Dancing with Louie Vito

2010 Olympic snowboarding hopeful Louie Vito will do more than double corks on Dancing With the Stars when it premiers on ABC-TV on Monday, September 21.

Louie Vito stood up from his chair, hiked up his low-riding trou — just a little — and walked to the edge of the stage, the bright orange shoelaces in his dark blue high tops drawing eyes to his feet.

Vito was among nearly 80 athletes who were in Chicago last week for the USOC Media Summit, a gathering designed for news media covering U.S. Olympic and Paralympic hopefuls for the 2010 Vancouver Games. While he was there, a journalist pointed to the double finger diamond ring on his left hand. It’s the first piece of jewelry that he’s purchased, he said.

“It’s something that I look down at and it keeps saying, ‘Louie, if you keep working hard and keep the progression going, you can keep getting things like that,’ ” he added.

It’s the only piece of glitz on the 21-year-old Olympic snowboarding hopeful who, on Monday, will be introduced to the 22 million fans of ABC’s hit reality show, Dancing With the Stars.

Making it beyond the first episode could be a stretch for a guy who admitted that he has never watched a full episode of the show, has “zero ballroom dancing experience,” and didn’t even know what a foxtrot was until his DWTS partner, pro dancer Chelsie Hightower, told him.

“I knew dancing was hard,” Vito said, “but there are a lot of little things that you don’t really think about. Lifting your head up and looking tall is way harder than I ever thought that it would be.”

Especially for a 5-foot-5, shaggy-haired guy, even with a charming smile.

Although he claims he will remain true to himself and be the snowboarder that he is on the show, Vito looks more “High School Musical’’ than X Games cool in promo pics released by ABC, as he's dressed in a sleeveless black outfit. He’ll also trade his baggy drawers and loose T-shirts for a plaid tux in the foxtrot. Other dance costumes remain to be seen.

“I wear pretty big clothes normally, and you’re going to see me in like sleeveless, tight salsa get-ups with my pants really high, or in like a suit and tie,” he said with a smile. “So obviously, it’s going to be pretty humorous to a lot of people.”

Athletes aren’t new to DWTS, or even reality TV in general. In addition to Olympic gold medalists Shawn Johnson, Apolo Anton Ohno, and Kristi Yamaguchi winning previous seasons of DWTS, and swimmer Natalie Coughlin competing with Vito in the upcoming season of DWTS, Olympic hockey player Angela Ruggiero, who is vying for her fourth trip to the Winter Games, was on The Apprentice in 2007, and Crystal Cox, gold medalist in the 4 x 400-meter track relay at the Athens 2004 Olympic Games, competed in Survivor: Gabon. Then there’s decathlete Bruce Jenner, who has almost made a second career out of reality TV appearances, most notably in E!’s series, Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

But none have appeared on these shows while trying to make an Olympic team.

“When I did Dancing with the Stars, I spent six to 10 hours per day in the dance studio, plus all the television interviews, package filming, press, and other Dancing With the Stars commitments that go along with the show,’’ said Yamaguchi, who won an Olympic gold medal in 1992 and didn’t compete on TV until 2008.  

“It was grueling,” she added. “I can’t imagine doing this show along with training for the Olympics. I know I wouldn’t have been able to do both at the same time.’’

So what’s Vito doing in Los Angeles with the likes of Donny Osmond, Tom DeLay, and Coughlin — his fellow DWTS competitors — with the Olympic Games less than five months away?

“Everyone asks that question,” Vito said during the Olympic Media Summit last week. “What would I be doing right now if I wasn’t doing Dancing With the Stars? Focusing? What am I going to focus on? I know how to snowboard. I know how to do all my tricks. I need to chill!”

After last season, when Vito defended his halfpipe title at the U.S. Grand Prix, a three-event series, he took a break, then trained at Mount Hood in Oregon for three weeks during the summer. From there, he headed to New Zealand to train for another three-and-a-half weeks.

“That’s a lot of snowboarding in the summer,” he said.

His coach, Mike Jankowski, doesn’t mind that Vito will be wearing dance shoes, not snowboard boots, this fall.

“This is really a neat opportunity for him to challenge himself,” said Jankowski, reached by phone in New Zealand. “I’m not saying it’s going to directly translate into new snowboarding tricks necessarily, but just the process of challenging yourself, learning something from scratch and making progress is a good exercise in and of itself, and it can translate into more great things for him.”

Vito added that the DWTS season finale is in November before his halfpipe competition season starts. (The first halfpipe World Cup is November 4-5 in Saas Fee, Switzerland, but Vito planned to skip that event anyway.) The first U.S. Grand Prix is scheduled for December 11-12. 

“December, January, February are going to be the craziest three months,” he said. “Contests, training, media, everything. I’m going to be burnt out before I even get to Vancouver.

“If I make [the Olympic team], I need to be relaxed and [DWTS] is a great way to stay in shape. If I wasn’t doing Dancing With the Stars, I would be in Utah just going to the gym or getting a trainer to stay in shape and help me prevent injury. I would be skateboarding and just hanging out. I wouldn’t be snowboarding right now.”

Taking the fall off from snowboarding will help Vito rejuvenate and “build the fire,” he said. “By the time November comes, I’m going to be so ready to be snowboarding again it’s going to be ridiculous.”

Meanwhile, on DWTS, Vito is building his name as an action sports star in the mainstream media.

It’s a long way from his roots as a pee-wee snowboarder learning to ride at Mad River Mountain, a little ski area outside Columbus, Ohio, that boasts all of 300 feet of vertical (a bump by ski resort standards). In eighth grade, Vito migrated east to attend the Stratton Mountain School, 2002 Olympic gold medalist Ross Powers’ alma mater.

Mentored by Olympic double silver medalist Danny Kass, Vito became a rider to watch even before he graduated from SMS. In 2005, at 17, he took fourth at the New Zealand Open and won the Australia Open. This past season, Vito was the second ranked U.S. rider on the World Cup and won the Grand Prix series for the second year in a row.

Over the summer, he worked on a new move called a double cork, which incorporates two spins with a flip. According to the U.S. Snowboarding Association, a double cork will be a prerequisite for any man looking to land on the podium this year.

In an interview with Transworld Snowboarding in late August this year, Vito claims that Kass dubbed his double cork the “Screwy Louie.’’

“Lou is one of the best athletes out there on the U.S. snowboarding team,” said Jankowski. “He’s a very focused individual, and he’s also a very fun-loving guy.”

But Vito is finding that dance steps aren’t coming as easily as double corks. After his stint in New Zealand, he flew to Los Angeles on August 21, went straight to wardrobe fitting, then to practice with Hightower, who was paired with rodeo bull rider Ty Murray in last spring’s season of DWTS. She helped take the cowboy all the way to the semifinals.

Since the end of August, Hightower has worked with Vito four to six hours a day. She also gives him homework — although Vito didn’t specify what his homework entails.

“Everything was pretty hard for me,” he confessed about dancing practice. “My snowboarding posture is not really great. I have to learn to keep my shoulders back, my head up, and I’m not allowed to slouch.”

In addition to standing up straight, Vito also has had trouble adapting to dancing’s strict code. “In snowboarding, you do what you want. You can take a trick that everybody does and put your own twist on it. [In dancing], you have to do it that way.”

On the show’s first night, Vito and Hightower will perform a salsa and foxtrot. If they make it past the first week, they will only have a week to learn another dance.

"Just enjoy it for the 15 weeks you're held in captivity, basically,” said Apolo Anton Ohno, when asked if he had any advice for Vito. “It’s unlike anything else."

With a week to go before the premier, Hightower seemed optimistic. “He is improving fast, which is all I can ask for,” she tweeted.

On September 17, Hightower reported on her website that they are calling themselves team “Chito.”

So what’s been the hardest dance to learn?

“All of them have been pretty difficult,” Vito confessed. “With the salsa, I have to learn how to roll my hips around and do a little booty shakin’. In the foxtrot, you’ve got to be smooth with the rise and fall and keep your posture up, like I said.”

Out of his element, Vito admitted to feeling like a klutz during practice, sometimes tripping over Hightower’s foot or losing his balance.

“Thinking about steps, thinking about posture, thinking about what I’m doing next, thinking about how my hand is, there are so many things you have to worry about,” he said.

Some people might think the same thing about doing a double cork, or any other trick, in the ’pipe.

Although he doesn’t think his stint on DWTS will directly help his snowboarding career — other than giving him a break — he does see some benefits.

“I’ve always heard from a lot of the athletes who have been on the show that they were in some of the best shape of their lives after the show,” he said. “Any time you’re working out muscles that you’ve never used before, your overall frame is getting stronger.”

Appearing on the show could help him mentally too.

“If I can get on stage and do something that I’m not comfortable with and not fully aware of what I’m doing in front of 22 million viewers a week, then snowboarding — doing something that I can do and am comfortable doing — should be a breeze.

Vito’s teammates seem happy with his role as a reality TV star. “He’s bringing [snowboarding] to a new generation, a new group of people who can now be interested in snowboarding,” said Steve Fisher, 26, Olympian and two-time X Games champ. “So I’m proud of the little guy!”

“The day it was announced [that Louie would be on Dancing With the Stars], the next day on Google, there were 13 million hits on his name,” said the U.S. Snowboarding Team’s 2010 Olympic spokesman Nick Alexakos.

Vito comes across as a natural showman, but even he seemed surprised at his upcoming role.

“It’s crazy,” he said. “Who would have thought Dancing With the Stars, a show all about ballroom dancing and big-time celebrities, would want a snowboarder?”

He will face stiff competition in the upcoming weeks. Athletes have won four of DWTS’s eight seasons, and three of those winners — Ohno, Yamaguchi, and Johnson — are Olympic gold medalists. Vito has yet to make the 2010 Olympic team, and he’ll face Coughlin, who already has 11 Olympic medals, including three gold. And she’s looking pretty glam in the show’s promo ads.

But Vito is unfazed.

“I tell everyone you can laugh at me all you want. I just need your vote.”

Peggy Shinn is a freelance contributor for teamusa.org. This story was not subject to the approval of the United States Olympic Committee or any National Governing Bodies.

Tags: Louie Vito, US Ski and Snowboard, USOC Virtual Press Room, Vancouver