What does ‘Dumb and Dumber’ have to do with Matthew 25:14-30, gambling and Mikaela Shiffrin? Only a Skieologian sermon could make sense of that pop-culture potpourri.

Let’s start with the faith-based stuff. Even if you aren’t religious, you can probably synthesize your own takeaway from Matthew’s 25th chapter. 

The parable of the talents involves a master who bestows five, two and one ‘talents’ to his respective servants — “according to their ability” — before leaving on a journey. He discovers upon his return that the guys with five and two have doubled their allotment.

“Well done, good and faithful servant,” the master says to each of his excellent stewards. 

The guy with one? He decided to bury his only talent out of fear. When he returns it to the master, he is deemed as being “wicked” and “slothful,” two labels I can’t really argue with, to be honest. 

It’s obvious that we live in a world where, though people have equal worth and value, true equity is a myth. Everyone has been given different ‘talents.’ The point of the parable isn’t that the world sucks because we aren’t all given Bill Gates’ wealth, Matt Carpenter’s VO2 max or Shiffrin’s speed. It’s saying people ought to be good stewards of what has been entrusted to them. Giving 100% effort to maximize our ‘talent’ is what counts. We shouldn’t just be good stewards of our athletic gifts, but our time, wealth and our environment as well.  

When it comes to sports, few have generational talent and even fewer actually make it. The prodigious Shiffrin, for example, started cultivating her talent at a young age on the very slopes you looked at this morning (while you were drinking coffee and typing a letter to the editor in response to this column, perhaps) but that doesn’t mean signing your kid up for ski club guarantees a crystal globe.

Recent data from Gambling.com looked into the odds of going pro by comparing the total number of current pros that there are from each state to the respective 2023 male birth rate.

In Colorado, there’s a 1 in 6,295 chance you’d make it to the NBA, 1 in 1,259 for the NFL, 1 in 2,861 for the MLB and 1 in 4,496 for the NHL. Soccer and golf are a bit more encouraging (1 in 984 and 1 in 1,259, respectively), while boxing would make Lloyd Christmas literally speechless: the odds are 0 (does that even make sense?).

Olympian odds? 1 in 1,085. That’s the third-highest in the country, behind New Hampshire (1.9 out of every 1,000) and Rhode Island (.96 out of every 1,000).

What are we to do with all of this? Don’t hire a private coach or sports psychologist.

My two-part suggestion is anchored in the theology of work presented above and undergirded by another verse from the good book, Colossians 3:23. It says, “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters.”

You might be picking up trash, performing arthroscopic surgery, teaching rowdy third-graders (whom you think aren’t paying attention), struggling through another meeting, or training to improve your placement in the XTERRA 60-65 age group national championships. Regardless of your lot in life, or the talents you’ve been given — or the accolades (or lack thereof) you receive — there’s great comfort in the reminder that your working for someone who gives you an unshakeable identity, one separate from your income or FIS ranking. You might not believe in God; in that regards, I guess I can only speak for myself in saying I’m striving as if the words “Well done, good and faithful servant,” are what’s on the line….even if I don’t land a pro contract.

Given that freedom and source of motivation, it’s still worth asking, since this is a sports column, whether it’s worth it to pursue a professional athletic career, even if the chances of making it are like, one-in-a-million (though, apparently the data says it’s more like one in a couple thousand). To answer that question, I turn to another source of transcendent, timeless wisdom: “Dumb and Dumber.”

When posed with a similar proposition, Lloyd Christmas once infamously said, “So you’re telling me there’s a chance.” 

When he’s not writing for the Vail Daily or training to make some sort of U.S. team yet to be named (in a sport still to be invented), Ryan Sederquist encourages people to “keep on striving, keep on skiing,” every week on ‘The SederSkier Podcast,’ which he claims is the “fourth-fastest Nordic Ski-specific podcast in all of Lake County.” It has exactly 100 Spotify subscribers.