Frank Beddor
Frank Beddor in the start area in a red race suit, goggles pushed up on his helmet and a pole in each hand, grinning. The bib over his chest is number 1 and reads Beddor, Carrera, Angel Fire, World Cup Freestyle.

World Champion
Freestyle Skier

A lake kid from Minnesota who was on water-skis at six, world freestyle champion twice before he was twenty-three, and the man doubling the villain in the highest-grossing ski movie ever made.

He is Frank Beddor III. His father was Frank Beddor Jr., who followed his father into the printing business and built it into an empire across the Midwest — and who, in 1953, water-skied eighteen hundred miles down the Mississippi dressed as Paul Bunyan to publicize a ski show he was running out of Brainerd.

So the showmanship was in the house before it was ever a career. Frank grew up in Excelsior, Minnesota, a lake kid who learned to water-ski at six and still comes back to the childhood home in Chanhassen.

World Champion

He won the world championship in freestyle skiing in 1981 and again in 1982, and retired from the sport at twenty-three. The printed record of those years bills him differently each time it appears: the Angel Fire World Cup poster of 1983 calls him World Combined Freestyle Champion; MensWear put him on its cover in February 1988 as FIS World Cup Freestyle Skiing Champion.

Freestyle in that era meant three disciplines — ballet, moguls and aerials — and a combined title meant doing all three well enough to beat everyone doing all three.

The Reel

“My success in the skiing world led to work as a stunt skier in films such as Hotdog! The Movie and the black comedy Better Off Dead starring John Cusack. This led to acting roles and forming relationships with a variety of talented filmmakers.”

Frank Beddor

Stunt Double

In 1984 a ski comedy called Hot Dog…The Movie went to Squaw Valley with a cast who could mostly not ski. Frank doubled the antagonist, an Austrian freestyler named Rudi Garmisch, and was paid thirty thousand dollars for a single day of flips — several times what most of the actors made. The film is the highest-grossing ski movie ever released. He has always been faintly embarrassed about it.

Then the black comedy Better Off Dead, with John Cusack. Then acting roles. In the mid-nineties he wrote a script of his own, Whiteout — a World War II unit he described as the Dirty Dozen on skis. It was never made.

Gallery

Beddor in a red and yellow race jacket on the snow, turned to his father, who stands beside him in a black ski suit and dark glasses with an event pass around his neck. Both are laughing. Beddor in the finish area being filmed for television, a camera operator in the foreground and a microphone at his chest. He is grinning; his bib reads Beddor III over an Audi logo. A publicity headshot from the skiing years: Beddor in his twenties, sunburnt and fair-haired, laughing at the camera with the collar of a red race suit at his neck.
Beddor flat out in mid-air in a red one-piece suit, arms spread and skis together, high above the treeline with the sun flaring behind him. An event poster for the 1983 Audi World Cup Freestyle Finals at Angel Fire, New Mexico. A photograph of Beddor holding a one-armed handstand on his poles in a red suit fills it, captioned “Frank Beddor, World Combined Freestyle Champion”, with the ballet, moguls and aerials dates listed underneath. Beddor at the Angel Fire World Cup, leaning on his poles and laughing into the camera in a red suit and headband. His bib reads USA, Beddor, number one, over Carrera and Angel Fire World Cup patches. A black-and-white photograph of Beddor beside his father, both smiling. His father holds up an engraved plaque reading World Cup Freestyle, second place, men’s ballet; Beddor, in a headband and an open jacket, holds his skis upright beside him.