Olympic athletes are famous for chasing their dreams as they travel the globe. For the US Freestyle Ski team aerials athletes, however, there’s no place like home.
“My first visit to Lake Placid was in the summer of 1996,” says US Aerials Coach Vladimir Lebedev. “After that I spent more and more time here. I came here every year. We trained summer and winter, and in my last seven years as an athlete I pretty much lived here.”
Though it’s home to the Elite Aerials Development Program (EDAP), the Olympic Jumping Complex hasn’t hosted an aerials competition since 2019, the season just prior to Vlad’s appointment as Head Aerials Coach. He’s excited to be back in Lake Placid. “I was 12 years old when I first came, and that water ramp for summer training really scared me back then,” he says. “But we trained here for a very long time. It’s a great place. A historical place. And the center for aerials really. I believe our athletes and coaches are all happy to be back.”
Born and raised in Uzbekistan, Vlad competed for the Russian National Ski Team from 2000 to 2010, earning a bronze medal at the 2006 Winter Games in Torino. After a knee injury, he made the transition to coaching and worked first as the Russian development coach before serving as its World Cup coach. Following his team’s impressive successes, he was offered a role as U.S. Moguls coach where his aerial expertise was instrumental in helping many U.S. athletes improve their performances. Vlad was then named Head Aerials Coach for the U.S. Ski Team in the summer of 2019.
For many on the U.S. Aerials Team, regardless of how much they’ve traveled, Lake Placid holds a special place in their hearts. Christopher Lillis – a member of the U.S. National Team for 10 years and gold medalist in Mixed Team Aerials in the 2022 Beijing Winter Games – considers his return a homecoming. “I’m from Rochester, not too far away, and Lake Placid was our summertime spot. I lived here for years as an athlete as well. Definitely, the longest period not coming to Lake Placid was the last four years. It’s a great town, and it’s good to be back.”
Now ranked fourth in the world, Chris is no stranger to the travel required of athletes on the World Cup circuit. In fact, he’s loving it. “It’s definitely one of my favorite parts. We go to some interesting spots and spend a lot of time in Russia and Kazakhstan and China as well as Europe. Still, I’d like to be more and more in Lake Placid, especially over the next couple years leading to the 2026 Olympics.”
Getting In the Game
Though she’s spent most of her development years in Park City, Utah, Chris’s teammate Winter Vinecki knows Lake Placid, too. “I came for camps in the summer and for NorAm Competitions. Then once I made the World Cup tour, we came for that, too, so I got a good taste of Lake Placid during week-long stays.”
Winter grew up in Michigan, focusing first on running and triathlons while turning to ski racing in wintertime. One day attending a Women’s Sports Foundation event in New York City, she happened to meet three-time Olympian and four-time World Cup Champion Emily Cook who invited Winter to give aerials a try even though she had no previous gymnastics training. That summer at Park City, Winter jumped ski jumped for her first time into a pool and did her first ever back flips. “It was a ton of fun,” she says, “and I decided I wanted to do it on snow and moved to Park City with a host family at just thirteen years old. The rest is history.”
“People get involved in different ways,” adds Chris. As a freestyle skier growing up doing moguls and skiing the terrain park, he would see the jumps and jumpers which led him to giving it a try. “I was about 11 years old, and I wanted to go off the jumps. Luckily in Lake Placid, there’s a history of it, and I was able to see a lot of jumpers like Ryan St Onge (2009 World Champion), who was my coach. Watching them made it seem real, and I just decided to do it. After that I kept going off the jumps, learning new tricks, and here I am.”
Training for a High-Risk Sport
Chris has been rising in the sport for 15 years and Winter for a dozen. They’re the first to tell you that no one starts the sport doing big tricks and landing on steep snowy slopes. They begin by mastering the basics and advancing safely and methodically as they eventually learn the flips, twists, rotations, and techniques.
Chris and Winter recognize it’s a high-risk sport and are quick to point out the countless ways the team mitigates risks, from the coaches and crews ensuring soft snow blankets the landing area to making small, well-ordered advances in skills and tricks one step at a time.
Learning those new skills always begins by working on a trampoline with bungee cords for safety before athletes move to hone those techniques with plenty of summertime repetitions on water ramps, landing in a pool. It’s through many repetitions in safer environments that Winter says athletes develop muscle memory so that as they regularly face the sport’s many changing wintertime factors from the quality of the snow to wind to ever so slight changes in speed on the ramp, they can consistently land safely on their feet.
Still, the risks are there. Both Chris and Winter have torn their anterior cruciate ligaments (ACL), not only requiring surgery and putting them in recovery for six months but also forcing them both to miss the 2018 Olympic Winter Games. A year earlier while training in summer, Winter had a hard, awkward landing that literally knocked her out. “Doing a new trick for the first time, I got a bit lost. I didn’t know where I was, and my fist hit the water first and drove through my face, fracturing the whole right side.”
With two titanium plates still in her face, she jumps with a plastic shield like those professional basketball players use. “Surprisingly, that one only took three to four weeks to come back from,” she says.
“The injury risk is there,” notes Chris. “It’s something we deal with, but there are a lot of crashes we take where we don’t get injured. Solid training gives us an ability to land on our feet, even when things don’t go right in a jump. We at least get it close enough to stay healthy.”
Putting It All Together in Competition
Previous injuries aside, Chris and Winter are now leading the U.S. Team standings and are both having a strong year amid their strong careers. After putting in years of work, they’ve risen in their sport to among the world’s best. In fact, with one more World Cup to go in Kazakhstan in early March, Winter is currently flying high at number one in the world.
“It’s extremely fun,” says Chris, “and I definitely enjoy this port. But once you get to that World Cup level, and you put all the years of work into it, putting it all together and having a good full day of competition and maybe even landing on the podium is a big relief.”
Winter chimes in, “You think you’d be excited over the moon when you land a big jump, but in that second, with so much pressure that we put on ourselves and also with the external factors you try not to think about, when you put it down, it’s simply a relief in that instant.”
As that relief washes over them, they have a few moments waiting for their scores from the judges, too. “Usually, we can tell instantly as soon as our feet leave,” says Winter. “If you hit a good takeoff, and you’re feeling good in the air, you know you’ll be pretty happy. Whether the score is good or not, it’s always the best feeling because no matter how it’s judged, the best you can do is the best jump you can do.”
A Dynamic and Driven Team
Vlad is a widely respected coach within the aerials community and brings to his work a history of athletic and coaching success. He has a clear passion for the sport and a vision that together sets a high standard for the team.
His team sees that, too. “He knows exactly what it takes,” says Chris. Meeting his expectations is difficult, but that’s my favorite part of him being my coach. He’s always pushing us to go a little further and be a little better. I think that’s why we’ve had so much success under his leadership.”
Clearly an individual sport, much of their success also depends on the team dynamics and relationships. One above and one below, the coaches radio back and forth to be sure they’re on the same page with the winds and other factors that affect jump safety. Winter says, “We have to trust each other. I know the coaches are going to put me in the right spot, and they’ve got confidence in me to know I’m going to do the job right. And with our teammates, we’re training together every day and constantly pushing each other, helping each other up when we’re feeling down, or just having fun when it’s a good sunny day. We each want to come out on top, but we also want our teammates to be right there with us.”
Today, given the experience and success Chris and Winter bring to the team, they’re taking on a more veteran role they see as fun and rewarding. “We’re almost used to it,” Chris jokes about his growing responsibilities to help lead the team. “The people we’re jumping with these days are younger and newer to the sport, most of them coming out of Lake Placid and following a similar path that we did. Growing into this new role and helping some of the younger kids along, has been a lot of fun.”
Achieving Lift Off Toward 2026
Training for the past two years to do triple rotations is paying off for Winter. “She’s having a really great season right now,” says Chris. “I’m having a solid year, too. We’ve struggled with some tough weather and there’ve been some ups and downs, but we’ve have had some good events.”
Says Winter, “This year’s big for me because it’s the first doing triples on snow. Having Vlad believe in me gave me the nudge I needed to know triples were possible. Now we have others on the team and other women from other countries starting to see them as a possibility, too. Landing them for the first time in competition was super rewarding.”
With Lake Placid’s NorAm competition March 1-2 plus one World Cup event left on the schedule March 8-10, they’re eager to finish strong. “We’re trying to end the season on a high note before going back to the drawing board to figure out how we’re going to be even better next year. That’s when we’ll really start our team’s push toward the Olympics in 2026.”
Chris and Winter are clearly excited for the upcoming competition. They say they love jumping for a good crowd in Lake Placid and eagerly urge everyone to come out and watch. “It’s been so much fun to jump in front of the spectators at the Olympic Jumping Complex,” says Chris.
“Last time we competed here was 2019, so it’s been a while,” says Winter. “We’re hoping to make Lake Placid our home event again and bring all the fans around the East Coast here to check it out. It’s very fun.”