Music can be a very good way of relieving stress. We all know this because we tend to feel good when we’re warbling the lyrics to a song that we like while we’re taking a shower or driving down a highway.
So it’s no surprise that at least one U.S. Olympian – alpine skier Laurenne Ross – takes to playing music in order to disconnect from the grind that comes with being an Olympic athlete. According to her official U.S. Ski Team bio, the Canadian-born and Oregon-raised Ross plays the violin, guitar and piano in addition to singing.
“In skiing, I feel like I have a lot of pressure on me,” she says in a video for NBCOlympics.com. “When I play my music – I kind of feel like that’s a good way to let go of all that pressure.
“I find a bit of meditation in both things, but they are very different…They are both passions, they’re very different, but they are both things that I’m really connected to.”
Ross, the 2013 U.S. Nationals champion in the super-G, is one of four first-time Olympians on this year’s U.S. women’s Alpine skiing team along with Mikaela Shiffrin, Julia Ford and Jacqueline Wiles.
The Games run in her family, as her grandfather, Allan Purvis, helped the Canadian men’s hockey team win the gold medal at Oslo in 1952.
For Sochi, she’s qualified in three Alpine disciplines – the super combined (Feb. 10), downhill (Feb. 12), and super-G (Feb. 15). To learn about how Ross got started in skiing, NBCOlympics.com’s Joe Battaglia has more.
