Between 1982-2016, the Christin Cooper Cup was awarded to the Fastest U16 Female at the Roy Hobson Memorial Race. Since 2017, it has been awarded to the Fastest U16 Female at the Gary Black, Jr. Memorial Race.

Christin’s impressive career started at age 10 when she joined the Sun Valley Ski Team and began honing her skills on the Intermountain junior racing circuit. At age 16, Christin was named to the U.S. Ski Team and competed in five Alpine World Cup disciplines for eight seasons. She won five World Cup races in three disciplines, competed in two Olympic Winter Games (1980 & 1984) and two FIS World Championships (1978 & 1982). She became the first American skier to win three medals in a single World Championships, earning a bronze and two silver medals in 1982. 

A severe compression fracture from a crash in 1983 ended her season, but Christin soon returned to win the giant slalom silver medal in the Sarajevo Winter Olympic Games in 1984, and took third overall in that season’s World Cup GS standings.

A remarkable World Cup record of five victories, 26 podiums and 65 top tens, one Olympic and three FIS medals, and six U.S. National Championships led to her induction into the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame in 1984, the same year she retired, at age 24, from international racing.

As alpine skiing’s first female expert analyst, she began a nearly uninterrupted 30-year run as the voice of women’s alpine skiing, calling decades of Olympic, World Championship, and World Cup events until her retirement in 2015.

In 2019, a bronze statue of Christin racing was unveiled in Sun Valley’s Festival Meadows as a part of the growing “Our Olympic Ladies” monument started by Sun Valley developer Brian Barsotti as a way to honor six Olympic and Paralympic medalists who grew up training at Sun Valley Resort. The first statue to launch the monument was of Gretchen Fraser, who was the first American to win an alpine ski medal, winning gold and silver at the 1948 Winter Olympics in St. Moritz. Christin was on hand In the fall of 2023 when the statue of U.S. Paralympian and multi-time World Champion Muffy Davis joined the lineup, and also in the summer of 2024 when the statue of Kaitlyn Farrington, Olympic Gold Medalist in Snowboarding was unveiled.

Christin and her husband, Mark Taché, started the Cooper-Tache First Tracks Fund in 2019 as a means to give back to SVSEF and also to the grassroots efforts at Rotarun Ski Area. The Cooper-Taché First Tracks Fund helps underwrite the LASAR and Striders learn-to-alpine and cross country ski programs to maintain a low cost of entry, and to fund those in need of financial aid for these programs. 

Accessibility for all kids is essential to SVSEF’s mission and to our place in our community, and the First Tracks Fund makes way for 150 children per year across all backgrounds, and scholarships available to those in need.

Award recipients’ names are engraved on the Christin Cooper Cup, which is displayed in the SVSEF Training Center at Warm Springs.

Source: Alf Engen Ski Museum, U.S. Ski & Snowboard Hall of Fame