By Justin Bigos, Vermont Standard Staff Writer
Sixteen years after winning gold at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada, Norwich native Hannah Kearney is headed to the Vermont Sports Hall of Fame. “I was driving, and Marilyn Cochran Brown [of the famous Cochran skiing family from Richmond, Vt.] called to tell me. It was in December, on my mom’s birthday, Dec. 11,” Kearney told the Standard from her current home in Park City, Utah, as she recalled learning the news that she had been tapped for the honor. “I was able to tell [my mother] and my brother and sister-in-law, because she was up there babysitting. I got to tell the whole family, one at a time.”
On Apr. 25, Kearney will join nine other athletes as part of the 13th class of Vermont Sports Hall of Fame inductees. Kearney will enter the 2026 group as a freestyle/mogul skier — and one who built quite a career résumé in her years as a professional skier. Aside from winning gold in 2010 just days before her 24th birthday, Kearney also competed in two other Winter Olympics — in 2006 in Turin, Italy, and in 2014 in Sochi, Russia, where she took home the bronze medal. Kearney also won the 2005 moguls World Cup title, as well as winning the overall World Cup championship in single moguls in both 2013 and 2014. Upon retiring in 2015, Kearney’s career included the prizes of “eight World Championship medals, three U.S. championships, and a record-tying 46 World Cup victories,” and an induction into the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame in 2024, according to the Vermont Sports Hall of Fame.
It all began in the Upper Valley, according to Kearney. “I was raised in Norwich, but I skied at Waterville Valley [Resort in N.H.] once I was competing in freestyle, and I graduated from Hanover High School. The old New Hampshire/Vermont living-on-the-border issue. But I consider myself a Vermonter, because I am,” she said.
Skiing, for Kearney, was “very much a family activity,” she said, and began so early in her childhood that she has little memory of it. “I was probably two-turning-three that winter,” she calculated as the age she first put on skis. “But yeah, very young. I’ve seen the home videos. My mom was really diligent about that way before cell phones, carrying the camcorder on her shoulder, which is much more impressive. We skied as a family.”
Kearney began competing in the afterschool program at the Dartmouth Skiway in Lyme, N.H., as part of the Ford Sayre Academy. “That’s where I was introduced to freestyle,” said Kearney. “My mom had a gymnastics background, so we were kind of intrigued by the description of freestyle skiing. And I always liked the whoop-de-doos and the cut-throughs when I was skiing with my family. We ended up doing almost all ballet skiing, dancing with short skis and tall poles on skis because of the snow condition and the lack of moguls of the Dartmouth Skiway.” Kearney’s first sanctioned competition was at Waterville Valley Resort, when she was 9-years-old.
The eventual journey to the Winter Olympics then included some travel, in order to win some national-level competitions en route to making the U.S. Ski Team. “Each spring, there’s a national competition called Nationals, where the elite ski team members and then young kids who have worked all season to make it to this point get to compete against each other,” explained Kearney. “So I competed at that event a few times, and it was held at Waterville when I was a freshman in high school. One year later, I made the U.S. Ski Team by winning a Junior World competition in Finland” — the first time she had ever been to Europe.
After four years of intensive training beginning in 2002, Kearney set her sights on the 2006 Winter Olympics. When asked what it felt like to fly to Italy and compete in Turin, Kearney said it was different than how she’d imagined it. “It’s really surreal, I suppose, because you grow up watching the Olympics on TV, and associate the Olympics with [the theme song on] NBC playing [during] prime-time coverage — that and the fanfare and the behind-the-scenes stories and the emotion.”
At Left, Hannah Kearney earned two Winter Olympics medals — gold in Vancouver, Canada in 2010, and bronze in Sochi, Russia in 2014. At right, Kearney currently makes her home in Park City, Utah with her family: daughter Lula, husband Mike Morse, and newborn daughter Lennox, along with their 12-year-old mutt, Finn. Photos Provided
“It turns out, when you’re actually there as an athlete, it’s another competition,” said Kearney. “The fanfare isn’t there. Once you’re at the venue, it’s the coaches coaching you in the same way, it’s the same judges, [and] all the competitors around you are the same. But you get a lot more attention going into it. And as a 19-year-old, I was pretty nervous. I think I took that attention as a lot of pressure. I sort of crumbled at my first Olympics.” Kearney placed third-to-last.
Faced with another four years to prepare for the next Winter Olympics, Kearney credited something unexpected with her eventual turnaround — an injury. “It was a knee injury that really turned the course of things for me and made me a professional skier. In the course of that rehab, you get a lot of help from physical therapists. I started working with strength and conditioning coaches, and just became a regimented and trained athlete who was training very specifically for mogul skiing, instead of just a high school student who happened to be good at mogul skiing.”
In 2009, Kearney won her first Crystal Globe, a trophy awarded to the World Cup overall mogul champion each year, putting her in a prominent position as a contender for the following year’s Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada. The rest is history, as they say. A gold medal in 2010, then five more years of awards and accolades. After Kearney’s third and final Winter Olympics, in Russia, she decided it was time to hang up the skis — at least competitively. “It is pretty normal for Olympic cycles to kind of determine when you retire. You’re like, ‘Do I have four more in me?’ And if I don’t, excuse me, I’m probably gonna step down.”
Kearney also mentioned her pressing desire to graduate from college, as well as marry and have children, as she approached her thirties. In fact, much of her interview with the Standard was conducted alongside the coos of Kearney and her husband’s — skier Mike Morse’s — three-month-old baby. Now living in Utah with her family, Kearney said she is excited to return to her hometown this spring and formally enter the Vermont Sports Hall of Fame.
“It’s a huge honor. Once you’re retired, there are no more accolades, unless there are things like the Hall of Fame. So it’s a way to celebrate your past. And for us, it has become like family reunions. Anytime there’s any sort of celebration like this, it becomes a fun excuse to come back [to Vermont]. Now, it’s like, ‘Oh, well, now I have to be in Burlington in April.’ Fantastic, because I’m always trying to get back there anyway. It’s really wonderful. I put my heart, soul, blood, tears, and ACLs into my career,” she concluded.