May 14, 2019 (Salt Lake City, Utah) – Tom Kelly, a native of Madison, Wisconsin, has had a nearly life-long love of Nordic skiing: its athletes, its personalities, its rich history and its culture. And he was, for more than 30 years a key player in the USSA-USST public relations, media and communications franchise, for which for years he served as Vice President of Communication for the organization.

For much of our lives he has been one of my closest friends. And so it was recently, that the ski world gathered in Salt Lake City to see Kelly and the Class of 2018 receive their prestigious lifetime honor.

Kelly, 67, was inducted into the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame, in early April, along with other ski and snowboarding legends including Bode Miller, Don Henderson, Tom Sims, Hilary Engisch-Klein, Kristen Ulmer and Andrew Weibrecht… representing the class of 2018. For everyone who attended it was a night of joy and celebration.

Tom Kelly was bitten by the Olympic bug, back on a winter’s day of February 1960, when sidelined with measles, he watched with rapt attention, the 1960 Olympic Winter Games on a black and white TV, from Squaw Valley, California. He recalls being especially mesmerized by New Hampshire’s Penny Pitou silver medal winning skiing performances, “I was captivated,” he said.

Kelly, who grew up in a non-skiing family, cut his journalistic teeth during studies at the University of Wisconsin, getting a job with Madison’s well-regarded Wisconsin State Journal and later the Capital Times, all the while serving as sports editor for the Monona Community Herald. He served as a photographer and reporter, where he developed his inherent eye for photography into even sharper focus. While in Madison, he started stringing for the fledgling SKI RACING magazine initially covering the U.S. Ski Team jumpers during their off-season training on the plastic ski jumps of the Black Hawk ski jumps in Middleton, Wisconsin and Nordic Junior Nationals at Ishpeming, Mich.

Shortly thereafter, our paths first crossed. First by a chance phone call I made to him, looking for ski jumping pictures while I was the PR Director for the Telemark Lodge, in Cable, Wisconsin, while working for skiing’s innovator and impresario, Tony Wise.

Then, a few month’s later I resigned my Telemark position to move to Minneapolis and take on the reins of PR Director for the cross-country ski importing firm of NorTur, Inc. Tony Wise, wisely hired the energetic Kelly to assume my role at the resort. That was in the fall of 1977.

It was the beginning of a deep and lifelong friendship. We shared many mutual interests, a love of the Nordic sport, and of both hard work and having fun. It was also during the early Telemark days, that Tom would meet his future wife, Carole Duh.

Tony Wise, was a fast-talking, brilliant innovator, clad with a Harvard MBA, the kind of personality the Nordic sport in the US had never encountered. His massive credits including the American Birkebeiner, the first-ever FIS World Cup in cross-country, the creation of the World Loppet League. He was a brilliant and creative thinker.

Well into my own work in the ski business and soon heading to the 1980 Winter Olympic Games in Lake Placid, to  help commentate, Kelly and I had an idea to get into the Nordic skiing travel business. Each of us invested $500 dollars to help the concept get off the ground and to cover the start-up legal fees. With the cash and the stroke of our lawyers’ pen World Wide Nordic was born.

Our plan was to take folks to Worldloppet races around the globe with guided tours, well traveled guides and to share the region’s top cultural experiences – a night at Munchen’s legendary Hofbrau Haus was always at the top of the list! As was the candle-lit carriage trips, where the sleigh driver, unbeknownst to us, was plying our customers with obstler or grappa depending on the country. Yet we never heard one person complain. The long and short was we saw the world, made life-long contacts, but made little profit as we wanted to make the trips affordable.

In 1986, Kelly was ready for a change and signed on to work for the USSA and in 1988 he would step into a leadership role as it’s Public Relations Director in Colorado Springs. This proved a springboard to later moving to Park City and ultimately becoming the VP-Communications for both the USSA and the U.S. Ski Team. During much of that period, Kelly became the wise choice to head the FIS PR and Mass Media Committee, and he was widely credited with helping to modernize and establish the group as a global sports media and marketing standard.

Tom was a world traveler, who was in the finish area for 75 Olympic medal wins by U.S. athletes and helped report those performances around the globe. He served as U.S. Ski Team spokesperson for breaking news, penning thousands of press releases, including columns and had an encyclopedic knowledge of the sport of skiing. His career was one of exceptionalism, passion and longevity.

Kelly is not one to let moss grow under his fast-moving feet, and soon after retiring from the team last summer, he quickly founded Tom Kelly Communication LLC, a PR consulting firm, that counts a number of NGB’s among his many clients. Safe to say, he’s keeping busy.

Of his experience with both the USSA and USST, Kelly, thought for a moment and said, “I never had any interest in doing anything else, it was the most perfect career anyone could have.”

For that, we all are indeed fortunate and blessed.