Henri Rivers IV: Olympic slalom run ends in seconds but his journey there should not be missed

BORMIO, Italy — The most important minute of Henri Rivers IV’s life ended in about seven and a half seconds.

Breaking free from the starting gate, the 18-year-old burst into a wall of white. Skis forward and weight centered, he set out into sideways snow and a maze of gates, mapping the course for his run in the men’s slalom at the 2026 Olympics. A scatter chart of grave plots lined the 700-meter course, one skier after another succumbing to vanishing visibility and deteriorating course conditions. Seeing the ruin below, Rivers’ father offered some shrewd final advice.

“Just finish.”

Jamaican flags waved as Rivers’ name was announced. Andrew Salm, a former World Cup ski racer and current president of the Jamaican Ski Federation, came prepared with a bag of gear, handing out hats and flags to anyone extending a hand. Some of Rivers’ friends from junior ski camps arrived out of nowhere, creating maybe the most unexpected home-course advantage the Alps have ever known.

It was fun while it lasted.

On the second of 69 gates, Rivers found soft snow and lost control, spinning out and automatically registering a DNF — Did Not Finish. Years of work to get here, months of anticipation, weeks spent in Italy waiting. All over, just like that. River threw his head back and trundled forward. He skirted off the side of the course while the next skier entered the starting gate. He, too, would not finish. Nor would 15 of the next 23 skiers who set out down the Stelvio on Monday, or 52 of 96, total in the first run.

Later, at the base of the mountain and well beyond the corral spotlight, Rivers chatted with Mexico’s Lasse Gaxiola. The two are 18 and sound exactly like 18-year-olds.

“Bro, that course is cooked!” Gaxiola said, laughing. “We had no chance.”

“I barely got out the gate, man!” River spat back, smiling, “What a f—ing loser.”

Rivers was laughing, but not joking.

Yes, the conditions were atrocious. Sure, Lucas Pinheiro Braathen, the same man who won giant slalom gold over the weekend, also wiped out. And yes, there were zero expectations for Rivers to compete with the world’s best slalom skiers in Bormio.

But Rivers didn’t come this far to be a novelty act, even if that’s what many assumed.

The idea of a Jamaican alpine skier is, without question, far harder to square than that of the legendary bobsled team; so is being a Black teenager in an overwhelmingly White sport; and being a part of triplets raised on Long Island with Olympic alpine skiing aspirations.

All that comes with that can be unavoidable. Like when we sat around a table at Bormio Steakhouse on Friday, a few nights before Henri’s slalom race. At one point, Helaina, one of the Rivers sisters, nudged Henniyah, the other Rivers sister, to point out someone snapping the least discreet, indiscreet picture imaginable. “That guy is sneaking a picture of all of us,” Helaina said. “Again?” Henniyah answered.

While attention can’t hurt in a world where it’s crucial to seek sponsors and funding, attention can nevertheless get old. Especially when it’s based mostly on being different. Especially when you’re asked if you’re a bobsledder despite being four hours away from the Olympic bobsled competition. Especially if what is missed is what’s behind.

That’s where the story is.

Henri Rivers III and Karen Hutchinson married late in life. It was 2004. Karen, a longtime biology teacher at Boys and Girls High in Brooklyn, was in her late 40s. Henri, a construction manager and renewable energy consultant, was getting into his mid-40s. Together for five years after first meeting in Brooklyn, the two decided to try it, setting off on an uncomplicated life together.

Then came 2007.

And so it happened that, at 50 years old, Karen Rivers gave birth to triplets.

Helaina

Henri

Henniyah

In that order.

The three would be a product of their confluence of fates.

Karen was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1957. Her father, a constable, was a man of ambition; the kind who saw all the moves before making them. Cecil Hutchinson and his wife, Cynthia, a Cuban-born seamstress, spent 1961 in the U.S. looking for a place to raise their three children, eventually moving the family into a rented apartment in Brooklyn in 1962.

Three years later, Cecil Hutchinson bought a dilapidated house, one ravaged by fire damage. Rebuilding it himself, he moved the family in and opened the doors to extended family desperate to migrate from Jamaica.

“We filled every bit of that place,” Karen Rivers remembers today.

Cecil Hutchinson started a construction company, rebuilding and flipping more and more houses. Then he started Kingston Shipping Company, moving freight out of a storefront on Bergen Avenue. It expanded to become Caribbean Cargo Company, moving into a larger building, taking on more tides.

Karen went to Bishop McDonall and Loughton High School, then CUNY York. She was an alternate in the long jump for Jamaica’s track and field team for the 1976 Olympic Games. All these years later, her personal best of 19 feet, 6 inches would still be good enough to garner Division I scholarship interest.

Karen was supposed to be a doctor. At least that’s what her father wanted. Yet, a master’s from NYU and additional postgrad classes at Pace and LIU Brooklyn taught her enough to know she wanted to teach. So that’s what she did, but not without being knocked off course.

On Sat., March 26 1983, Karen arrived at her parents’ house in Crown Heights to find her father bound and beaten to death. “Blood spattered across the walls,” she says, leaning in close, letting the rest of the table go on talking about whatever they’re talking about. Police at the time suspected a planned heist by assailants who believed Cecil had cash in the house. Police told the New York Daily News he was likely targeted as a community leader and owner of a mini-fleet of medallion cabs.

To this day, Cecil Hutchinson’s murder is unsolved.

“He’s the one that a lot of this goes back to,” Karen says.

Henri Rivers III grew up in Jamaica, Queens, also as a result of ambition. His grandmother, Helen Bryant, moved to New York from the Caribbean island of Saint Kitts. “Arrived with a barrel of salt fish and a barrel of peanuts to sell,” as Henri tells it. She bought a bodega in Harlem. One bodega in Harlem turned into three bodegas in Harlem.

In the early 1960s, Bryant, her daughter, Cynthia, and Cynthia’s husband, Henri Rivers II, turned the profits of those bodegas into a big bet — the purchase of a 38-bed hotel in the Catskills Mountains, about an hour outside the city. If owning bodegas in Harlem to buying a hotel in the Catskills sounds like a big jump, that’s because it is. The hotel was opened, in part, as a sanctuary for civil rights activists needing to get out of the city. Dick Gregory, Marcus Garvey, Stokely Carmichael and others made the drive. Availability was never a question.

“They wanted to provide a safe haven for them,” Henri Rivers III says, “and a safe haven for us kids as heroin took over the city.”

Spending his early years living in the hotel, Henri grew curious about his surroundings. With his father mostly remaining in the city to work, Henri was the only Black male in Big Indian, N.Y. Unsure where to go or what to do, he went where everyone else did — Belleayre Mountain. Henri stepped onto skis for the first time around age 10, and all the mysterious forces of who we are and what we love to do took over. He was, immediately, a skier. Henri spent his early teenage years begging his mom to let him out of hotel chores. When she said yes, he’d thumb it 6 miles to Belleayre.

“I’d always get a ride because I was the only Black boy in a 25-mile radius,” Henri says, “Everyone knew who I was.”

That included the police, and anytime there was a break-in or a crime within those 25 miles, the door was knocked. This was life from age 10 to 16. Skiing was his outlet, one that never closed.

It didn’t matter when the family moved to Long Island.

It didn’t matter when he went off to play football at Marist College.

It didn’t change when he moved to Brooklyn.

When Henri and Karen got together years later, skiing had to have its place in the relationship. And when three children arrived on Aug. 27, 2007, skiing had to have its place in their lives.

Henri IV, Helaina and Henniyah can picture the drive from the West Babylon area of Long Island to the Catskills. Every weekend. Every holiday. Every available minute. The kids grew up packing the family’s Chrysler minivan to the brim and navigating traffic to Windham Mountain.

When it came time for high school, skiing was the prerequisite. The girls shipped off to Holderness Academy, a boarding school in New Hampshire. Henri IV went to Stratton Mountain School in Vermont.

From there, to here.

With Henri off training before Monday’s men’s slalom, Helaina and Henniyah are sitting outside a bistro in Bormio on Saturday night. They’re wearing Team Jamaica jackets and explaining the obvious — that as dual citizens, the family decided long ago to register the teenagers with the International Ski and Snowboard Federation representing Jamaica. The goal was always the Olympics. Helaina and Henniyah made their own runs at qualifying for Milan Cortina 2026 but hit some stumbling blocks. They’re proud to represent their mother’s home and quick to say, as Helaina does, “If we repped U.S., there’s no way we would make it here.”

As Helaina and Henniyah chat, foot traffic on the cobblestones slows by.

Yes, the attention can feel odd, and no, the racial overtones aren’t lost on anyone, but when considering all that’s come before them, and all the coincidental circumstances required, and all the dominoes that have fallen in order, to see Rivers run through the Alps is far more than a nice little story.

It’s a reminder that every story comes from somewhere.

It’s Monday afternoon and 18-year-old Henri Rivers IV is reliving it all. Getting into the gate. “Wasn’t nervous, at all.” The start. “Clean.” The first gate. “I was fine.” The second gate. “I’ve seen worse conditions.” The moment it all went wrong. “F—, man.”

He starts, and stops; starts and stops, not out of frustration, but out of distraction. Run 2 of the men’s slalom is on a TV above the restaurant bar. We’re on the opposite side of the river from the Stelvio, less than a half-mile away, but the action — the top slalom skiers in the world trying to claim space on the podium — seems a world away.

“I’m gonna get there,” Henri says between bites of bolognese.

Where is there? Rivers wants to reach the World Cup Circuit. He wants 2030 in the French Alps. He wants 2034 in Salt Lake City, when he’ll be 26. Let’s not forget that Monday’s medalists are 29, 28 and 31.

The slalom is getting into its final runs, those with swollen times who successfully finished Run 1, but are essentially out of the competition. Henri watches as some take leisurely rides down the Stelvio. They’re not racing, as much as they’re trying to finish the course.

“I don’t get that, man,” Henri says. “Like, if I’m getting in the gate, I’m gonna go.”

That’s all he knows because others set the course.

Henri doesn’t talk much about the twists and turns of the past because, like his sisters, he has been given the gift of the present.

“A lot had to happen to get here,” he says of his last few years climbing the ranks. “There’s a long way to go, you know. But this feels like the start.”

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