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From Buck Hill to the Top Step: Paula Moltzan Wins Sölden
One hundredth of a second. That is roughly how long it takes a hummingbird to think about flapping its wings. It is also the margin by which Buck Hill Ski Racing Team alumna Paula Moltzan won the women’s giant slalom in Sölden, Austria, the opening race of the FIS Alpine Ski World Cup season and the first World Cup win of her career.
It took 149 starts, 10 previous podiums, 13 seasons and one very foggy Austrian glacier. At 32, Moltzan is now the oldest woman in history to claim her first World Cup victory. The Olympic Dreams training run at Buck Hill is quietly beaming with pride.
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Fifth, Foggy and Fearless: How the Race Unfolded
Moltzan finished fifth in both runs and still won the race, which is the kind of math only giant slalom can produce. After the first run on the Rettenbach Glacier, she sat 0.59 seconds behind U.S. teammate Mikaela Shiffrin, who led Sweden’s Sara Hector by 0.14 seconds.
Then Austria changed the lighting. A sunny morning turned to clouds, snow and fading light as the second run went on. Moltzan, never one to tiptoe, laid down a 1:07.86 to jump four places and set a combined time of 2:14.82. Nobody after her could catch it.
The last four skiers out of the gate, Britt Richardson, Camille Rast, Hector and Shiffrin, all finished 21st or worse on the second run. Shiffrin slid wide on one turn and dropped to seventh, 0.83 seconds back. Albania’s 19-year-old Lara Colturi came agonizingly close, climbing from sixth to cross the line exactly 0.01 seconds behind.
Results:
1st Paula Moltzan United States 2:14.82
2nd Lara Colturi Albania +0.01
3rd Emma Aicher Germany +0.52
4th Sara Hector Sweden +0.63
7th Mikaela Shiffrin United States +0.83
The Stifel U.S. Ski Team put five in the points. AJ Hurt finished 13th, one hundredth ahead of Elisabeth Bocock in 14th, and Nina O’Brien climbed from 22nd to 16th. Then the whole team mobbed Moltzan in the finish corral, belted out the national anthem and performed the team’s traditional “sha la la” celebration dance. Video of the dance has not been independently reviewed by our choreography desk.
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Effort, Grit and Courage, Delivered at Race Speed
At Buck Hill, we talk a lot about three values: Effort, Grit and Courage. On Saturday, Paula put all three on display in front of the entire ski racing world, and she didn’t even need a whiteboard.
Effort. Moltzan spent the summer developing a brand-new ski with Van Deer, the company founded by Austrian legend Marcel Hirscher. She is the only woman on the World Cup circuit racing on them, and Sölden was her very first start on the new boards. “We’ve put in a lot of hard work this summer developing this ski,” she said, “and it feels like this is kind of the pinnacle that it’s paying off.” Her summer training also happens in a woodshed, by herself, between shifts as a whitewater raft guide. Effort, apparently, has no off-season.
Grit. Moltzan debuted on the World Cup in 2012 and was dropped from the U.S. team after a rough 2016. She went to the University of Vermont, won the 2017 NCAA slalom title, rebuilt her skiing and fought her way back. Then came 10 podiums without a win. “I’ve been working a really long time for my first victory,” she said. Her teammate put it best. “She showed so much grit and so much courage,” Shiffrin said. “It’s history for our sport. It’s history for her.”
Courage. With the light fading and snow falling, Moltzan did the opposite of what most racers do. “In the second run I knew I had to send it,” she said. “A lot of people tend to back off when it gets dark and, for me, I just want to push harder. It’s just an opportunity to be brave and take a chance.” Her secret sauce? “You have to kind of fake it till you make it. And yeah, I guess I faked it well enough today.”
Those instincts were not built overnight. They were built on short, icy Minnesota runs, on nights under the lights, and in gates set by coaches who expect you to attack every one of them.
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Dreams Start on Small Hills
The Buck Hill Ski Racing Team’s mission is simple: to inspire athletes to pursue their dreams through ski racing. Paula’s story is that mission with a bib on.
She grew up idolizing Lindsey Vonn, skiing the same Minnesota hill where Vonn learned to race. Both of her parents were ski instructors at Buck Hill. At 12, she moved into the elite program led by Erich Sailer, Vonn’s former coach. Twenty years later, she is standing on top of a World Cup podium in Austria, saying, “It’s a fairytale; it doesn’t really feel real.”
The lesson for every young racer clicking into their bindings this winter: the size of your hill has nothing to do with the size of your dream.
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About Paula Moltzan
Paula Moltzan is a Minnesota original who came up through the Buck Hill Ski Racing Team and Ski and Snowboard Club Vail. A slalom and giant slalom specialist, she was the first woman to win slalom gold at the Junior World Championships.
At the University of Vermont, she became the fifth UVM woman to win the NCAA slalom title and the first freshman to do it since 1986, earning NCAA First Team All-American honors twice. She rejoined the U.S. Ski Team in 2018 and has been climbing ever since:
2021: First World Cup podium, in the parallel event in Lech Zürs, Austria.
2023: Second in the Semmering slalom behind Shiffrin, plus team event gold at the World Championships in Courchevel-Méribel.
2024: Slalom podium in Soldeu, Andorra.
2025: First giant slalom podium in Kronplatz, then giant slalom bronze at the World Championships in Saalbach.
2025-26: Olympic bronze in the team combined with Jackie Wiles in Milano Cortina, five World Cup podiums, and season rankings of sixth in GS and fifth in slalom.
2026: First World Cup win, Sölden.
Off the hill, Moltzan married her ski tech, Ryan Mooney, in 2022, and the two travel the World Cup circuit together. She grows almost every vegetable you can name, guides whitewater rafts on summer weekends and is campaigning for expanded fertility treatment coverage for U.S. Olympic athletes, a cause she promotes with a floral design on her helmet.
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Paula and a Brief History of the Buck Hill Ski Racing Team
Paula is not the first Buck Hill racer to wear the stars and stripes, and she won’t be the last. Lindsey Vonn, an Olympic champion and one of the most decorated skiers in history, learned to race on these same slopes. Paula joins a long line of Buck Hill alumni who have represented the U.S. Ski Team, and we’re cheering for every one of them this season.
Buck Hill is not a big mountain, it’s a hill. Locals know that. The rest of the ski world found out the hard way, by losing to people who trained there.
Under legendary coach Erich Sailer, the program became one of the most respected development pipelines in American ski racing. His formula was famously simple: lots of gates, lots of runs, lots of attitude. Short runs meant more laps, and more laps meant more turns than racers at much bigger mountains could ever squeeze into a training day. Generations of athletes, from local beer-league legends to Olympic champions, have come through the program.
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Your Turn in the Start Gate
Every World Cup winner was once a kid in an oversized helmet, wondering if the gates were set too tight. Paula was one of them. So was Lindsey.
If you’re a racer bashing your first gates or getting your first World Cup start, the Buck Hill Ski Racing Team is where Effort, Grit and Courage get built, one run at a time. We can’t promise a win in Sölden. We can promise great coaching, a team that cheers louder than a finish corral full of Americans, and more training runs than your legs will thank you for.
Registration for the upcoming season is open now. Come find out what a small hill can do HERE.
Race details and quotes compiled from U.S. Ski & Snowboard, The Guardian, AP, The New York Times and Yahoo Sports.