‘Just happy to be a part of it’: Freeskier Cassie Sharpe balances motherhood at third Olympics
Cassie Sharpe thought she was done with skiing. The Canadian freeskier had earned her two Olympic medals in women’s halfpipe (gold at PyeongChang 2018 and silver at Beijing 2022), started a family, and thought she’d already ridden into the sunset.
“I’m good. I don’t need to go back. I’m happy to be a mom,” Sharpe recalls thinking after giving birth.
But in January 2024 — two years after her retirement and five months after giving birth to her daughter, Louella Duke Dorey — she started thinking that maybe the mountain was calling.
“I was watching X Games, sitting in the living room, holding [Louella], I was watching the girls [compete] and I was just like, oh, maybe I’m not done,” Sharpe recalled. “Maybe I go for another [season].”
Sharpe and her husband, Justin Dorey, a fellow halfpipe skier who competed at the 2014 Winter Olympics, discussed what it would look like if she were to go back for a season and how they could make that work. She chose to do summer training in New Zealand after seeing the spring training posts from her fellow halfpipe competitors.
“It kind of slowly ignited it into being like, ‘OK, maybe we’re going to go to New Zealand and really put a push on it,'” she said.
Sharpe returned to routine training, and her training regime progressed as her daughter grew. Once her daughter weighed 15 pounds, she knew she could lift 15 pounds in the gym, and so on.
“It was a pretty quick turnaround once I decided that [I was going to return to skiing],” Sharpe said. “I was like, ‘Yeah, I think we can make this happen.’ In January, it was pedal to the metal. … I was still breastfeeding.”
The gym for the Canadian national ski team is only 30 minutes away from where Sharpe lives in Squamish, British Columbia. She would bring Louella to the gym, where her brother, Olympic snowboarder Darcy Sharpe, would care for his niece while Sharpe trained. Sometimes, Louella would be bouncing in the Jolly Jumper along the squat machines as Sharpe worked out. Like mother, like daughter.
