By Neil Turitz
Above: Krista Schmidinger, 1996

Berkshire winters have an upside: They produce some pretty spectacular athletes. Take Pittsfield’s Mary Lou DiNicola, whose speed skating prowess is legendary enough that in The Berkshire Eagle’s series listing the top 50 Berkshire County athletes of the 20th century, she was number seven.

She took up the sport in 1950 at the age of 10, retired at the age of 18, then returned to it 27 years later after working locally as a coach. Starting in 1985, she began entering competitions and was wildly successful, winning several national and world championships in her age group. Still, it wasn’t winning that interested her, it was the rush of being in the race.

“I love competition,” she said. “If I won, that was a plus. If I didn’t, I wanted to make the winner work for it. Like my husband says, I’m just competitive. At everything I do. I think you’re born with it.”

Now 84 and still living in Pittsfield, her competing days appear to be over. “There are not that many competitions for my age group. I still skate, but my last competition was in Lake Placid in 2020. I think you could probably call me retired now. At this stage of my life,” she said with a laugh, “I think this is it.”

One of Heidi Voelker’s teammates on the ’92 and ’94 Olympic teams was Krista Schmidinger, who was a local legend alongside twin sister, Kim. Their father taught them to ski in their backyard in Lee and at Eastover Resort, where he was a ski instructor and lifeguard. Krista describes growing up skiing all the local mountains and racing for Bousquet as “escaping with my twin sister into a world of fun and freedom and snow and glitter and french fries and hot chocolate with whipped cream.”

Now she lives in Washington, D.C., where her daughter is in high school and she is an entrepreneur developing a high-performing and safer ski.

More recently, Lenox Memorial Middle and High School alum Laura Spector competed in the biathlon—a combination of cross country skiing and riflery—in the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver.

“My mom suggested I try it,” she says. “She said it was a no-strings-attached situation. It was, if you don’t like it, you can quit, but give it a try first. I had some friends who were on the team, and we just had a great time. Because when you’re starting and you’re young, skiing should just be fun.”

Spector is now a scientist living in Los Alamos, New Mexico, with her husband and newborn son. “There was a lot of support from the athletes and from the coaches, and we had the legacy of [two-time Olympian and Berkshires native] Patrick Weaver when I was growing up,” she says. “If you’ve been to Kennedy Park, there’s a trail named after him. So I used to run that trail all the time, and it was pretty inspiring.”