Your Turn to Help a Brother Out

If you're reading this blog and don't know who Tyler Palmer is, you should.  If you don't know Tyler Palmer personally, you should do that as well.  The man is legendary in so many ways:  his ski racing career, his coaching career, his personality, and just the aura of a man who's lived ski racing the way we all wish we could.  This is a man who still likes to run SL on 195's, and in fact complains that they are too short.  He's a man who takes Erik and Karl Johnson hunting, and doesn't mind when they fall asleep waiting for an elk to walk by, because, well, he's probably sleeping too.  He's a man who may or may not have compared snow conditions at a race last spring to certain illegal drugs of similar texture and color, excusing himself by saying, "Hey, I lived in Aspen in the '70's."  So many ski coaches hide their pasts from their athletes, not wanting the kids to know about all the illicit things they used to do.  But Palmer walks a finer line, acknowledging his pretty wild past but couching it in the context of a very holistic approach to life and ski racing that combines the two, and in fact welds them into a single path through time.  Palmer knows, and demonstrates, that your being is defined by how you ski, and vice versa.  If you don't bring "It" in life, you won't bring "It" on the hill, because what you do on course is the same as what you do in life.

These days, Tyler has fallen on tough times.  His health is deteriorating due to diabetes and Addison's Disease, and as is the case for many ski coaches, he does not have health insurance.  If you haven't had to buy your own health insurance lately, you may not know that it will now be effectively impossible for him to purchase health insurance because of his pre-existing condition.  Either because it will be prohibitively expensive, or because insurance companies will simply refuse to sell him a policy that covers the care he now needs.  That leaves him to cover the looming medical bills out of pocket, which is a luxury that only the super-rich can afford to indulge in.  If you have $1 billion, you are your own health insurance.  If you have, say, $30,000 and no insurance, you are screwed.

So help him out.  Read the message posted at the Skiing Heritage blog, and take the opportunity to help a man who has helped the entire ski racing community in every way he can, on both coasts.  Palmer has done great service to us all, either directly or indirectly, and now we have the opportunity to help him.  Make a donation, there's also possibly a raffle in the works so you can potentially win a little something for yourself in the process.