Stifel sponsored professional skier at the Killington Cup
Professional skier Alex Ferreira is a three-time Olympic medalist with over 20 World Cup podiums, more than 10 individual World Cup wins and made history in 2023-2024 by winning every single competition he entered, including a sweep of all the World Cup stops.
For many elite athletes, that would be a full career’s worth of hardware and a decent excuse to slow down. He didn’t. Instead, the Aspen, Colorado, native who started competitive freeskiing at age 10 and later got into halfpipe skiing, played the long game. It took him until this year, a full eight years and another Olympic cycle, to finally win gold at the Milan Cortina Games. His mom told reporters afterward that he’d been chasing that specific medal the whole time, that he needed to “finish the rainbow.”
Skiing at Sun Valley
Patience, mostly invisible
Leadership tends to get described in terms of transcendent events: the clutch moment, the gutsy call, the highlight-reel play. Ferreira’s story doesn’t really fit that narrative. Most of it was invisible, training sessions nobody covered, seasons where he didn’t medal at all, sticking with one goal long after it stopped being new. Not glamorous. That tenacity is also a good predictor of whether someone finishes what they start.
Alpine ski racer Mikaela Shiffrin’s career runs on a similar path, even though it looks flashier from the outside. She’s a three-time Olympic gold medalist and eight-time world champion. In the 2022-23 season, Shiffrin became the winningest alpine skier in history when she earned her 87th World Cup victory in Are, Sweden. Then in the 2024-25 season, she won her 100th World Cup Victory in Sestriere, Italy. And that didn’t come from one golden season. It came from showing up since the age of eight, when she began ski racing, and she has earned a reputation for precision and consistency. Enough small, consistent decisions, stacked long enough, and they stop looking small.
Two athletes, two disciplines, the same quiet math underneath.
Skier at Toyota U.S. Grand Prix
What the partnership actually funds
Stifel’s sponsorship of the U.S. Ski Team snowballs off that logic. The agreement runs through 2034 — three Olympic cycles including a home games in Salt Lake City — and it covers a lot more than the athletes whose faces end up on cereal boxes. Eight disciplines get funding, from alpine and cross-country down to freeski and moguls, plus a career and financial education program meant to help athletes figure out what comes after the sport ends. Because eventually it does, medals or not, and long careers need a plan for what comes next just as much as they need a training schedule.
Stifel also runs an annual fundraiser for the team, and this year’s event brought in $1.35 million. That money doesn’t stop at Shiffrin or Ferreira. Most of it goes toward athletes nobody’s heard of yet, still on developmental teams, hoping for their own medal runs, their own eight-year mountain climbs.
Rooted in Winston-Salem
Winston-Salem has learned that lasting success sometimes means finding a new purpose for what came before. Its transformation from a tobacco and banking center into a growing hub for innovation reflects the kind of long-range vision that rarely produces overnight results. Elite athletes understand that process. The training that leads to a medal takes years, but preparing for what happens after the final competition requires just as much foresight. Through its partnership with the U.S. Ski Team, Stifel supports both the pursuit of athletic excellence and financial education for life beyond the sport. For Winston-Salem families, that same philosophy guides wealth planning designed to carry hard-earned success into the future.
The long game, on and off the mountain
None of this is really about skiing, or even sponsorship. It’s a simple idea, and it happens to line up with the company’s own mantra: where success meets success. On the mountain or off it, the work that endures is rarely finished in a single season. It is built by people who understand the value of patience, consistency and commitment. Those who understand that the pursuit of excellence never takes a day off.
Visit stifel.com for more information.
