Andrew Blaser

Blaser was born on May 8, 1989, in Boise, Idaho to Sherman and Ellen Blaser.[1] He was the youngest of four children in an athletic Mormon family,[2] and danced ballet in elementary school.[3] He attended Meridian High School in nearby Meridian, graduating in 2007.[4] In addition to playing football and basketball,[3] he was a three-time Class 5A state champion in track and field, winning back-to-back state titles in the 110m hurdles and tying for first in the 300m intermediate hurdles as a senior.[5] He also won five district titles and set a school record in the 110m hurdles.[1]

Blaser attended the University of Louisville as a freshman, setting a school record in the heptathlon.[6] He was planning to transfer to a junior college ahead of his sophomore year, but a friend of his convinced him to come to the University of Idaho instead, where he walked on to the track team and trained under sprint coach Angela Whyte.[7] Blaser went on the win six individual conference titles for the Vandals.[6] He was also honored with 10 outdoor All-Western Athletic Conference (WAC) honors and seven indoor All-WAC honors, both school records.[8]

At the 2010 WAC Indoor Championships, Blaser earned first-team all-WAC honors in the high jump after recording a career-best mark of 6 ft 6¾ in.[5] He was also a second-team all-WAC selection in three other events.[5] He suffered a back injury in a car accident soon afterward,[9] causing him to miss the 2010 outdoor and 2011 indoor seasons after undergoing hernia surgery.[5][10] Blaser made his return to competition during the 2011 outdoor season. He won his first conference title at the WAC Championships, scoring a career-high 7,037 points in the decathlon to take first place.[11] He set personal bests in six of the ten events en route to the fifth-best score in school history.[11] He also won the 110m hurdles event at the Sam Adams Classic and the Payton Jordan Cardinal Invitational, qualifying for the NCAA Preliminaries for the first time in his career.[5]

As a senior in 2012, he led the Vandals to a conference title at the WAC Indoor Championships, where he scored a school-record 40 points and won the heptathlon, high jump, and 60-meter hurdles.[12] His score in the heptathlon (5,324) was the second-best mark in school history.[5] It was the school's first WAC title in any men's sport, and Blaser was named the WAC Men's Field Performer of the Year for his performance.[13] At the WAC Outdoor Championships, he set another school record with 44 points, winning the decathlon and 110 hurdles events while finishing third in four others.[12][14] He won seven of the ten events in the decathlon.[15] He also qualified for the NCAA Preliminaries in the 110m hurdles for the second year in a row.[5] At the end of the year Blaser was given the Joe Kearney Award as the conference's top male student-athlete, which he shared with Utah football player Robert Turpin.[8]

Blaser spent his first year after college as an assistant coach on the Utah State track team.[10][12] While watching Cool Runnings, Blaser joked with his sister that he should try bobsledding.[4] He first called coaches in the spring of 2012 and attended a combine in Park City, Utah, but he was advised to switch to the similar sport of skeleton because of his lighter frame.[4][6][7] He made the move but soon grew frustrated and moved to Louisville, where he knew some people.[6] After eight months, he decided to give skeleton another chance, so he drove back to Utah, got a job as a waiter, and bought a new sled.[6]

Blaser debuted on the international circuit during the 2015–16 North American Cup season. He won his first medal, a silver, at a race in Park City in March 2016, finishing .07 seconds behind first place.[16] In 2017–18 he earned six medals (one silver and five bronze).[4] The following season, he won four gold medals in the North American Cup: two each in Park City and Lake Placid.[4] At the 2019 USA Skeleton National Team Trials, Blaser won all four races to win a spot on the 2019–20 Skeleton World Cup roster.[17] He finished 23rd and 22nd (out of 27) in his first two races, respectively.[12] Blaser placed 27th at the 2020 World Championships, suffering a concussion when he crashed.[7]

Blaser finished 2021 as the 28th-ranked racer in the IBSF standings and as the highest American earned a spot in the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.[4] In January 2022, he was officially announced as a member of the American skeleton team at the Tokyo Games, marking the first time the U.S. delegation included a single male skeleton rider.[18] He finished in 21st place after three heats and missed the finals.[19]

Blaser lives in Boise during the offseason, where he serves as an assistant coach for volleyball and track at Capital High School.[4] He also works through the Starbucks Elite Athlete Program.[4][7]

Blaser is openly gay. He came out to his family around 2014 or 2015, though he had been out among his friends for years.[2] In high school, he spent his lunches "with the theater kids instead of the athletes he competed with" and faced homophobic taunts from his peers.[2] He first talked to the media about his sexuality in a November 2021 interview with Outsports.[20] He was the first publicly gay man to compete in skeleton at the Olympic level,[21] competing with a rainbow saddle on his sled.[22] In the days leading up to the competition, he received a shoutout on Instagram from his favorite singer, Sara Bareilles.[23]

His brother, Sherm, won a state title as head football coach at Kuna High School in Kuna, Idaho.[12]

• Andrew Blaser at IBSF
• Andrew Blaser at Team USA
• Andrew Blaser at World Athletics