Gretchen Bleiler

No regrets
After narrowly missing the cut for the 2002 Olympic team, Bleiler made her Olympic debut at the 2006 Torino Games, where she won silver in women's halfpipe. And though she didn't win gold (that honor went to teammate Hannah Teter), Bleiler has only fond memories of her first Olympic appearance. "Torino was amazing," she recalls. "I did everything I wanted to do at the Olympics in 2006. I had such an amazing day where I rode my best, and my friends were there and my family. And it was just - it was magic. There were no regrets."

Destination: wedding
During the summer of 2009, Bleiler and former professional snowboarder Chris Hotell were married in Dominical, Costa Rica. Though the wedding took place in the midst of rainy season, the weather held up on the day of the wedding, and Bleiler made a dramatic entrance to the ceremony, riding along the beach on a horse. Among the members of the wedding party were 2002 Olympian Tricia Byrnes and 2002 Olympic halfpipe champion Kelly Clark. The couple went on their honeymoon in the Maldives, a republic of approximately 1,100 islands located about 400 miles southwest of Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean.

Super G
In addition to the training required to remain an elite snowboarder, Bleiler has a life filled with off-snow commitments and a seemingly limitless store of energy that has prompted her family to coin the nickname "Super G." In the past two years, she has gone to Beijing to work as an Olympic host for Yahoo! Sports, designed her own signature snowboarding clothing line with Oakley (see "Fashionable," below), helped produce her own eco-friendly snowboard with K2, played a featured role in snowboarding movies (most recently Stance, released in Sept. 2009) and even has her own line of lip balm. And Bleiler isn't just attaching her name to products; she has played an active role, right down to trying out different types of chapstick. "Last year we went through some many different rounds," she says. "We went through [prototypes] all the time, and I'd tell them the texture is not quite right, it tastes too vanilla or it's too greasy." Putting her hectic schedule into perspective, in early autumn 2009, Bleiler estimated that she and her husband Chris had spent more time apart than together since their wedding this summer.

Gretchen Bleiler (right) and teammate Hannah Teter celebrate after winning silver and gold, respectively, in Torino.

Fashionable
Bleiler has experience as a model (she famously posed for the Feb. 2004 cover of FHM wearing only a brushed-on bikini), but these days, she's seeing fashion through a designer's eyes, having created the Gretchen Bleiler Collection with Oakley. "Fashion and snowboarding have always kind of fallen together," she says. "There have always been extreme fashions in snowboarding, and I've always had a pretty strong idea of how I want to look on the mountain, so when Oakley came to me with this opportunity to have my own collection, I just jumped on it. How often do you get to design the clothes you get to wear? You'll be wearing them, so you might as well design them yourself. I worked with the designers closely on everything. I'm involved with everything from the materials we choose to the colors, to the fit, the trim, every little last step."

A little town called Aspen
Though she was born in Ohio and now lives in California, Bleiler's primary home base remains Aspen, where she moved with her mother at age 10 (her parents are divorced). While Bleiler is undoubtedly fond of Aspen, she also is appreciative of her Midwestern roots. "I love that I did grow up in Ohio," she says, "because it really made me appreciate having these four amazing mountains in my backyard to go and snowboard."