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At 9 years old, Matt Gold would wander through The Ski Center, a Washington, D.C., specialty sports store, staring at posters of Aspen and Vail. In a short time, he was up himself on the slopes, albeit at local haunts like Wisp Resort and Liberty Mountain Resort with significantly less vertical drop.
A self-described “gym rat,” Gold turned his athletic prowess into a spot on the tennis team at Pomona College in California, where he qualified twice for the NCAA Division III championships. But when he realized that his Plan A — “to become the next John McEnroe” — wasn’t going to happen, he pursued his backup plan of making a living in the sports world.
Doing so for the past 30 years has taken Gold across Europe and Asia, opening markets in Japan and China for an international sporting goods company and exploring the globe with his wife and two daughters. And just when the exhilarating adventure was starting to become exhausting, Gold landed in the state where he’d always dreamed of being, coming to Colorado in late 2016 to helm Lakewood-headquartered Christy Sports.
Even now, Gold tries to picture what that kid from northwestern D.C. would have thought of the life he’s been able to lead. And he’s not sure that kid would believe his good fortune.
“It’s kind of a dream come true,” he said of his career and his current post, which has him overseeing more than 60 retail and rental locations in five states and, yes, hitting the slopes about 40 to 50 times a year. “I was pretty clear from about age 16 that if I could combine my passion with my career, that would be what I wanted.”
To launch that career, Gold spent about a year and a half interning for Tom Ross, a sports agent who represented tennis royalty like Michael Chang and Stefan Edberg, before leveraging Ross’ connections to get a job with Wilson Sporting Goods as the company grew internationally. By the age of 25, he was running the racket sports division for the company in Tokyo, and the next two decades were a flurry of trying to open new markets and find new properties for parent company Amer Sports Corp. as it expanded with a buy-and-build strategy.
That included a period from 2008-16 when Gold and his family made a home base in China, where the company needed to establish a presence.Gold oversaw operations not just in the world’s largest country but in 16 other countries for 10 brands. He found himself traveling 200 days a year internationally and exposed his daughters, now 13 and 16, to ski slopes on multiple continents.
“I like challenge. The higher the degree of difficulty, the more it gets me motivated and kind of determined to succeed and figure it out,” he said. “Trying to figure out different cultures and different markets and different consumer groups and how to take multinational companies and brands into different marketplaces was about as energizing as anything you could imagine.”
But he and his wife also knew that after fantastic years offering a “junior United Nations” experience, they wanted to settle down more and raise their girls in the United States. And when he found that the now-65-year-old Christy Sports needed a new CEO, he jumped quickly at the chance to be with a smaller company that had a customer-facing culture in a place that long had fascinated him.
To understand the draw to Colorado, one needs to hear Gold tell them about the first time he ever came to the state, stopping here in June of 1990 on his trip back home from his sophomore year at college to raft the Arkansas River and ski Arapahoe Basin with friends. He begins to choke up and pauses, admitting that the moment still gives him goosebumps.
“It was June in Colorado,” he recounts, thinking about being on the water one day and being on powder the next. “I was just absolutely blown away that … that kind of experience was possible.”
Much of Gold’s time for the past six years has been invested in growing Christy Sports, which has expanded from 40 to 60 locations and more than doubled revenue.
The company under Gold has grown its online business, but it also has remodeled several high-volume stores — including those in Steamboat Springs, Dillon and Cherry Creek — to improve the customer experience with increased space and dedicated areas where visitors can rent or buy. The changes harken back to his learning across continents that a successful company must meet their patrons where they are and provide them something they can't get from a competitor.
Gold believes intently that direct relations with customers are what allows a regional sporting-goods chain like his that does a high volume of ski-gear rental to succeed. He calls Christy sports a service business rather than a retail business. He said that he reads every online review the company gets — with an average rating of 4.7 stars out of five, he likes to point out — and reacts quickly when he sees problems.
And he believes in treating employees with the same respect and attention with which he demands they treat customers. After two years of labor and supply shortages that left everyone working harder, he rented out Arapahoe Basin — the same resort that made him fall in love with Colorado — one day last spring and bused in workers from across the region and offered bands, food trucks and free skiing to thank them.
Christy Sports, like its CEO, is driven by a desire to give people the chance to get outdoors and let themselves be forever changed by that experience.
And for its CEO, that is a change that started at an early age and continues to drive him to help others find the same muse in their lives.
“What I’m trying to instill to my children as well is: I think one of the best things you can do with your life is find what you’re truly passionate about and go for that full speed,” he said, surrounded by skis in the company’s Cherry Creek store. “I do feel so lucky that I did have that clarity pretty early and I was able to follow through on it and make it happen. People obviously need to find a way to make ends meet and make their personal career decisions, but I think it’s possible that you can really hone in and land on what you love and then go for it.”
Matt Gold
Position: CEO
Company: Christy Sports
Age: 53
Family: Married with two teen girls
Education: Bachelor of Arts in ancient studies, Pomona College. He learned to read Greek and Latin in school and said that helped him to pick up Japanese and Mandarin more quickly while living and working in Asia.
Best skiing experience: Hokkaido, Japan, where the powder skiing is “off the charts” because it can snow up to 300 inches per month in peak season and be kept from melting by winter winds blowing down from Siberia
