling The Times in 2010, “You could walk faster than she skied.” As she became a driven international racer, though, Sailer recognized that “she would rather be dead than not succeed.”
With a fearless attacking style, Vonn became the first (and still only) American to win a gold medal in the women’s downhill, at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, British Columbia. She also won a bronze medal at those Games in the super giant slalom, which combines speed and technical skill, and a bronze in the downhill at the 2018 Winter Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea.
Vonn kept in touch with Sailer as she won four World Cup overall titles and 82 individual races on the World Cup circuit. He remained a trustworthy sounding board.
As she prepared for her final downhill race before retiring in 2019, he was encouraging, she recalled in her memoir, “Rise: My Story” (2022). “Of course you can do it,” he told her. “It’s nothing! What’s a minute and a half? I’m 93!”
Last year, Vonn, now 40, consulted Sailer again before deciding whether to make a comeback and try to qualify for next year’s Winter Olympics in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy.
“Do you think I can really do it?” Martina Sailer recalled Vonn asking her father.
“Of course you can,” he replied.
She has decided to make the attempt.
Vonn said on social media that she considered Sailer part of her family; he had also coached her father in his youth. “There is no doubt that I would not be the person or skier I am today without him,” she wrote about Sailer on Instagram, adding,“He single-handedly did more for skiing than any other coach in America and perhaps the world.”
Erich Josef Johann Sailer was born on Nov. 7, 1925, in Telfs, Austria, a market town near Innsbruck, the host city of the 1964 Winter Olympics. His father, Josef Sailer, was an artist and house painter. His mother, Margarethe (Schatz) Sailer, was a florist.
Erich began skiing as a teenager in the Tyrolean Alps. Although he was not related to the Austrian skiing great Toni Sailer, who won three gold medals at the 1956 Winter Olympics in Cortina d’Ampezzo, he did have his own moments of glory. As a member of Austria’s national ski team, he finished third in 1950 in the Hahnenkamm downhill race in Kitzbühel, Austria, on what is considered one of the world’s most challenging courses.
He emigrated to Vancouver in 1954 to coach skiing at the University of British Columbia. As the story goes, he arrived with $35 in his pocket and a familiarity with English effectively limited to the word hamburger.
He then moved to Oregon, where, according to the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame, he “pioneered summer ski racing on this continent” in 1956 with a camp at the Timberline resort on Mount Hood. In 1967, he helped launch a summer camp on the Beartooth Pass outside Red Lodge, Mont., which became the country’s largest ski-racing camp, drawing 700 skiers for 40-day sessions.
In 1969, Sailer moved to the Twin Cities area of Minnesota, where the terrain was relatively flat but where, with the population booming, there would be many more potential students.
Buck Hill’s 310-foot vertical drop was particularly suited to slalom skiing. Using a simple rope-tow lift — 45 seconds up and 20 seconds down — skiers under Sailer’s tutelage built consistency through repetition. Vonn was known to ski 400 gates (the pairs of poles that mark a slalom course) on a school day and up to 1,000 a day on weekends, including evening sessions under the lights.
Sailer had been a youth coach for all four members of the U.S. women’s slalom team at the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City — Vonn, Tasha Nelson, Kristina Koznick and Sarah Schleper. Four years later, at the Winter Games in Turin, Italy, five of his one-time athletes — Vonn, Koznick, Schleper, Julia Mancuso and Resi Stiegler — represented the U.S. across alpine events, with Mancuso winning the giant slalom.
While he was quick to encourage his athletes, Sailer could also be candid in his criticism. One of his methods would be considered harsh today — smacking skiers on their backsides with a bamboo pole if they were too slow out of the gate.
But he also knew how to calm nerves, skiers told Ski Racing Media in paying tribute to his career after his death. For instance, he once told Nelson, a two-time Olympian in the slalom, to think of her horse, Shadow, to relax herself in the start gate.
Perhaps his most appreciated skill was to treat each athlete individually and not try to mold them into a particular form. Vonn said that the best advice she received from Sailer was “Never change, because you are fast just as you are.”
In addition to his daughter, Martina, a lawyer and ski coach, Sailer is survived by his wife of 55 years, Ursula (Steinhauser) Sailer, and two granddaughters.
In 2005, Sailer was inducted into the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame, in Ishpeming, Mich., in the Upper Peninsula. He was so dedicated to coaching that, after tearing an Achilles tendon in his 80s, he devised a novel solution to aid in his recovery and avoid missing a summer ski camp.
“He called me all excited,” Martina Sailer said, “and told me that he put his ski boots on and mowed the lawn.”
Jeré Longman is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk who writes the occasional sports-related story.
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