Spyder's 49-Year-Old Racing Roots Meet a New Model for Athletes Without a Team

When Global Racing shut down at the end of March, its athletes lost more than a program — they lost one of the last independent bridges to World Cup ski racing. Within months, several of them had built a new one from scratch, backed by a ski apparel brand old enough to remember when it, too, started out of necessity rather than ambition.

Two closures, one widening gap

Global Racing had spent 13 years filling a specific and unglamorous niche in alpine skiing: giving athletes without a national-team spot, or without a fully funded federation behind them, somewhere to train and race at a high level. Founder Paul Epstein built it into a genuine pipeline — over its final nine seasons alone, the program helped 20 athletes score World Cup points or return to national teams, Belgian giant slalom racer Sam Maes among them. The team folded after this year's finals in Hafjell, Norway, when Epstein left to become the Stifel U.S. Ski Team's men's technical coach.

Almost simultaneously, World Racing Academy — a similar program founded by Daniel Fahrner in 2010 and later run by his son Martin — also wound down its elite operation. Between them, the two programs had spent well over two decades absorbing athletes that national federations couldn't, or wouldn't, fully fund.

That left racers like American slalom specialist Tim Gavett, who had just posted four spring podiums for Global Racing while also nursing an ACL injury, without an obvious next step. Without a national-team place, his path to the World Cup looked, in his words, close to nonexistent.

From a phone call to a seven-athlete roster

Gavett's response was to call his father, longtime coach Dave Gavett, and then Jimmy Krupka, a former teammate from Green Mountain Valley School who was facing the same problem after two years with World Racing Academy. The idea of simply starting their own team took hold once Dave Gavett's wife — Traudl Hächer-Gavett, a former World Cup winner in her own right — got involved.

Inside two months, the group had a name (Spyder Redline Alpine), seven athletes, three coaches, service staff, a physiotherapist and a base in Austria.

The roster blends established World Cup racers with athletes rebuilding toward the circuit: Canadian Erik Read, a two-time Olympian with 11 straight seasons of World Cup slalom points; countryman Liam Wallace, whose costs and training are being underwritten this season by Alpine Canada even as he trains outside the federation's own structure; Denmark's Christian Borgnaes and Brazil's Christian Oliveira Søvik, both of whom compete for nations with no national alpine funding to speak of; plus Krupka, Gavett and Quebec's Étienne Mazellier, all rebuilding after injury or in search of their first World Cup starts. Head coach Ryan Wilson, who spent last season with Global Racing itself, leads a staff built specifically to avoid leaving any athlete uncoached when the group splits across two training locations.

No owner, no profit motive

Structurally, Spyder Redline is set up as a collective rather than a business: athletes cover their own training and racing costs plus a team fee, sponsors and federation support offset the rest, and no single person holds a financial stake. That, the founders argue, is what keeps the roster from growing simply to collect more fees — this year's group of seven was chosen for compatible schedules and character as much as results.

The arrangement with Alpine Canada is a notable test case for the model: Wallace keeps his place on Canada's national team roster while Spyder Redline handles his day-to-day training, with the federation footing the bill. It's an example of an independent program supplementing a federation's capacity rather than competing with it — useful for a mid-sized national team, and close to essential for athletes from countries like Denmark and Brazil that fund no alpine program at all.

A sponsor with its own underdog history

The team's title backer has some history with exactly this kind of story. Spyder began in 1978 as a small mail-order operation, run out of founder David Jacobs's Boulder, Colorado kitchen after he concluded he could make better race sweaters than what was then on the market. Decades and one ownership change later — the brand has been part of Authentic Brands Group since a 2020s acquisition — Spyder still trades heavily on its racing pedigree, including a 33-year run as official supplier to the U.S. Ski Team.

For Steven Nyman, the retired U.S. downhiller now working with Spyder on the partnership, backing Redline is personal: he spent two stretches of his own career self-financing a comeback without full national-team support. Spyder is supplying race suits, apparel and direct funding, and in exchange gets World Cup visibility and product feedback from athletes testing its Speed Freaks racing line under competitive conditions. TOKO, meanwhile, joins as wax-and-tool partner, citing prior working relationships with several of the team's athletes and staff.

What success looks like

Redline's stated goals for its first season are modest by design: World Cup points, NorAm podiums, improved rankings, and new World Cup starting positions for athletes rebuilding their eligibility. The bigger question — whether an athlete-owned collective can survive past a single season the way Global Racing and World Racing Academy managed for over a decade each — won't be answered until the results start coming in from Europe and North America this winter.

For now, the team has already accomplished what it set out to do at the most basic level: keeping seven racers, several of whom had few other realistic routes to the World Cup, on snow and racing this season.