In a Winter Olympics filled with iconic moments, one was especially poignant: Vermont skier Ryan Cochran-Siegle, who stunned the ski world by roaring down the mountain to a second place finish in the Super G, FaceTiming with his mother Barbara Ann Cochran at the finish of his run. The two were laughing and crying. Ryan had won his Olympic silver medal almost 50 years to the day after his mother won an Olympic gold medal in slalom at the 1972 Winter Olympics in Sapporo, Japan.

Cochran-Siegle’s feat marks a new chapter in the story of the Skiing Cochrans, Vermont’s First Family of Skiing. Six members of the Cochran family have skied in the Olympics. Mickey and Ginny Cochran opened Cochran’s Ski Area in 1961 in their backyard in Richmond, Vermont. The beloved ski area is now a nonprofit where generations of Vermonters have learned to ski.

Barbara Ann Cochran, 71, watched her son’s silver medal run streaming on her computer at her home in Starksboro. In the hours that followed, the publicity-shy mother and grandmother has appeared alongside her son on the Today Show, among numerous other media. Ryan, 29, is one of Barbara Ann’s two children, and she has two grandchildren by her daughter Cate, one of whom jumped into her lap during her Today Show interview.

Since retiring from ski racing at the age of 23, Barbara Ann Cochran has pursued a diverse career. She wrote ski columns for the Washington Post, has been a performance coach, and has run the ski school at Cochran’s for the past 40 years. She recently announced that this would be her last season directing the ski school.

Cochran says that her father Mickey espoused a philosophy of skiing that he called the Cochran Way. “He was hoping that we would experience skiing as just a heck of a lot of fun. Those were his words. But he also wanted us to learn some life lessons. He wanted us to realize that in order to do well [and] get better at something, you really had to work hard at it and put effort into it. And he felt that it took not only the hard work, but paying attention to details …to get yourself better.”

Mickey Cochran urged his children to not just focus on results, says his daughter. “It was about putting your best effort into it and seeing yourself getting better and better [in] what you were doing.”

On an icy slope in China, Cochran-Siegle demonstrated that the Cochran Way lives on in a new generation. “Regardless of where I finished today I wanted to be proud of my skiing,” the newly minted Olympic silver medalist told NBC. “Even before I saw my time I was like, ‘That was as good as I could have done.’”