Was it destiny that propelled  Hedda Berntsen ’99 toward her silver medal in ski-cross at the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games?

After all, Berntsen learned  to ski on the “World Championship Trail” and the “Olympic Hill”—names her dad, Dag Berntsen ’73, gave to the routes he hand-cut through the woods around their home in Norway, an hour south of Oslo.

“It’s funny now to look back and wonder if it was all meant to happen,” says Berntsen, from her home in Olso, where she has returned to study anthropology at the University of Oslo after her whirlwind Olympic tour.

But Berntsen’s path to Olympic glory followed anything but the straight and narrow. Winter school days in Norway ended in the late morning, allowing Berntsen, her siblings, and their neighbors to race each other through the trees and show off ski tricks.

“I was a free child in the realest sense,” she says. Berntsen began competing in ski jumping and cross country skiing, and then switched to alpine skiing as a teenager. She raced alpine and played soccer for Middlebury—and while she was a Panther, she also won gold in telemark skiing at the 1997 World Championships. Next up was a stint on the Norway national alpine team and a bronze in slalom at the 2001 World Championships before Berntsen eventually picked up freestyle skiing and ski-cross.

While the discipline (the newbie at the 2010 Games) has been compared to a demolition derby, jousting, bull riding, NASCAR, motocross and extreme cage-fighting, Berntsen says that ski-cross is simply a good test of multiple skiing skills and a great spectator sport.

“You master this really fun obstacle course,” she says, “and it’s easy to understand — the two fastest racers from each heat go on to the next round.”

Before the Vancouver Games, Berntsen wasn’t advancing very much, thanks to injuries; her last podium was at a World Cup race in early 2009.

Still, there Berntsen was on Feb. 23 at Cypress Mountain, feeling butterflies about the huge jumps and jam-packed elements, and fighting off fatigue from a sleepless night.

“Once the heat started, the nervousness disappeared,” she says. “I was in a flow state of mind all day. My legs were so tired after two runs that I had no idea how I would be able to do two more heats.”

She hung on to edge by Marion Josserand of France and, finishing behind Canada’s Ashleigh McIvor, take the silver while representing Norway.

“It was an unbelievable achievement for me…I still can’t know if it was a dream or it really happened” says Berntsen, who made a promise that if she made the podium, she would donate profits of her new children’s book (The Playspirits Playground, co-written by Jessica Riley ’98.5, illustrated by Vancouver schoolchildren, and to be published by Riley’s Kiba Kiba Books in June) to the Olympic nonprofit Right to Play.

Berntsen, whose silver medal now rests on a table in her hallway, says that her Olympic achievement both stems back to Middlebury and her sense of freedom as a child in Norway.

“We had a great group of people on the Middlebury Ski Team, and at the Snow Bowl, we used to start all the way at the top and then race alongside each other—almost like ski-cross—to the bottom,” says Berntsen, who found this same joy at Vancouver.

“I felt like I was racing for the true reason — not to impress people or the sponsors but for the love of skiing. It was to celebrate play.”

This story is the first part of a two-part series focusing on Middlebury at the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. On Monday, Tim Reynolds ’09 reports on the Vancouver experience of cross-country skiers Simi Hamilton ’09 and Garrott Kuzzy ’06.