The Winter Olympics opened yesterday in Sochi. As happens once every 4 years, American viewers are suddenly experts about sports like biathlon, curling and the bizarrely named “skeleton.”
NBC does a nice job personalizing athletes we’ve never heard of. Each of them, it seems, has an amazingly warm and compelling back story. Picking favorites is not easy.
Susan Izzo
But Westporters have a way to root for 4 snowboarders. Greg Bretz and Danny Davis (US), Charles Reid (Canada) and Christian Haller (Sweden) are all represented by 1992 Staples graduate Susan Izzo.
Susan — part of the famous family that owns Crossroads Hardware — first saw the business potential of snowboarding as a student at Vermont’s St. Michael’s College. After graduation, she worked for snowboard mogul Jake Burton.
She now owns Mosaic Management. Based in Encinitas, California, the company represents extreme sports athletes: surfers, motocross racers, snowboarders and the like.
Susan is now in Sochi. If When one of her athletes climbs the medal stand, we can all enjoy our 2 degrees of separation from them.
Though, hopefully, it’s a lot warmer than that there.
Danny Davis is one of Susan Izzo’s athletes. Dude, how could you not root for him?
