VERMONT SPORTS HALL OF FAME

David Hakins Inductee

Richmond

Inducted 2020

Now in its seventh decade, the non-profit Cochran’s Ski Area in Richmond has introduced and developed countless generations to alpine skiing. For their efforts and commitment to youth sports and recreation in the state, the late Gordon ‘Mickey’ and Virginia ‘Ginny’ Cochran are the 2020 Vermont Sports Hall of Fame David Hakins Inductees for exceptional promotion and development of sports and athletics in the Green Mountain State.

Cochran’s Ski Area was developed by Yankee ingenuity on Mickey and Ginny’s kitchen table and opened on February 5, 1961. A true family business, Mickey’s engineering skills coupled with Ginny’s love of life, her children’s activities, and down-home motherly instincts made this vision into reality, one that has endured through decades.

The couple and their family worked together each winter to organize events, run and fix the machinery, and work around the never-quite-enough snow, to introduce countless kids to a favorite Vermont winter pastime, stressing fun along the way. Cochran’s Ski Area has been passed along to the hands of Mickey and Ginny’s four children, all who became Olympians and are all members of the Vermont Sports Hall of Fame, and as of 2020, into the hands of their grandchildren and great grandchildren. 

In 1998 following Mickey’s death, Vermont Life magazine stated, ‘Mickey’s love of skiing and his family’s devotion to the sport sent all four of the Cochran children to the Olympics and helped thousands of others – generations of young Vermonters – learn to ski!. It wasn’t long after moving to Richmond that their backyard became the neighborhood ski area…. and it became a Vermont Tradition and Legend that still hums along… introducing children and adults to skiing and training young racers.’

Perhaps Vermont’s most distinguished political figure ever, the late Senator George Aiken was quoted profoundly as he described Mickey and Ginny, ‘Like maple syrup and the Morgan Horse, you are Vermont’s finest products!’

The ‘Skiing Cochran’ children, Marilyn, Barbara, Bobby and Lindy, all became Olympians and are all Vermont Sports Hall of Fame inductees. Several of their children- grandkids of Mickey and Ginny- have also competed on the U.S. National Ski Team. All of them learned to ski at Cochran’s Ski Area and all continue to share their love of the sport to the community in Mickey and Ginny’s backyard hill in Richmond.