When the Vermont-trained skier Jessie Diggins won the freestyle sprint at the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea, American television announcers stopped screaming long enough to report she had captured not only the United States’ first cross-country gold but also its second Nordic medal ever.
Back home in the Green Mountains, Bill Koch — the man who snagged that initial silver in 1976 — took in all the bells and whistles with bemusement. He remembered how, four decades before, the U.S. didn’t have a single camera, commentator or cheering crowd at his race.
Koch, however, was anything but envious.
“I was overjoyed,” the 66-year-old recalls of Diggins’ win alongside teammate Kikkan Randall. “I was laughing and crying at the same time. It was like a huge weight came off. I’m so ready to pass the torch.”
At the start of the 1976 Winter Games in Austria, most people couldn’t pronounce Koch’s name (think Coke), let alone tell you who he was. The media struggled to draw out the “quiet-mannered man of mystery” (as tagged by the New York Times) who “did the unexpected with a performance so surprising that some people called it the greatest American Olympic upset in history” (according to Sports Illustrated).
“Koch is an ascetic, given to classic Vermonter answers to obvious questions,” the latter magazine observed. “A reporter asked him, ‘Have you lived in Vermont all your life?’ Koch replied, ‘Not yet.’”
“I’m kind of a loner,” the skier told reporters at the time. “You must respect nature to race cross-country. You are outdoors in contact with the elements. It feels good to be there all by yourself.”
Almost a half-century later, Koch’s aversion to publicity hasn’t changed. Even so, the reticent revolutionary knows how to make a statement.
Koch pushed for respecting athletes’ privacy decades before superstars like Michael Phelps and Simone Biles pulled back the curtain on the suffocating mental stress of Olympic sports.
He pioneered the “skating” technique — pushing forward by placing his ski on a diagonal rather than staying parallel — allowing him to become the first American to win cross-country’s World Cup.
As U.S. flag bearer at the 1992 Winter Games in France, he threatened to upend almost a century of tradition by tipping the Stars and Stripes to the world as a goodwill gesture during the opening ceremony.
Koch ultimately held the banner high, but his love for the planet, both as an egalitarian and environmentalist, is unflagging — and, for subsequent generations of athletes, unusually inspiring.
Diggins, for example, has looked up to Koch ever since she tacked a poster above her childhood bed picturing the four-time Olympian skiing the sandy surf of Hawaii.
“All I wanted was to be him,” she told the press after her win, “and not even because of the medal, just because of this joy he had for just getting out there.”
Diggins today is following in Koch’s tracks, living in the same state, sharing his same concern for climate change and learning the road to victory — and perhaps a 2022 repeat in Beijing — comes with its share of unforeseen bumps.
‘All of a sudden it just kicked in’
Born June 7, 1955, William “Bill” Koch stood on his first downhill slats at age 2 and began ski jumping at age 6. Cross-country, however, wasn’t an immediate fit. He raced his first childhood competition on sawed-up hand-me-downs. Win, his father said, and we’ll get you a real pair.
Koch was entering Guilford Central School when everything clicked.
“I can remember the day, the minute, exactly where I was and how amazing it felt when I finally put my stride together,” he says. “I was every which way but loose, and all of a sudden it just kicked in: ‘Wow! I got it! I got it!’”
Rather than riding the bus, Koch woke daily before dawn to run, bike or ski to class four miles away. By his teens he was training with a nearby Putney School teacher who introduced him to campus coach John Caldwell, a 1952 Olympian who literally wrote the book (“The Cross-Country Ski Book”) on the sport.
Koch would transfer to Putney, where he saw a classmate, alumnus and teacher make the nation’s 1972 Olympic team. A year after graduating, he placed third in the 15-kilometer at the 1974 European junior championships, becoming the first American to medal at a top international Nordic competition.
Koch moved on to the 1976 Olympics for a grueling 18.6-miler known as the 30-kilometer.
“I definitely was going in with solid results,” he recalls. “I knew I was a shot for a medal.”
Few others were convinced.
Sports Illustrated reported Koch suffered from exercise-induced asthma, had appeared in fewer than 10 world-class senior races and had skied the 30-kilometer only twice.
Crowds flocked to the faster, steeper Austrian downhill course, where host-nation hero Franz Klammer would win gold.
U.S. television crews, for their part, focused on figure skater Dorothy Hamill, knowing the nation’s best Olympic cross-country finish was 15th in 1932.
Koch, surrounded by competitors waiting for someone else to set the pace, itched to take his turn one by one against the clock. Fearing warming temperatures would melt the speed out of the snow, he chose to start seventh, blazing the trail for 62 others behind him.
Koch can’t tell you much about the look of the landscape, the sound of the spectators, the feel of the frozen air. He simply remembers taking it moment by moment, stride by stride.
“I could feel it — I knew I was really on. There’s a difference between putting out a lot of effort attempting to try to go fast, and just being in the flow. It’s a total altered state. You’re like in a trance. It’s all a blur except for the task at hand.”
Koch reached the finish line in 1 hour, 30 minutes and 57.84 seconds. His muscles cramping, he looked at the scoreboard. He saw himself in first.
Would he stay there? One Russian soon flew by particularly fast.
Koch dropped to second — behind by less than half a minute.
As the Vermonter watched skier after skier follow, he saw his name remain in place.
That is how, at age 20, you make history.
“We knew the American was strong,” Soviet bronze medalist Ivan Garanin told reporters after, “but we were surprised to see him finish second.”
Koch, in turn, reacted the same way he did to any other good race.
“I would enjoy it, yes,” he says, “but I wouldn’t revel in it.”
‘Buddy, I’ll trade places with you’
That didn’t stop people from showering Koch with calls and cards. President Gerald Ford invited him to the White House. Cross-country coaches nationwide renamed their youth leagues after him.
“I never once had thought about, ‘What if I did it? What would happen to me? What would my life be like?’”
But as tsunami survivors know, the force of a tidal wave barreling in is followed by the whiplash of the water backtracking out.
Koch soon saw cross-country skiers in the Worldloppet league (“loppet” is Swedish for endurance race) fly with a technique similar to speed skating. He became the first to try it in World Cup competition, angering traditionalists who aimed to ban it.
In 1982, Koch became the first American to win cross-country’s World Cup. But he didn’t medal during appearances at the 1980 Olympics in Lake Placid, N.Y., or the 1984 games in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia and moved to the West Coast as his peers headed north for the 1988 competition in Calgary, Canada.
Media outlets labeled Koch a “has-been” and “quitter.” Sports Illustrated, having once lauded his “calves of Vermont maple,” wrote, “Mr. Wonderful one year, a washout the next.”
The swarm of words stung.
“Sports are healthy recreation, but they are not an end-all,” he responded at the time. “There are so many more important things than skiing.”
Then Koch qualified at age 36 for the 1992 Olympics in Albertville, France. There, teammates chose him to carry the American flag at the opening ceremony.
Although Koch had attended three previous games, he hadn’t marched in the late-night parade of nations because his first race was always early the next morning.
He didn’t know that U.S. shot-putter Ralph Rose, carrying the Stars and Stripes at the 1908 Olympics, set precedent by refusing to tip the flag to King Edward VII. Nor was he familiar with the subsequent federal statute 829 that says, “The United States flag shall not be dipped to any person or any thing.”
Koch instead heard it was Olympic tradition to dip the flag in respect to the host country. Five hours before the ceremony, the Vermonter said he might do so, too.
“My feelings are that the Olympics are a world event,” he told reporters at a routine press conference. “Maybe it’s not an appropriate place for excessive nationalism.”
The French tagged the resulting story “un scandale.” U.S. officials told Koch about the shot-putter, the federal statute, the millions of dollars in team sponsorships on the line.
Click on a YouTube video of the ceremony and you’ll catch the skier, his long hair corralled by a fedora some 22 minutes in, entering to the roar of the crowd — and, as he remembers, a whisper from one last official: “Don’t you dip that flag.”
“I almost turned around and said, ‘Here you go, buddy, I’ll trade places with you.’”
Instead, Koch walked forward and watched the flagbearers in front of him hold their flags high. That’s when he decided to follow their lead. And with that, the New York Times reported, “the first United States controversy of the Winter Olympic Games faded into the Alpine night.”
‘It’s more of an opportunity than a burden’
Koch trained for the 1994 Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway, only to face a chest infection before tryouts. He then flirted with the 1998 games in Nagano, Japan, before retiring from competition at age 42.
But that hasn’t stopped him from skiing. Take the time he sped in a pair of shorts along the Hawaiian shore, leading to the poster in Diggins’ bedroom.
“The darn stuff had lots of glide,” he says of the surf. “It was just so much fun cruising along the water’s edge, letting the waves chase you. I love the movements of skiing so much, I’ll ski on anything.”
After living in California, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon and Washington, Koch was ready for a comeback. This time, he wasn’t thinking of the Olympics. Instead, he returned home to Vermont, where he now lives at the edge of the Green Mountain National Forest in the Bennington County town of Peru, population 531.
“I’m always glad when people don’t recognize me,” he says. “I love to be anonymous.”
That works in a state where everyone bundles up in the same winter wardrobe. But it’s more difficult at elite skiing events such as the recent U.S. national cross-country championships in Utah, where he cheered on his namesake son, 19-year-old Will, the 2020 Stratton Mountain School valedictorian turned aspiring physics major at the University of Colorado.
“We weren’t even thinking he would ever be a ski racer when we were thinking of names,” Koch says.
Then his son medaled at the 2020 Youth Olympic Games in Switzerland. Koch recalls standing by as the press asked Will whether his famous name came with challenges.
“I was just holding my breath,” Koch says, “and he took that question and turned it around.”
As Will told TeamUSA.org: “A lot of people think, gosh, that’s a lot of pressure, a lot to live up to. I don’t really see it that way myself. I just think it’s really cool to have him as a person in my life. It’s more of an opportunity than a burden.”
That made Koch smile: “Boy, what a huge weight came off me in that moment.”
Will is set to compete at the 2022 Junior World Championships Feb. 22-27 in Norway.
“My goal with skiing has always been to just do as well as I possibly can,” the university sophomore has told the press. “If I do my best, that’s success.”
His father couldn’t be prouder.
“He totally gets it,” Koch says. “He understands that he is not defined by racing, and racing does not define skiing.”
Koch doesn’t own a television, so he won’t be watching the coming Olympic hype pitting competitor against competitor, country against country. He’s more interested in global cooperation — specifically against climate change, a cause he shares with Diggins and fellow Vermont friend, author and activist Bill McKibben.
“The Earth is a living organism,” Koch says, “and we are killing it.”
Visit Koch at his home and he’ll ask if you want to ski. Make an excuse that you forgot yours so as not to faceplant in front of an Olympian and he’ll reveal his stockpile of equipment sized to outfit anyone.
“We went for a ski a few weeks ago,” McKibben says. “He’s very kind on the snow!”
And everywhere else, too.
“I enjoy skiing with my friends and I really love skiing by myself, too,” Koch says. “Being able to just vanish into the woods and experience the stillness of nature has always been part of me. It’s a therapeutic, healing endeavor.”
Being in the moment, he has discovered, beats out any medal.
“As you grow older, you keep learning to appreciate that on newer and deeper levels, from the physical to the mental, all the way to the spiritual. Racing was only a step along the way.”
