Chuck Ferries, 1939-2025

Charles “Chuck” Ferries was a former American alpine ski racer, and an Olympian in 1960 and 1964. More notably, Ferries became the first American to win a European race, the Hahnenkamm slalom, at Kitzbühel in 1962. At the 1964 Innsbruck Olympics, he fell in the slalom, quit school after the Games and moved to Seattle as a sales rep for Head. 

In 1966 he coached the US women’s team through the 1968 Olympics when he joined Bill Kirschner at K2 to run its marketing. By 1976 Chuck Ferries moved to Sun Valley, where he partnered with Clay Freeman and Bud Godfrey to create Wintersports International, a company that sold US-built ski equipment abroad. 

In the early eighties, at K2’s request, he created Precision skis or PRE, to help the Seattle brand expand its sales and run that division. At about the same time, along with partners, including the founder of Smith goggles, Ferries bought Scott USA out of bankruptcy. They re-established Scott as the world’s best-selling ski pole brand, added Scott goggles and along with Smith ended up controlling about 70 percent of the North American market for ski goggles. 

In 1990, Chuck Ferries asked me to help them in developing a ski boot that would have been called “The Boot” and I went with him, Ned Post and Larry Morton to scout for potential ski boot partners in Italy. That was my sole interaction with this tireless ski entrepreneur, who then entered Scott into the bike business. 

After selling his interest in Scott in 1997, five years later he bought Chums, a Utah-based manufacturer of eyeglass retainers. He stepped away from the business in 2018 and kept skiing until illness restricted his activities. Quite a rich and creative character with an impressive life path!