Born in Sandpoint and raised next to the bunny hill at Schweitzer, one could argue that Farli Boden, 18, has literally had skiing in her sights her whole life. “My parents put me on alpine skis as soon as I could walk,” she laughs. “Then, I started telemark skiing when I was 5 or 6. Our friend Craig Marine had to help remold the shell of the boots and double up my socks just to make them fit.”
“When I was about 9, my parents put me into a Schweitzer Alpine Racing School (SARS) Christmas camp hoping to make me a better skier. What we didn’t expect was how much I would really like racing.” Farli notes that she was relatively late to the racing scene when she started competing at the age of 10. “When I went to my first junior national telemark competition, I was amazed by all the people cheering everybody on. It got me hooked.”
Balancing both alpine and telemark training has been exciting for Farli with telemark racing adding even more to her schedule when she made the US Telemark Development Team at the age of 13. By the time she was 16, she was competing for the US National Team.
Her hard work isn’t just on the race course though. Farli, who carried a solid 4.0 GPA throughout high school, plans to head to college and keep on racing. “I want to continue racing both alpine and telemark in college but I can see that with telemark racing, I have a better opportunity to compete on a national and international level so I may need to defer those plans for a year to focus on training.”
In fact, Farli wrapped up the 2017/18 season by winning the US Telemark Nationals and becoming the #1 female racer in the US. “If telemark racing gets sanctioned for the 2022 Olympics, there’s a chance I could compete in Beijing and that’s really, really exciting.”
Telemark racing has more components to it than alpine, she says “There’s a jump section, a 360 degree turn called a ‘wrap,’ and a skate portion. It’s a very demanding race. With tele, you’ve got to be on your game. It’s funny to me that people think only old people telemark ski,” she says with a huge smile. “That’s so not true.” // (Dig Chrismer)
Dig Chrismer is a tele skier and the marketing manager at Schweitzer Mountain Resort. This piece originally appeared in the 2018-2019 issue of “Schweitzer Magazine.”
