Paula Moltzan’s long, winding and mostly uphill road
I’m not quite over the opening World Cup, and Paula Moltzan’s historic win. As a policy I don’t write about stars here on Racer eX. They get enough press, so I concentrate more on the underdogs and the character-building phase that builds the greatness. I need to take a moment here with Paula, however, because although she’s no underdog the magnitude of what she’s accomplished has been vastly understated.
Let’s start with the noted record of being the oldest woman, at age 32, to notch her first World Cup win, and the stat that it took her 149 starts to get a win. They seem like backhanded compliments, like “what took you so long?” records. They are trotted out with little context on why this journey took so long.
A FAST START INTO STRONG HEADWINDS
Her story started like so many others. Young rising star is on the fast track to success, then falters, and falls off the track. The whole “got kicked off the national team” thing has happened to many young athletes, some of whom have then earned their spot back. But Moltzan wasn’t just talented. She was the 2015 World Junior Champion. And she didn’t just climb back into position by signing on to a private coach or a PG program. She went to school, which at the time was the ultimate nail in the coffin for American female skiers.
Instead of easing off the gas, she kept her foot down hard in her new environment. She won the NCAA SL title in 2017 and in 2018 won a record eight carnivals for UVM. Conventional wisdom then was that men could make it to the World Cup from the NCAA but that the women’s tour wasn’t tough enough to support that. Moltzan, speaking through her boots, quietly dissented.
In November 2017, her sophomore year at UVM, she earned start rights at the Killington World Cup. I remember seeing her fall hard on the upper flat amidst a snow squall and seeing the dejection as she dusted herself off and disappeared into the wind. A year later she again earned a Killington start through a Colorado time trial, with no summer training. That time she finished 17th (3 places behind UVM teammate and future World Champion Laurence St-Germain) earning another World Cup start.
THE DIY COMEBACK
Despite having no American SL contenders other than Shiffrin, she was not welcomed back into the US Ski Team fold. Each race became a time trial for the next. While the World Cup covered her expenses at races, where was allowed into the team tent, she and her then boyfriend Ryan had to cobble together funding and connections for all the travel and training in between.
They arranged and paid for flights, rental cars and hotels while managing logistics at every turn. They fought for good equipment—always a huge hurdle for non-national team skiers. Ryan also committed fully to the effort as coach/tech/chauffeur. Oh yeah, and she did all that while toggling back and forth to the states to attend classes at UVM and race for them on the NCAA circuit. NOTHING was given to her. (Read more about that season’s campaign in Project Paula that appeared right here on Racer eX.)
Once named to the national team that spring, Moltzan had to keep fighting, this time for the pace she needed to move up the ranks. It’s hard to imagine now, on the heels of the US women winning the 2026 Nations Cup, but in 2019 Moltzan was the only American other than Shiffrin regularly scoring SL points. Because Shiffrin trains solo, Moltzan had to build her own pace by pulling the team up along with her. Then, during Covid, she rebuilt her own body, emerging from quarantine with the physical strength to match her iron will.
As every ski racing fan knows, she went on to climb steadily up the ranks in SL as well as GS, earning podiums in each and finishing last season ranked in the first group in both tech events. It was already a pretty solid Hero’s Journey, but she kept pushing for that next step, for something more than incremental progress on a familiar path.
REACHING THE TOP, THEN REACHING FOR MORE
Making a wholesale equipment change at the peak of your career is always high risk. At best it takes a lot of work and patience during an adjustment period. At worst it is the “cash in/fade out” move where you sign a fat contract with high hopes then plummet down the ranks. Making that type of change by moving to Van Deer—a brand totally untested by women— is incredibly bold. It takes full commitment and confidence, and even then it might not be enough to overcome the challenges.
A pioneering equipment switch like this involves a summer fully devoted to testing, with no peer to look to for advice or experience: nobody to validate the decision; nobody to compare notes with; as a top skier in each event, nobody to really test your speed; and nobody to quell your doubts, to counter that voice inside asking, ”Did I just totally throw away my career on this hair-brained idea?”
When Moltzan heaps credit on her team, she means it. There is no way a move like this could work without the support of an equally committed team to work through the sheer volume of testing and the inevitable troughs of doubt. The challenge will surely continue throughout the season, with every new hill and different condition, but she can meet that challenge without a shadow of doubt about her decision, her capabilities and her ability to deliver on race day.
So to you Paula, I send my congratulations and my deepest respect. I’m a little sad I don’t get to write about you much on Racer eX anymore, but those are the rules and you will never ever again be an underdog.