Remembering John Dakin: US Ski Team’s first public relations specialist and a Vail icon said he never worked a day in his life

At ski racing media centers across North America, longtime Vail Valley local John Dakin was often performing the most important job in the room as chief of press.

But to him, it wasn’t a job at all; it was a passion.

Dakin, 71, died on April 12 after battling Parkinson’s disease for the last few years. He was the first person to hold the chief of press position at three different Alpine world championships and also served as Alpine press chief at the 2002 Olympics and the Alpine mixed zone coordinator at the 2010 Olympics.

Before that, Dakin was a public relations specialist with the U.S. Ski Team and the University of Colorado, where he started his career.

David Plati, the longtime sports information director and associate athletic director at CU, said he first met Dakin as a freshman in the sports information office on the Boulder campus.

“He was the main contact for the ski team, even as a student,” Plati said. “So we wound up being friends for over 45 years.”

Dakin became the sports information director for CU’s ski team after graduating.

“I believe he worked at least three if not four of our NCAA championships,” Plati said. “He was attached at the hip to the program, was well respected and loved what he did — those days you had to come off the hill, type your story somewhere, and find a telecopier to send it to the media.”

While at CU, Dakin worked under Bill Marolt, the former Olympian who finished 12th in the giant slalom in the 1964 Innsbruck Winter Games. Marolt moved into coaching after his competitive career and led the Buffaloes to seven straight NCAA titles from 1978. When he left to coach the U.S. Ski Team through the 1984 Olympics, he brought Dakin with him.

“We needed a PR person,” Marolt said in the video that ran before Dakin’s 2022 induction into the Colorado Snowsports Museum’s Hall of Fame in Vail. “The first person that came to my mind was John. So we contacted him, naturally, he was excited to do it, came to Park City, and was there during one of the golden eras of U.S. skiing.”

Finding a home in Vail

In the late 1980s, Dakin moved to Vail and took on the chief of press role at the 1989 world championships for what was then a new and small organization, the Vail Valley Foundation. The original plan was for Dakin’s position to be eliminated following the event, but Vail Valley Foundation Vice President John Garnsey helped lead the effort to keep him on board as a public relations person for the foundation. Dakin would go on to help with events ranging from the Alpine World Ski Championships in 1999 and 2015 to the Bolshoi Ballet to the Mountain Bike World Championships.

Dakin made all those things a lot easier because of his reputation, Garnsey said.

“He was loved by the staff at the foundation, he was loved by the ski team people, the CU people,” Garnsey said. “He was a great writer, a great thinker.”

Garnsey said Dakin had a very calm demeanor, and he never had any issues with the press.

“We’re going to miss him,” Garnsey said, adding that he and other old foundation hands had spent a lot of time with him in the past few weeks.

Dakin’s move from the U.S. Ski Team to the Vail Valley Foundation left a public relations void at the ski team which was filled by Tom Kelly.

“I often think back to when I was just a young ski PR person and how I looked up to him at the U.S. Ski Team,” Kelly said, “not having any idea I would follow him and how our paths would work in parallel for so many years.”

A legendary talent

While working the ’89 Alpine world championships, Dakin got to know then-volunteer Ceil Folz, who would go on to become the CEO of the Vail Valley Foundation.

“If you ever watched him call a World Cup race, he would do it without cards,” Folz said. “Every single racer in the start — he seemed to know everything about them.”

Folz said the foundation often used the phrase “bringing Vail to the world, and the world to Vail,” a tagline that was coined by Dakin.

“If you look at almost every single thing the VVF did between 1989-2015, John either wrote it, came up with the idea, or fixed it before it went out the door,” Folz said.

At the foundation, Dakin became known for his sense of humor and spot-on impressions of well-known locals like President Ford and Harry Frampton. When he left the foundation in 2015, Dakin became a natural fit for the Colorado Snowsports Museum in Vail, which was in the process of transforming its exhibits at the time.

Dakin wrote the descriptions for many of the exhibits at the museum today. Jen Mason, the museum’s executive director, said he was a perfect fit for the role. The museum is also in charge of the Colorado Snowsports Hall of Fame, which Dakin was running when Mason started.

“For 20 years, he wrote the scripts that were read when people were inducted, and did the voiceovers for their videos,” Mason said. “By the time that video is done, you completely understand why that person is being inducted.”

A Hall of Famer

But when it came time to induct Dakin himself in 2022, “We were like, ‘Oh no, who’s going to write his script?'” Mason said.

That job fell to Kelly, taking over for Dakin just like he had all those years earlier as the U.S. Ski Team’s press person.

Kelly said Dakin will be remembered by many for his announcing at ski races, where he developed his own style with “his info-packed race calls and his strong sense of sport production,” Kelly said.

In receiving the award, Dakin said he felt like he had never worked a day in his life.

“For the past 40-plus years, I haven’t had a job, which my high school guidance counselors thought was going to happen,” Dakin said. “I’ve had a passion, and I was fortunate enough to turn that passion into a career.”

A celebration of life is being planned for later in the summer in Vail.

— Tricia Swenson, Scott Miller and Nate Peterson contributed reporting