GUS KENWORTHY

Like most athletes, freestyle skier Gus Kenworthy spent years dreaming about going to the Olympics and bringing back some bronze, silver or gold. When the dust cleared and the Sochi Olympics were finished, Kenworthy found himself returning to the States with something far more precious than the silver medal around his neck—a family of stray dogs he rescued off the streets. “My friend Robin (MacDonald) sent me a photo of this particular family of stray dogs,” Kenworthy says. “It was a mom and these four puppies and they were literally the cutest things in the entire world. I left the Athlete’s Village, found a bus, and went all the way to check them out. I thought, alright, we need to find a way to bring these dogs home with us.” Kenworthy is the type of guy that stops to pet every single dog he passes on the street, even when he has the biggest competition of his life looming only a few days away. In between practice runs Kenworthy would check in on the dogs. After all of the stressful qualifiers in the weeks leading up to the Olympics, the Sochi Pups, as they are known on their very own Instagram, provided a welcome distraction for Kenworthy. The final Olympic team isn’t even announced until right before the games. Skiers then flew over to Russia and had to wait for two weeks before the events took place. “It’s a huge build up for one day, it’s really stressful,” Kenworthy says. “I was eating away at myself, getting stressed out and second guessing the run I was going to do. If I wasn’t doing the stuff with the dogs I would just be sitting around in the rooms, which sucked.” All of those hours inside of his own head may have not been what Kenworthy would have wanted, but it clearly worked in his favor as he was able to grab the silver as the US freestyle ski team made history by sweeping the podium in the men’s slopestyle. Slopestyle hasn’t been an Olympic sport for long but from his earliest days on skis Kenworthy felt the calling. “I got into it because my older brother skied, I skied, and we used to watch ski movies and snowboard movies. I always though the cool thing was doing tricks,” Kenworthy says. “I was always trying to do tricks on whatever I could. I thought that it was the most fun thing you could do while on skis. It was awesome.” It takes a great deal of testicular fortitude to go down a mountain backwards while hitting jumps and sliding on rails. Even the biggest daredevils must have a little bit of trepidation when they plan out their runs and think of the consequences of a trick gone awry. “You know that you are going to get hurt,” Kenworthy says. “I’ve come to terms with that aspect. I’m not that scared of it hurting, but I’m more fearful of all of the time you have to take off when you get hurt.” And get hurt he has. From breaking both of his legs when he came up short on a jump to breaking his collarbone badly enough that he needed a metal plate put in, Kenworthy has taken more than few spills on the slopes. Even with the frustrating amounts of time he had to miss due to the major injuries he has sustained, it was a simple cut he barely noticed that proved to be the most galling—it went right through the middle of his brand new tattoo. The scar is barely noticeable a few months later; if anything, it adds a little grit to the skull and roses design covering his upper arm. In the months since coming back from the Olympics Kenworthy has been working on his right arm sleeve after a long gap between tattoos. When Kenworthy was only 14 he received his first tattoo—the name Hoot on his left arm to pay tribute to his best friend who had passed away. His next tattoo, an owl on his ribcage, was also honoring his lost friend. “For the longest time I kept thinking that all of my tattoos needed to mean something deep,” Kenworthy explains. “My first one meant so much and the second one was an extension of that one. Then I got past that. “[The tattoos] still mean something to me but I don’t think they need to be tribute tattoos or anything like that,” Kenworthy continues. “That’s awesome if there’s a reason like that, but I also feel like it’s artwork that I’m stoked to wear.” Kenworthy has been visiting Dave Allen of Preying Mantis tattoo in Denver to work on his sleeve quite a lot over the last couple of months. In addition to the skull and roses Allen has added an anatomically correct heart, a moth and a woman wearing a wolf’s head to Kenworthy’s body. The two have also become fast friends thanks to the many tattoo sessions completing Kenworthy’s sleeve. Much like the Sochi Pups, this friendship between artist and client started in Russia. “When I wanted to start my sleeve I got the Olympic rings on the inside of my bicep,” Kenworthy says. “It’s kind of cliché but I figured you got to do it. Maybe I should have gotten the medal tattooed on my chest like Iron Man.” Within hours of winning that medal, US Olympic officials were trying to hustle Kenworthy back to the States to begin his media tour. The task of actually getting the dogs onto a plane bound for the States fell to Kenworthy’s friend who had brought the dogs to his attention, Robin MacDonald (also the photographer of this story). As Kenworthy made his stops on the media tour, the story of the puppies became a sensation. The publicity would end up being both positive and negative. Since the story was so heartwarming, groups like the Humane Society got in touch with MacDonald in Sochi to help clear the path for the dogs. Dealing with the bureaucracy of any government can be an enormous undertaking, so Kenworthy and MacDonald needed all of the help they could get. The publicity the pups received added to the avalanche of bad PR the Russians had been combating since months before the Sochi games even began. Needless to say, this made the task of getting the dogs out of the country a bit more difficult. “The trick was to get them permission to fly,” Kenworthy says. “The Russians really didn’t want to release them to us. The US never said anything, so they never went to quarantine. They flew over and came right home.” Kenworthy and MacDonald have each taken in a pup while the mother dog has found a home with the skier’s mom. Now that all of the dogs have found proper homes and Kenworthy has spent a summer getting tattooed, it’s time for him to get back on those skis. The 2018 Winter Olympics are only three-and-a-half years away; Kenworthy has a lot of work to do if he wants to earn the time off to fill in his other sleeve.