Meet Ali:
My name is Ali Nullmeyer, and I’m an Olympic Alpine Skier and current member of the Canadian Alpine Ski Team. I was born in Toronto, Canada in 1998 and skied out of the Georgian Peaks Ski Club in Collingwood, Ontario. At age 14, I moved to Vermont, USA to attend Green Mountain Valley School, a ski racing academy, where I graduated in 2016. I have been a proud member of the Canadian Alpine Ski Team since 2015 where I have been working towards my World Cup and Olympic dreams. I began studying at Middlebury College in 2019 while coming back from a knee injury where I tore my ACL and meniscus in both knees. I graduated Middlebury with degree in Economics in May 2023. During my time at college, I competed at both World Cups and on the NCAA circuit and am now focused on podiuming at the World Cup level.
Welcome to Vermont
As we headed south on I89, I couldn’t help but look around and see what surrounded us on that first drive to Waitsfield – a lot of trees, a few small towns and a couple stores here and there. As a 14 year old “city girl” and homebody who had grown up in Toronto with a big family, I couldn’t help but wonder what I had got myself into as we drove through rural countryside of Vermont to chase my dreams of becoming a World Cup athlete. Flash forward to present day, that same “city girl” has spent eight of the last 15 years in Vermont and fell in love with the place she now calls a second home. And what’s even more amazing is that I get to live my World Cup and Olympic dream as well!
I started skiing at 18 months old and spent my first few years on snow simply trying to keep up with my three older siblings. I loved skiing right from the start and I enjoyed challenging myself to be faster and better every run. In a fun race when I was about six years old, I turned to my Dad at the bottom of my first run, looked up and him and asked, “Dad, am I allowed to go as fast as I can?” That spirit of mastering each run and every course and condition was native to me since I was a little girl. When I was 13 years old, two my coaches had conversations with me that made me realize if I wanted to take skiing more seriously, I needed a change. I was missing school from Wednesday to Friday every week in the winter and was gone for multiple weeks in the fall and spring for training camps. It was starting to get challenging with my high school in Toronto and many of my teachers did not understand why I was gone so often.
After a bit of convincing and a lot of contemplation, I decided to pack up and head to Vermont.
I attended Green Mountain Valley School from Grade 9-12 where we trained daily at Mt. Ellen, Sugarbush. A typical day in the winter had us training from 8 to 11am at Sugarbush, returning to school for lunch, and attending afternoon classes from 2 to 6pm. We then had dinner followed by study hall from 7 to 9pm before heading to our dorms for some free time prior to going to bed.
My favorite memory from training at Sugarbush is routed in one of the classic East Coast cold, damp ski days. Sometimes, while training on the GMVS training hill, the Inverness lift was closed so we looped on the GMX lift just below. My friends and I would head to GMX in our thin, skintight speed suits (that are not warm at all) in freezing and windy winter weather. We huddled in the tightest ball possible riding up that chair run after run. When we unloaded at the top, we were practically icicles as we headed toward the cat track that looped us back to our training hill. One day, after a few laps of us pushing and skating along the cat track, my friends and I realized that we could get there faster (and have more fun) if we all held onto each other and created a “train” with multiple people. We flew past our coaches and made it to our training course in record time. Every run after that initial “train” as we called it, was more fun than the last and is still something my friends and I reminisce about to this day.
The days I spent skiing and training at Sugarbush were some of the most fun I’ve had. From training slalom on Spring Fling in spring conditions to free skiing all the way up to Castlerock double on cold and snowy days, Sugarbush has been an amazing mountain to explore and help develop my skiing over the past 15 years. Every year, I find myself returning to Vermont at the end of my World Cup season and trying to squeeze in some extra ski days before the hill closes, or skinning up the mountain until there’s almost no snow left. I’m so thankful for the time I’ve spent in Vermont, training and growing up at Sugarbush and I can’t wait for more fun days to come!