Roy Frances Varney

2000 – 2019

“As the years pass, we want athletes who didn’t get a chance to ski with him or experience his chaotic energy firsthand, to understand his legacy and why we still celebrate him and his commitment to this sport. 

The best way to do this is through stories. 

I have four siblings, we’re very competitive, we all skied, and all did relatively well, but Roy took it a step further and one night at dinner announced to us that he was going to be better than we were; He was going to be an Olympic athlete, I’d like to tell you we were incredibly supportive about this, but he was 12, and our annoying younger brother, so we laughed at him. This didn’t phase him in the least, instead, he started collecting all of our medals, and ribbons from middle and high school put them on his walls, and would wear them around the house. Whenever something related to skiing went missing, it was most likely in his room. Jackets, brushes, ski ties, you name it, it was there. We thought it was weird, but let it slide. As the years went on we noticed he kept improving and getting better, training all season long, then he was winning races, and awards, and states, and we started taking him a bit more seriously.

He was obsessed with this sport and wasn’t shy about it, either. He would walk up to other athletes who had done better than him and berate them with questions:  what their workout routines looked like, what their protein intake was, and how often they cross-trained. If they did other sports, he would try to convince them to quit and train year-round for skiing with him – which worked, he ended up recruiting quite a few kids and was not very popular with other hight school coach his senior year. It went on and on, and as you can imagine, this could be quite overwhelming, but when he had a goal, there wasn’t an option but to reach it. He was best described as intense, he was incredibly supportive of his fellow teammates and pushed everyone to be their absolute best, at all times. He was one of those people who shined so bright that you couldn’t help but be better around him. 

One of his dreams was to create a biathlon course through the fields at the farm, which is what we’ve been doing for the past few years in his memory, we created an outdoor recreation center called the MOWC in Turner Maine – we host races when we have snow, otherwise its miles of biking/hiking trails while still operating as an agriculture space, and it’s one of the ways we keep the community engaged in remembering him. Thank you to all who visit, and volunteer, and to everyone who works to make this possible.”

– Mackenzie Varney, 2025