Last season, Paula Moltzan had the best season of her career. In 2025-26, the American captured Olympic bronze at Milan-Cortina 2026 in the team combined event, added four World Cup runner-up finishes, and continued establishing herself as one of the strongest technical skiers in the world. Off the snow, she also made one of the biggest equipment changes in ski racing, becoming the first woman to join Van Deer, the ski brand backed by Marcel Hirscher.
And during the offseason, Moltzan made another important decision about her future: she froze her eggs. “As an athlete, my body and schedule are pretty much always spoken for,” Moltzan wrote on social media. “Over the past few years I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what my future looks like, and one thing I’ve always known is that I want a big family.”
For Moltzan, the decision was not about stepping away from ski racing. It was about creating freedom — the ability to continue pursuing the peak of her career without feeling forced to choose between elite sport and future family plans. That choice was rarely available to previous generations of female ski racers.
In the 1980s and 1990s, it was common for women in alpine skiing to retire in their mid-20s. Careers were shorter, support systems were smaller, and the expectation that female athletes would eventually step away from sport to start families was deeply ingrained within elite competition. However, the idea that a female ski racer’s window closes in her mid-twenties — once treated as biological inevitability — has been steadily dismantled by a combination of better sports science, better medicine, and athletes who refused to accept the old timelines.
Moltzan represents this new era of women’s ski racing — one where athletes increasingly do not feel pressured to put strict timelines on either their careers or their personal lives.
The Minnesota native has steadily built one of the most impressive résumés in American skiing. She won World Championship gold in the team event in 2023, bronze in giant slalom at the 2025 World Championships in Saalbach, and now enters the 2026-27 season arguably in the strongest form of her career. “I’m 32 now, but I still feel like I’m on my way to my career peak,” Moltzan said earlier this year after announcing her move to Van Deer.
At the same time, life away from the race course continues moving quickly. Moltzan married ski technician Ryan Mooney in 2022, and the pair spend much of the year traveling together on the World Cup circuit. Like many elite athletes, Moltzan’s schedule leaves very little room for long stretches away from training and competition and realistically no time for having a baby in the middle of an active racing career. However, women’s body clocks cannot be altered, which made Moltzan’s timing critical. Fertility decreases from the age of about 25 and accelerates in your 30s.
Egg freezing — formally known as oocyte cryopreservation — involves retrieving and freezing mature eggs for potential future use. The procedure has become increasingly common among professional athletes and women with demanding careers because it allows egg quality to be preserved at the age the eggs are frozen, rather than later in life. Research shows age is one of the biggest factors affecting success rates. A major study from NYU Langone found women under 38 who thawed more than 20 mature frozen eggs achieved live birth rates of approximately 70%. Even across broader patient groups, outcomes for women freezing eggs before age 35 are generally considered encouraging by fertility specialists.
Moltzan underwent the procedure this spring through Northeastern Reproductive Medicine in Colchester, Vermont. She explained that the final two weeks of April represented her only realistic offseason window before returning to full training. “The whole process was much easier than I expected,” Moltzan wrote. “Day to day leading up to the retrieval was simple — one shot and one pill at night, with a couple of ultrasound appointments toward the end of the cycle.” She admitted she had prepared herself for something far more difficult physically and emotionally. “I’d braced myself for something a lot more painful and for me it just wasn’t,” she wrote. Moltzan also praised Dr. Jenny Brown and the staff at the clinic for helping make the experience feel calm and manageable during an otherwise hectic offseason.
The significance of Moltzan’s decision extends beyond one athlete’s medical procedure. It reflects how modern female athletes increasingly approach career planning, longevity, and family life differently than previous generations. Ski racers are competing longer than ever before, often remaining at the top of the sport well into their 30s.
For Moltzan, freezing her eggs does not guarantee anything about the future. What it does provide is flexibility — the ability to continue chasing podiums, World Championship medals, and Olympic success while preserving options for the life she hopes to build after racing. Speaking about the experience publicly may also help normalize conversations that, until recently, many women kept private. In elite sport — where careers, injuries, travel schedules, and biological timelines often collide — Moltzan’s openness could help remove some of the remaining stigma surrounding women taking control of their reproductive future while continuing to pursue their careers on their own terms.
