Byline: Jay Weiner; Staff Writer
RSEC: +
She will be part of Minnesota cross-country ski history at these Winter Olympics, but Aelin Peterson has made her marks far from her Red Wing birthplace.
First, in a quiet, tiny Alaskan village, where she was one of the few white girls, and where she first took to winter sports on the frozen Bering Sea. Then, at a hectic mutual fund office in Milwaukee, where she regularly traded hundreds of thousands of shares of stocks.
Peterson, 27, has lived in isolation and in the fast lane. Now she's about to prove a unique point at the Salt Lake City Winter Games: A professional woman can push herself away from her desk and pour the same commitment into sports that she once did into business.
'How many working women are able to take a risk like [mine]?' Peterson asked. 'I know I've been given a luxury. But if other working women have some unfulfilled goals that have been sadly tucked away, I would like to think that they would see me and take a shot at their own dreams.'
Peterson was born in Red Wing to Donald Peterson and Susan Mylander Peterson, who both attended high school in Cloquet, Minn. Before her birth, the Petersons lived in the western Alaska outpost of Unalakleet, population 700, mostly Inupiak natives. Don, a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War, was serving his alternative duty as a teacher. But for Sue to get the proper health care, the couple decided to return to Minnesota.
Thus Aelin Peterson - with a slew of Minnesota relatives in the Twin Cities, Carlton and Two Harbors - this week joins Barb Jones of West Lakeland Township and Lindsey Weier of Mahtomedi as the first three Minnesota-born women to make the U.S. Olympic cross-country ski team.
When she was 3, the Petersons moved back to Unalakleet, where Aelin was one of two white girls in school. She spent much of her time on her own, increasingly rejected by the Inupiak girls as they got older, in fourth, fifth and sixth grades, 'when people are beginning to figure out who they are,' Peterson said.
It was then she learned to skate on the frozen Norton Sound, which is part of the Bering Sea, and first skied.
By the time she was in seventh grade, the Petersons moved to Fairbanks, where Peterson excelled, made U.S. junior national ski teams, and went on to Northern Michigan University, a winter sports power, where she majored in economics and minored, more or less, in skiing.
But she contracted viral meningitis and for a time burned out on skiing.
'My body was exhausted, my head was exhausted and I just didn't have the passion for it anymore,' said Peterson, whose career, at age 21, appeared over.
One A-minus short of a perfect 4.0 grade-point average, she received an internship at a prestigious Boston investment bank, Brown Brothers Harriman. She was impressing superiors when an athletic spark rekindled in her: She wanted to take a stab at speedskating.
Somewhat impulsively, but with dedication, she moved to Milwaukee, home then to the best oval in the nation, where greats Dan Jansen and Bonnie Blair had trained.
'It's a sport I'd always found beautiful and intriguing,' Peterson said. 'I simply wanted to try it. I am a risk-taker by nature.'
To support herself, she took a job as a customer service agent for Strong Asset Management, a Milwaukee-based mutual fund company. As it turned out, her speedskating aspirations stumbled and fell; starting an elite career at age 22 just wasn't possible.
Instead, she dived into the equities business and, before long, applied for and was promoted to become a junior trader on Strong's equities desk. There, every market day, she would arrive at her office at 5:30 a.m., study the foreign markets, read the financial press, collect data and then share her insights with analysts and senior traders.
But over the course of three years, she began to make trades, too, sometimes buying and selling 400,000 shares of an individual stock for Strong's Opportunity and Growth 20 funds. Her salary was $65,000 a year. She ate lunch at her desk, had business meetings at night.
'It was very unhealthy,' she said. 'My body started to tell me I needed racing.'
At night, while sleeping, she dreamed of skiing, of carrying skis, of training on roller-skis. It was too obvious.
In the fall of 2000, Aelin Peterson turned her back on a rising career. She went back to skiing. Her boss, then Strong's director of trading David Braaten, said he was 'astounded' but saw in her eyes that she couldn't be stopped. Her parents, still in Fairbanks, were amazed but supportive.
'There is no road where she grew up,' said Sue Peterson, her mother. 'She had to explore the world. She has a gift. This was her way of exploring.'
After six years off skis, she returned to training. By January 2001, only 13 months ago, she raced in the national championships, made a good showing and decided Salt Lake City was achievable.
Last month, at the 2002 nationals, Peterson registered two third-place finishes (5-kilometer pursuit and 30K classical), a sixth (1.5K sprint) and a seventh (5K classic), making her the fourth-ranked U.S. woman cross-country skier.
'I haven't had nylons on for more than a year,' Peterson said, with great glee. She'd like to return to Unalakleet 'to inspire the young girls, white or native, that growing up in a place like that doesn't have to be a limiting factor.'
While it's unclear which races she'll start in Salt Lake, can she win against the great Europeans? Can she, as it were, beat the world skiing market?
Ponder this: During her three years of trading stocks, the Dow Jones average rose 24 percent and the NASDAQ soared more than 100 percent.
'Maybe it was me!' she joked.
Maybe.
- Jay Weiner is at jweiner@startribune.com.
