Local athlete begins World Cup career on home turf

Hunt, a 21-year-old junior, will compete in the slalom race Sunday against the best female alpine ski racers in the world at the Killington World Cup in Vermont.

That includes U.S. star Mikaela Shiffrin, who is poised to set a new World Cup record.

“I think that’s really cool. I mean, I’ve looked up to her for a long time,” Hunt said about racing with Shiffrin. “Also I think it would be really cool if she went, at my first World Cup, she got her 100th World Cup victory at home in Killington, I think that would be a pretty cool thing to be a part of.”

While she isn’t on the U.S. ski team, Hunt qualified for the Stifel Killington Cup after qualifying for and winning a time trial race last week against national team member Dasha Romanov in Aspen, Colorado.

She said the invitation to the race came as a surprise.

“I wasn’t expecting it at all. So it was a really good surprise,” she said. “Then kind of going into it, I wasn’t, I don’t know, it’s not that I didn’t expect to win, but I was kind of like, ‘I don’t know, this is a really cool thing to be able to do.’ And so I just kind of went into it with a really good mentality.”

A former member of the U.S. Ski Team Alpine Development Team, Hunt represented team USA at the 2024 FIS Alpine Junior World Ski Championships in France.

Parkite and University of Denver alum Katie Hensien is also slated to race at Killington.

The two-day race begins with a giant slalom race Saturday at 8 a.m. MST and slalom on Sunday.