By David Frey
Special to The Denver Post
When Robel Teklemariam races in today’s cross country 15K freestyle competition, the lone member of the Ethiopian Olympic team will put to the test the skills he honed in the mountains of Colorado.
“I’m ready to race,” said Teklemariam in a recent phone interview from Addis Ababa, where he was training in the desert heat on roller skis before flying to Vancouver.
If a cross country skier from Ethiopia sounds like a joke, Teklemariam, 35, wants you to know he is serious about his pursuit, though he has no illusions about earning a medal. A 1993 graduate of the Colorado Rocky Mountain School in Carbondale, Teklemariam earned a skiing scholarship to the University of New Hampshire.
“When he came in, he was a pretty small, gangly kid, but he obviously had a pretty good feel for skis and expressed an interest in skiing cross country,” said Mark Clark, who was coach of CRMS’s cross country ski team. “He developed into a really, really good skier.”
Ever since learning to ski as a child growing up in Lake Placid, N.Y., home of the 1980 Winter Games, representing Ethiopia at the Winter Games has been a dream for Teklemariam. Not to win a medal, but to bring future generations of Ethiopians to the sport.
“My goal is for Ethiopia to be a mainstay in the Winter Olympics,” he said.
Teklemariam has been skiing most of his life, even though his home country’s language has no word for “skier” and almost no snow. He takes the nickname “Beredoe Shartate,” which loosely means “Ice Slider” in his native Amharic.
“He always loved the mountains,” said his mother, Yesherek Denise, who left Ethiopia when she took a United Nations job in New York when Teklemariam was 9.
Teklemariam, one of six children, didn’t adapt well to city life, Denise said, so she enrolled him at the private North Country School in Lake Placid.
“Living with nature, that was his passion,” she said, “from childhood, from when he was a baby. But of course, the opportunity to ski was something new to explore.”
He fell in love with the sport, a love that led him to the Colorado Rocky Mountain School, with its strong outdoor education emphasis.
“Really, the fuel that drove his skiing came from within,” Clark said. “He was a soulful kid.”
After college, Teklemariam became a ski instructor at Copper Mountain and later in Japan. But since his days as a boy on the snow at Lake Placid, competing in the Olympics had been a dream.
He approached Ethiopian authorities a few years ago and formed the Ethiopian Ski Association, then became the first and only cross country ski racer from a nation known for producing Olympic-caliber long-distance runners.
Teklemariam competed in his first Olympics four years ago in Turin, finishing 83rd in the 15K, almost 10 minutes behind the top finisher. His goal today is to beat that time and to inspire other Ethiopians to strap on skis.
