Lindsey Vonn: halfway to 2k

It was a perfect day for alpine skiing Friday in St. Moritz, Switzerland, site of the 1928 Winter Olympics, blue skies and no wind, the kind that makes you think about possibilities.

They held the first super-combined race this season on the women’s tour, and Lindsey Vonn won, her 48th career World Cup victory.

Slovenia’s Tina Maze finished second, 41-hundredths of a second back. Nicole Hosp of Austria finished third, 58-hundredths behind.

Lindsey leads the 2012 season overall World Cup standings by 302 points over Maze. A victory would make for Lindsey’s fourth overall title in the past five seasons.

Beyond that is where the possibilities start getting truly tantalizing.

Lindsey Vonn and Maria Hoefl-Riesch in the leader box in Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy, a few weeks back // photo courtesy U.S. SKi Team and Doug Haney

It’s not even the end of January. Lindsey now has 1,070 World Cup points.

No female racer has ever reached 2,000 for the season.

In 2006, Croatia’s Janica Kostelic got to 1,970. In 1997, Sweden’s Pernilla Wiberg reached 1,960.

On the men’s side, Austria’s Hermann Maier — the Herminator — reached exactly 2,000 points in the 2000 season.

It’s not unthinkable now that — if she stays healthy and if the weather holds — Lindsey could reach 2k.

It’s abundantly clear that Lindsey is racing this season with unquenchable ambition and desire.

Part of that is from last year — the way the 2011 season ended, when Lindsey came up three points shy of winning the overall World Cup title, denied in measure because of bad weather after making an incredible late charge. Her good friend and rival, Germany’s Maria Riesch, won the 2011 overall title.

Riesch — who got married over the summer and is now Hoefl-Riesch — is winless this season.

Meanwhile, and Lindsey has made this perfectly plain time and again, she absolutely loves to ski; her passion for ski racing has carried her through the rough patches these months in her personal life with the announcement of the divorce from her husband, Thomas. The two minutes or so of each race are time when all that can be left behind. It’s just her and her skis and the snow and the mountain, and nothing else matters.

There are two more races to go this weekend in St. Moritz — a downhill on Saturday and then another super-combined on Sunday, a make-up race from Val d’Isere in December.

Traditionally, Lindsey has done very well indeed in St. Moritz. The victory there Friday made for the sixth podium finish there in her career.

The downhill is Lindsey’s specialty; Nearly half, 23, of her career World Cup victories have come in the downhill and she is, of course, the 2010 Olympic downhill champion.

She is, moreover, the super-combined World Cup season event champion the past two seasons.

Intriguingly, Lindsey’s slalom — the second piece of the super-combined — seems to be picking up. She finished seventh this past Sunday at the World Cup slalom stop at Kranjska Gora, Slovenia, and said Friday, after the super-combined in St. Moritz, “I am a lot more confident this year. My equipment is working really well. I feel just more sure of myself.

“A lot of times I don’t have enough training in slalom. I lack confidence. You can see it in my body language when I’m skiing. Today I knew what I had to do. I knew I had to be smart, use good tactics on the pitches and let it go on the flats. I feel solid. I think it’s getting better by day with my slalom results and definitely helping with my combined results as well.”

Hannah Kearney: a champion’s consistency

Moguls skier Hannah Kearney won Olympic gold in Vancouver two years ago. Even so, she was more nervous in her qualifying run a couple days ago at the World Cup stop in Lake Placid, N.Y., than she had been in a long, long time.

For one, Hannah said, “I’d had two absolutely worst days of training, back-to-back,” in some measure because of the weather. The first training day, it had been 40 degrees,  hardly conducive to snow. Then the temperature dropped to zero, with high winds that knocked out power and postponed training and turned the course into, in Hannah’s words, “a skating rink.”

Then there was the matter of family, and friends. Generally speaking, Hannah competes in Europe. The last time her younger brother, Denny — with whom she’s particularly close — had seen her compete was at the December, 2009, Olympic Trials in Colorado. But he had made it to Lake Placid. So, too, had her mom, Jill, and dad, Tom, and a bunch of others.

Pressure?

Hannah Kearney with her mom, Jill; brother, Denny; and father, Tom at the 2012 World Cup stop // photo courtesy Kearney family

As she has done at every World Cup event for the last year without a glitch, Hannah Kearney came through. She roared through qualifying, then won the event in Lake Placid, marking her 11th consecutive World Cup moguls victory — beating the old record of Swiss star Conny Kissling.

It was the 16th individual moguls win of Hannah’s career.

In a bit of serendipity, this 11th straight victory came on the same Whiteface Mountain course where the streak started on Jan. 22, 2011.

For counting purposes — the streak does not include the 2011 world championships, where Hannah took second in the moguls and third in the dual moguls events.

It’s 11 straight World Cup events, and while it perhaps may not equal one Olympic gold it is testament to extraordinary consistency.

“It’s completely different,” Hannah said when asked to compare Olympic gold with this streak, adding a moment later, “There’s more attention and more focus at the Olympics. But skiing well over multiple seasons against good competitors is something totally different. It’s just one day at the Olympics. This is my whole life.”

For several months now, Hannah has been documenting her life in a series of Facebook posts — you can find them here — for Lovering Volvo, a family-owned Nashua, N.H., auto dealership that sponsors her. She gets an XC60 equipped with a ski rack and bike rack, a major step up from the Toyota Yaris that used to be her ride. In return, among other things, she writes a quality blog — hardly a surprise, perhaps, for someone who goes to Dartmouth when she’s not running moguls and whose brother is a Yale graduate.

In those posts, for instance, Hannah has documented the 1,174 water jumps she made in training last summer; and the 68,092 stairs she climbed, skis in hand, to make those jumps. Those totals were all more than she had ever done before — the better to achieve consistency this winter.

Hannah has written about how Subway sandwich shops in Finland smell exactly the same there as they do back home; about how it took 33 hours and 36 minutes to travel last month from Ruka, Finland, to Meribel, France; about the excellent jam that was her reward for all that travel; about how she, a veteran of the World Cup circuit, kills time by knitting, listening to National Public Radio podcasts, doing some laundry and maybe doing some online shopping. Oh, and some skiing.

It takes a real pro to win in Finland, where there is little daylight and this season almost no snow, and then again in France, where after that long trip the snow was abundant, and then again back home in Lake Placid, after crummy training and amid awful weather and in front of mom, dad, brother and everyone else expecting you to win.

Hannah Kearney is, at this point, a pro’s pro.

If everyone she knows expects her to win — well, she expects to win. “Anything less,” she said candidly, “is a failure on some level.”

Winning, especially on a bumpy mountain where one slip and you careen off course, is never guaranteed. Then again, when your heart and soul are truly in what you do, the winning comes a lot easier. And the idea of pressure is a lot different. You can embrace it instead of running from it.

“I appreciate what I am getting to do with this skiing career,” Hannah Kearney said. “I love what I do.”

Toby Dawson’s new Korean adventure

Give this to Toby Dawson: “I love,” he said, “jumping into things head first.”

The 2006 Torino Winter Games bronze medalist in moguls skiing for the United States, adopted long ago as a toddler by a pair of American ski instructors after being abandoned on the doorstep of a police station in Pusan, in the far south of South Korea — he’s now the Korean national freestyle ski coach.

He’s getting to know his real father, and step-mother, better. And his brother.

He knows now where his mother is, too. And someday, when he speaks the language much better, he will meet her.

“This is one of the biggest adventures of my life,” he said on his mobile phone, the wind whistling on the mountain many time zones away over there in Korea.

U.S. 2006 moguls bronze medalist Toby Dawson, now the Korean freestyle coach // photo courtesy Toby Dawson

The genesis of this idea came up last summer, when Toby played a key role in Pyeongchang’s winning bid for the 2018 Winter Games.

At the International Olympic Committee session in Durban, South Africa, where Pyeongchang won a landslide victory, Toby told the IOC members his remarkable story — that he was both Korean by birth and given the name Kim Bong Seok and, of course, that he was an American named Toby Dawson who was an Olympic medalist.

At 3, little Bong Seok had been abandoned on the doorstep of a police station in Pusan. He spent six months in an orphanage, where he was given yet another name — Soo Chul. Ultimately, he was adopted by American ski instructors Mike and Deborah Dawson, who brought him to a new life in Vail, Colo.

Toby’s presentation in Durban was powerful stuff — and not just for the IOC members.

Afterward, the Korean Ski Assn. reached out to Toby and asked if he would be interested in trying to take its freestyle team to the next level.

The Koreans, excellent in ice sports, have lagged — significantly, as all involved acknowledge — on snow. “It sparked my interest,” Toby said. “I never saw myself as a coach but it just kind of fell in my lap. And it just seemed like such a right fit.”

Toby is a celebrity of sorts in Korea so the fit went both ways. Already, he has become a semi-regular presence there on TV — which helps the association attract sponsors.

This is not uncommon since he has moved over to Korea: Toby Dawson doing a television interview // photo courtesy Toby Dawson

Toby’s deal calls for him to be there through the Sochi 2014 Games. The reality is he’s likely to be there all the way through 2018.

Toby and his biological father, Jae Soo Kim, who had first reunited in 2007, know each other now. Toby has gone even a step further perhaps with his biological brother, Hyun Chul Kim.

He calls Hyun Chul “dong-saeng,” which means “little brother” in Korean. Hyun Chul calls Toby “hyeong,” or “older brother.” And they’re using the terms affectionately.

“I have probably picked up 300 words already. I would guess in the next [few] months I’ll be pretty fluent.”

At which point he might be ready to meet his mother. “She is in Pusan,” he said. “She is in the area where I was lost.”

He said, “She contacted my father. I actually know where she is. I am waiting for the right time now … she is hesitant. She is re-married.

“I am not sure she has disclosed being married previously, having lost a child, all that stuff. She wants to keep it under wraps. I want to learn the language,” he said, “and meet her one-on-one.”

Field hockey: it’s not for sissies

The odds were still pretty fair that Carrie Lingo might well have made the 2012 U.S. Olympic women’s field hockey team.

Even though her knee is so leaky that — if you’re easily grossed out don’t read these next few words — she was bending down a few weeks ago and clear liquid shot straight out and traveled, oh, three to five yards.

That, mind you, was after the seventh surgery to that same right knee. “It’s a part of sports that people don’t realize,” she was saying a few days ago. “It’s as much a part to repair to your body as it is to train. It’s true.”

Over 190 international matches, a career with the U.S. national team that ran for a decade and that included the 2008 Olympics, two Pan Am Games silver medals and a featured spot in the 2010 ESPN Body issue, Carrie Lingo pretty much got to do it all.

Carrie Lingo, who played 190 international matches for the American team // photo courtesy USA Field Hockey

The thing is, she probably could have kept on going.

The Olympics are coming up fast. And last year, when she was maybe at 60 percent, she had nonetheless been selected for the U.S. team headed for Dublin, Ireland, and what’s called the Champions Challenge, a tournament for teams ranked No. 7-14 in the world. She said, no, I’m not going to go — take someone else.

“The biggest thing for me this last year — I have been trying to get my body back,” she said. “Obviously, the London Games are coming up. I said to myself, ‘OK, Carrie, you’re never going to be satisfied because you can’t be [going] 100 percent anymore. The second I realized that — I was done.”

What is not well-understood by those who have only a passing familiarity with field hockey is just how physical the sport can be. Sure, the women wear skirts. “It’s funny,” Carrie Lingo said when asked if she’d had concussions. “I’ve had two big ones. I’ve had teeth knocked out. Broken fingers. Stitches. It’s the usual, for sure. All my injuries are very common.”

The sport also involves intense lateral movement and cutting. That’s hard on the knees. That led to her first knee surgery, in 1998, when she was playing on the under-19 U.S. team. She tore her ACL in a practice session. They took her to the hospital ER; her knee was, as she said, “fully dislocated, everything was shifted” but there was an awful lot of attention being paid to someone else in the ER: Charlie Sheen.

This was near Los Angeles, of course.

“Ohmigosh,” she said, recalling the scene. “I was sitting there and, come on — my leg is out of place.”

She recovered from that and went on to star at the University of North Carolina.

In 2003 — surgery No. 3 — required more work on that ACL and, as well, a micro-fracture. The doctors told her she would never play again.

Her response: “I’m like, ‘Thanks for your input.’ ”

She came back and trained a year with the men’s program.

If it sounds like Carrie Lingo is a football player — well, that’s what her parents say as well. “The surgeries have been part of the job. Oh, man,” she sighed.

It’s why she decided last week to remove herself from the women’s national team. The knee can probably take the games. It just can’t take the training anymore.

Carrie Lingo // photo courtesy USA Field Hockey

“I cannot speak highly enough of the contribution that Carrie has made to the National Team,” the U.S. women’s head coach, Lee Bodimeade, said in a statement issued by the federation.

“I want to congratulate her on what she has been able to achieve as a player in our sport and wish her every success in her future endeavors. I am positive that the same strengths and attributes that she displayed when playing will ensure success.”

Added Terry Walsh, the technical director of high performance: “Carrie has been one of the cornerstones in the recent development of the USA Field Hockey program. I think her presence will forever be a part of the USA Field Hockey fabric. She has had a major impact on the mentality of the group and the hardship she has endured over the last two years has silently been an incredibly powerful driver for the whole program.”

She said, “It has been an interesting conflict within myself. Obviously, I would give anything to be able to play.” That said, “I understand the cold, hard facts [it takes] to be at the Olympic Games.”

Lindsey Vonn: 47 and counting

After she had won the super-G Sunday at one of her favorite spots, Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, and made history yet again, Lindsey Vonn shared a little bit of herself.

Last week, at the World Cup stop in Bad Kleinkirchheim, Austria, Lindsey was suffering from a stomach illness. She came in 18th in the super-G — the first time in 19 starts she missed a World Cup super-G podium. It was her worst finish in super-G in five years.

“You know,” she said after winning Sunday, her 47th career World Cup win, “for me, if I don’t have the strength, I can’t do what I want to do and I don’t trust myself. Confidence and trust are very important things in my skiing. I have those two things back.

“I knew what I had to do to win the race today and I think I executed my plan well. I”m really happy the way the whole weekend went and I’m really proud of buy whole team. As a team, we had an incredible weekend. Stacy and Julia and Leanne and Laurenne and everyone is skiing really well. So I think for the entire U.S. team — it was very successful.”

Lindsey Vonn celebrates with the U.S. Ski Team coaching staff after her super-G victory at Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy // photo courtesy Doug Haney and the U.S. Ski Team

There you have it, in two paragraphs — Lindsey Vonn, the 2012-season version.

Confidence and trust in her own skiing and the bond with her team that helps keeps her going amid the — many — other distractions in her life, some deeply personal.

The victory lifts Lindsey into third on the all-time World Cup win list, ahead of Austria’s Renate Goetschl, who has 46. Switzerland’s Vreni Schneider has 55; Austria’s Annemarie Moser-Proell has 62.

“The records in skiing are really important to me,” Lindsey told reporters afterward.

“It’s the history of our sport and it’s something you can look back on and be proud of what you’ve done with your career. I never thought that I’d be able to reach as many victories as I have now. Renate has always been such a role model. I can’t believe I’m at a point where I can stand alongside her in history.”

Lindsey hadn’t won a World Cup race since a super-G Dec. 7 at Beaver Creek, Colo. She led Sunday at every interval, finishing in 1:26.16. Germany’s Maria Hoefl-Riesch, last season’s World Cup overall winner and Lindsey’s longtime friend and rival, finished second, in 1:26.77. Slovenia’s Tina Maze took third, in 1:27.02.

Cortina, as Lindsey noted, is where she first made her first World Cup podium — eight years ago, in the downhill. The victory Sunday was her fourth straight super-G win in Cortina and sixth at the Italian resort.

“I say it every time I come here: Cortina is always a special place for me … I like the hill. It’s — the snow is perfect here. It’s always dry, dense snow, similar to Colorado where I grew up skiing.”

When you have that and when you ski with confidence and trust in yourself, you get classic Lindsey — a “good combination of risk and aggression but still staying in control,” as she put it immediately after the race, declaring, “I’m happy.”

Julia Mancuso finished fifth, just 12-hundredths back of Maze. Leanne Smith finished 10th — the third-best result of her career. Laurenne Ross took 13th — her second-best result-ever. Stacey Cook, who had finished sixth in Saturday’s downhill, finished 25th. Alice McKennnis landed in 38th.

The Americans were awarded what’s called the “Cortina Trophy,” which goes to the most successful team over the weekend. Imagine how even a few years back how that would have been unthinkable — an American ski team winning such an award in the heart of Europe.

With the victory, Lindsey now leads the 2012 overall World Cup standings by 291 points over Maze. She leads the super-G standings by 87 points over Fabienne Suter of Switzerland.

All in all, there was only discordant note to the day. Asked by a reporter about Denver’s blowout loss to the New England Patriots in the NFL playoffs Saturday night, Lindsey — who, remember, is a Colorado girl and even Tebowed after her super-G win in Beaver Creek — said, “I’m really bummed out the Broncos lost.”

Russell Currier’s breakthrough

Never before had Russell Currier so much as cracked the top-50 in a World Cup biathlon.

Until Saturday.

Currier, a 24-year-old from Stockholm, Maine, finished sixth at the World Cup 10-kilometer sprint in Nove Mesto, in the Czech Republic. Tim Burke finished 11th. Lowell Bailey came in 21st and Jay Hakkinen 31st.

Currier finished 23.2 seconds back of the winner, Emil Hegle Svendsen, who crossed in 27:13.1. French brothers Simon and Martin Fourcade took second and third.

The strong U.S. finish, led by Currier, underscores the enhanced legitimacy of  the American team as it builds toward  Sochi and 2014.

It’s a question of persistence, patience and, of course, performance — not unlike that delivered by the U.S. men’s Nordic combined team, which broke through at the Vancouver Olympics in 2010.

Russell Currier celebrating after Saturday's top-six finish // photo courtesy U.S. Biathlon and Nordic Focus

Currier is now the fourth man on the U.S. team to finish top-10 already this season — evidence that, finally, the Americans have some depth.

Burke, Bailey and Hakkinen are veterans.

Leif Nordgren, for instance, anchored the U.S. relay to a sixth-place finish at the 2011 world championships.

There are others. But everyone associated with the program has long understood that Currier — who is a product of the Maine Winter Sports Center — could be a star.

If — and this has always been the big if — he could just dial in the shooting part of the sport.

Russell’s skiing: solid.

The shooting: that has, over the years, needed work.

After a camp this fall, in Utah, he and his coaches went back to the drawing board. They changed the sight on his rifle. They worked on the way he went about taking his breaths during the prone segment of the shooting. They worked on what he was thinking about in the shooting range.

“We changed up the focus and committed to a few thought processes ingrained into my head so that every time I come into shoot, no matter where I am, it’s the same consistent thought process — so that I get a foundation of consistency,” he said late Saturday.

If that sounds elemental — at this level, sometimes simple things can make a big difference.

It was really windy Saturday out on the Nove Mesto course. Didn’t matter.

Russell Currier shot clean. No penalties.

Currier in action in Saturday's 10k sprint at Nove Mesto, Czech Republic // photo courtesy U.S. Biathlon and Nordic Focus

“It’s this American dream,” said Bernd Eisenbichler, the U.S. team’s high-performance director. “…In the end, he has proved he has the potential to belong on the podium. It’s super.”

Russell’s was one of only two clean shooting performances on the day.

“I haven’t been this excited about racing since I was 14,” Russell said afterward. “It feels like — I just can’t keep the grin off my face. It is everything I wanted this sport to be.”

Doc Patton can handle it

The months have passed now since Doc Patton ran into Harry Double-A at the world track championships in Daegu. Doc crumpled immediately to the track, felled as if by Ray Lewis. No wonder. Britain’s Harry Aikines-Aryeetey is indeed built like an NFL linebacker.

Doc’s collarbone was separated in the collision. And the American men, once again, were out of the 4×100 relay. 2008 — out. 2009 — out. 2011 — out. Doc has been not just a part of each of those relays. He has arguably been the story in each of those relays.

Doc is better now, physically, his bone healed. His psyche, too. He is back home in Texas, training hard. And if there is redemption in this world, if there is justice — perhaps no one in the United States would be more deserving to stand atop the medal stand this summer in London than Darvis “Doc” Patton.

The man has been through his trials.

That has gained him perspective.

It has also given him, at age 34, wisdom.

“I’ve made that walk [off the track] three times,” he said. “It doesn’t get any better.”

Darvis "Doc" Patton // photo courtesy Danny Warnier

To be clear: Doc has loads of talent. He made the 2008 Olympic 100 final. He won silver in the Paris 2003 world championships 200. In the 4×100 relay, he won silver in the Athens 2004 Games and gold in both the 2007 Osaka and Paris 2003 world championships.

In Daegu, the Americans — despite the fact that both Usain Bolt and Yohan Blake were running for the Jamaicans — seriously believed beforehand they could steal a win, Doc said.

“On paper you maybe had to give them the nod,” he acknowledged. “But in the relays, if we could put pressure on them, anything can happen. We lined up on the track thinking we were going to walk away with the gold.”

And then — as he wrote on his blog, “That just happened. Again.”

Doc — remember, he’s from Texas — went on to draw a parallel on his blog to Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo, and the art of putting an interception behind you to focus on the possibility of a touchdown:

“… ‘The absolute beauty of sport is that it’s unscripted.’ You have to learn how to improvise, rehearse, come back for the next show and do it all over again and again. I’ve had time for my tears and my anger and my frustration. I’m done with that. Are you?”

Beyond which, Doc has since had way, way, way more to deal with. Doc and his wife, Crystal, are the proud parents of a little girl, Dakota. When Doc came home from South Korea, he was met by a big group of family and friends. Crystal was pregnant again.

Then, though, she miscarried. He has written about this, too, on his blog. He said in an interview that when they went to the doctor’s office and there was no heartbeat when there should have been one it was “the loudest silence I ever heard in my life.”

Doc is now training hard, and without fear. He and two-time world 200-meter bronze medalist Wallace Spearmon, among others, are part of a training group that runs the stadium at the University of Texas at Arlington each Monday — they call it “Butt Lock Monday” because that’s what happens to their backsides after they’re done, it’s that grueling. (Watch some of it here.)

Doc welcomes your comments, your criticisms, your ignorant belief — should you still subscribe to it — that he is somehow a jinx, a pox on the relay.

Yes, yes, yes. He dropped the stick in 2008 in Beijing, in a pass with Tyson Gay. The 2009 Berlin team was DQ’d after an improper pass, Doc to Shawn Crawford, just before the allowable zone instead of safely inside it. And then the 2011 crash.

Feel free to stand up and ask him, Doc, if you qualify for the 2012 team and they pick you, dude — are you, like, bad luck?

“I haven’t forgotten about Beijing and Berlin. I have messed up plenty of relays in my day. But I have put it behind me. If I make the team and I am in the [relay] pool,” he said, “I am ready to face that.

“I will normally do a little laugh. I will tell them the reason I am on the relay, the reason I have been chosen to be on the team — yes, I have had failures and I have had mistakes — but I deserve to be there. And they trust me to know I get the stick around.

“Mistakes happen. They happened on the biggest stage in track and field. But they are not going to stop me. I am going to go for the United States of America, and I intend to go.”

Go, go Indigo

The team the United States will send to the inaugural Winter Youth Olympic Games in Innsbruck, Austria, which begin next week, is dominated — logically enough — by teenagers from locales like Utah, Colorado and Minnesota.

Places where it’s cold or there are big mountains or that are hockey hotbeds.

Of the 57-member U.S. team, there’s one name — just one — on the roster from California and, at that, not from a mountain village but Manhattan Beach, the epitome of the surf-style lifestyle in L.A.

Meet Indigo Monk.

Indigo Monk -- the only California girl on Team USA at the Winter Youth Olympic Games // photo courtesy Kat Monk

Indigo is such a good surfer that she had to decide whether to stay in public school and be on the surf team — really, they have a surf team at Mira Costa High School in Manhattan Beach — or pursue her 2014 Olympic dream and surf, as it were, on snow.

Indigo competes in — what else — snowboarding.

Slopestyle, to be precise — the Olympic world’s newly approved variant of boarding in which riders do tricks and rip through rails and bumps and other features rather than executing jumps and spins in the halfpipe. She finds it more creative.

Understand that Indigo comes from a hugely creative family.

Her mom, Kat, is an accomplished photographer widely recognized for her work especially in the beach cities — Manhattan, Hermosa, Redondo — and, truth be told, well beyond. Kat works with her husband, Drew Heidreich, a digital designer.

Indigo will turn 17 on Thursday. When she was born, she was named Indigo because, well, Kat liked the Indigo Girls’ music. To be clear: Indigo is not named for the Indigo Girls themselves. Simply, Kat was inspired by the band’s music.

Indigo’s middle name is Anaïs. Like Nin.

Indigo gets asked about her first name a lot: “A lot of people ask me if [Indigo] is on my birth certificate. I say, ‘Of course it is.’ ”

She also said, “I love my first name. I wouldn’t change it for anything.”

Indigo has an older brother, Julian, who’s now 19 and a college freshman in San Diego. She started snowboarding when she was just 2, up at Big Bear in the San Bernardino mountains, about two hours east of L.A., trying to keep up with her big brother. By 3, Kat said of her daughter, “She was fully riding.”

Indigo riding at Big Bear, Calif., at age 3 // photo courtesy Kat Monk

This is — and always has — been the secret to Indigo’s mojo: “I was fearless.”

At 6, Indigo won an 8-and-under boarder-cross race. Kat said, “We were like, ‘Oh, wow, now what do we do?’ ”

The folks at Roxy, the sportswear company, promptly offered to sponsor Indigo, which they did until she was 13, Kat said.

Indigo, at 6, after winning the 8-and-under race // photo courtesy Kat Monk

At 9, Indigo could hit the 40-foot jumps at Mammoth Mountain, up in the Sierras. Kat said that’s when she thought her daughter was really talented.

At 10, Indigo won the age-group slopestyle nationals. That, Indigo said, was when she herself thought she might be pretty good.

“That was when my head was the biggest,” she said, quickly adding, “Snowboarding has always been a love-hate deal of mine. It makes you feel like a million dollars. And then it kicks your butt.”

Or — in Indigo’s case: Her pelvis. Her knee. Her neck. Her left ankle, which is her front foot when she rides. All of these have been broken or otherwise hurt.

She also, she said, has had her “fair share of concussions,” adding, “These things humble you, they tell you you’re not invincible.”

Indigo doing her thing and mom doing hers // photo courtesy Kat Monk

Indigo trains now up in Colorado from December to April. She made the Youth Games team with her performance in contests at the end of last season. “It was crazy that I qualified,” she said. “I didn’t know anything about it.”

She added, “It all still surreal to me. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s a really big deal to represent America. For snowboarding, it’s a great honor. It’s overwhelming. To be honest, all the Youth Olympic stuff that we’re getting, how important everything is, how official it is … I’m really excited more than anything.”

So is Kat, who is going to Austria, too. Expect lots of pictures. Really good pictures.