Waddell, Worthington, and Roepke share between-games announcing work with Warrior Games, Red Bull

Archery athletes at the 2024 U.S. Department of Defense Warrior Games in Florida. Photo: Carl Roepke

PARK CITY, Utah — Even living, working, and playing in the Olympic orbit that is Park City, Chris Waddell, Trace Worthington, and Carl Roepke often are asked the question, “But, what do you do the other three and a half years between Games?”  The answer is gigs like these.

Waddell and Roepke returned on Wednesday from announcing the Department of Defense’s Warrior Games in Orlando and Worthington from announcing Red Bull’s Cliff Diving World Season stop in Boston. 

Among the three Park City residents, there are approximately and accumulatively 30 Olympics worth of sports production work, including Summer, Winter, Para, and Youth.

Worthington, a freestyle skiing Olympian, is perhaps best known for his ongoing Olympic Moguls NBC television commentating career, which includes special Tour stops in his hometown at Deer Valley Resort each winter.

He knows the ins and outs and ups and downs of Cliff Diving since he spent so much time with the training teams at the Utah Olympic Park’s summer ski pool. The seven-story high dive platform shared swim space with the world-famous “Flying Aces” Freestyle Show, whereby aerialists and mogul skiers perform high-flying tricks and flips for adoring and roaring crowds all summer. The show’s nomenclature is derived from its creator, Trace “the Ace” Worthington.

Chris Waddell and the wounded warriors for whom he announces have a deep, mutual respect for one another. Waddell is an icon for the athletes with disabilities community with his 12 medals in Paralympic Winter Alpine skiing and Summer athletics.

He’s an in-studio anchor host for the Paralympics. Waddell told TownLift, “These athletes here at the Warrior Games have incredibly impressive skills and talents, for example calling the competition for the archery athletes and seeing just how straight they can shoot an arrow is absolutely awe inspiring.”

Waddell is also a Ski With a Champion program participant at Deer Valley Resort and still in close contact with Park City’s National Ability Center where he trained to win those medals.

Roepke looks forward to P.A. announcing for the Warrior Games each summer as much as announcing the nine Olympics and Paralympics he’s gotten to work. The international Luge competitor works at the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee Official Training Site in Park City, where he never quite gets sick of witnessing the sportsmanship on display in small and big ways all around him, all the time, perhaps nowhere more so, he says, than at the Warrior Games.

Disclosure: The author of this article is related to one of its subjects.