Nine times, TJ Lanning scored World Cup points for the United States, and three of those results landed him in the top 10, numbers that put him among the more feared American speed skiers of his generation. Lanning, a former U.S. Ski Team alpine racer who spent more than a decade afterward coaching the sport's next wave of downhill and super-G racers, died in July 2026 at age 41, according to Yahoo Sports.

Born August 27, 1984, in Helena, Montana, Lanning was the world's top-ranked junior skier in slalom and super-G by 2001. He raced at the FIS Junior World Ski Championships that year and again in 2002, then carried his speed onto the senior World Cup circuit, where he specialized in downhill, super-G and combined events. In 2007 he represented the United States at the FIS Alpine World Ski Championships in Åre, Sweden.

His best season followed in 2008, when he won the U.S. national downhill title and qualified for the World Cup Finals in the discipline. That November he placed ninth in the World Cup downhill at Lake Louise, Canada, then followed it with a 10th-place finish at Val Gardena, Italy, two of the three top-10 World Cup results of his career, according to Ski Racing.

That career ended on November 28, 2009, when Lanning crashed during the World Cup downhill at Lake Louise, fracturing a vertebra in his neck and dislocating his left knee. He was 25.

Rather than leave the sport, Lanning turned to coaching. In May 2012 the U.S. Ski Team added him to its men's alpine staff as an assistant in the World Cup speed program. Men's alpine head coach Sasha Rearick said at the time that Lanning had "a tremendous spark and is extremely competitive with a great eye for skiing," adding that he had "a familiarity and respect with the athletes that you can't teach." He stayed with the program for more than a decade, and for the 2025-26 World Cup season was serving as an assistant to head speed coach Johno McBride, according to the Aspen Times.

Lanning, who was based in Park City, Utah, described his time on the team in personal terms. "My greatest achievement in life so far has been the 12 years I spent on the U.S. Alpine Ski Team," he wrote on LinkedIn, in a passage later quoted by Yahoo Sports.

U.S. Ski & Snowboard announced Lanning's death on July 7, saying his "impact on our sport went far beyond his years of competition" and that the organization's "thoughts are with his family, friends and children during this difficult time." No cause of death was disclosed.

The record of Lanning's two careers sits side by side in the sport's history: the junior rankings of 2001, the downhill title of 2008, and, longer than either, the run of seasons afterward in which he stood at the bottom of the same World Cup courses he once raced, coaching the next class of American speed skiers down them.