Suzy Chaffee moved through the world like someone who never quite touched the ground—gliding, carving, improvising. Before the cameras and the commercials, before “Suzy Chapstick” became a brand unto itself, she was Suzanne Stevia Chaffee of Rutland, Vermont, a girl taught to ski by a mother who’d nearly made the 1940 Olympic team. The sport was a birthright, the snow practically a second language. Her brother Rick would join the family tradition too, but Suzy was the one who turned the slopes into a stage.
At nineteen she tried out for the first U.S. Ski Team while still a freshman at the University of Denver—and made it. No hesitation, no warming up to the moment. Just point the skis downhill and go. She finished fourth in the downhill at the 1966 World Championships, survived a brutal crash in ’67, and still ended that season ranked tenth in the world in downhill, sixteenth overall. By 1968 she was captain of the U.S. Women’s Team, a favorite heading into the Grenoble Olympics. When she finished 28th after choosing the wrong wax, she shrugged and kept the world’s attention anyway—thanks to a skin-tight silver racing suit that became instantly iconic. Even her missteps shone.
But racing was just the first act. Chaffee reinvented herself as the queen of freestyle ballet skiing, a three-time world champion from 1971 to 1973. While others chased medals, she choreographed flight, turning mountainsides into performance art. Editorial photographers loved her. Ford Models signed her. Advertisers claimed her. And America—especially 1970s television America—fell for her entirely when she became the face of ChapStick. One winter athlete, one humble little tube, and suddenly Suzy Chaffee had a nickname that would outlast half the decade’s fashion trends.
Off the slopes, she was just as kinetic, pushing through barriers in rooms that didn’t usually leave a seat for women. She became the first woman ever to serve on the board of the U.S. Olympic Committee, fought publicly for Title IX, and advised four U.S. presidents on the President’s Council on Physical Fitness. She also co-founded the Native Voices Foundation, giving Native American athletes a pipeline toward the Olympics—an idea as simple and radical as everything else she touched.
She joked later that rumors about an affair with Ted Kennedy helped her get the Amateur Sports Act passed in 1978. It was very Suzy: flirt with the scandal, then point to the legislation it helped move. Her eyes stayed on the mission, even when the headlines tried to play a different game.
Acting drifted in and out of her life—films like Ski Lift to Death and Fire and Ice, endorsements for Revlon and Dannon and Seagram’s, even a turn as a contestant on Bullseye in 1982. By the late 2000s she was running for local office in Sedona, Arizona, still trying to carve new lines in unfamiliar territory. She lost the race but kept the cause, same as always.
She has lived many versions of herself: Olympian, model, activist, athlete, actress, folk hero. Suzy Chaffee didn’t stay in one lane, or on one mountain. She learned early that momentum is its own kind of survival, that reinvention keeps the blood warm, and that sometimes the most indelible legacy comes from the paths you cut where no one else thought to ski.
