Few would argue that it’s pretty difficult to be an Olympic athlete once, let alone twice.

And when one considers that out of 25,300 college football players, only 1.8 % of them get drafted by the NFL, it makes a professional football career singularly special, too.

The list of fashion models successful enough to land jobs with Tommy Hilfiger, Abercrombie & Fitch, Under Armour, GQ Magazine, and Cosmopolitan magazine has to be pretty short too, don’t you think?

How about academics? Getting a finance degree from arguably the best business school in the country, Wharton, is challenging enough, but parlaying that knowledge into a net worth of $5 million surely ranks right up there. 

Let’s throw around some other accomplishments that any of us would be proud to have: A black belt in a martial art;  Leading our high school track team to back-to-back Class 5A state championship titles; Founding a marketing software company that’s raised over $42M of venture capital; Being a TV analyst for ESPN, Fox, and NBC; Having a sister so famous that Kevin Costner plays their dad in a movie; Narrating a Warren Miller movie (skiers will understand this);  Participating in a television dating game show….

What would you say if we told you that all of the aforementioned accomplishments were realized by one man?

It’s true. Everything we mention above was accomplished by Jeremy Bloom. He is the only athlete in history to ever ski in the Winter Olympics twice, and also be drafted into the NFL. In skiing, he was a three-time World Champion, two-time Olympian, and eleven time World Cup Gold Medalist. He became the youngest freestyle skier in history to be inducted into the United States Skiing Hall of Fame, and also played football in the NFL for the Philadelphia Eagles and Pittsburgh Steelers. He got a degree from Wharton, and became a successful technology entrepreneur and founder of a marketing software company. That black belt? He got it in karate at the age of 12. We suppose any of the aforementioned achievements would be enough to get the attention of magazines and brands eager for him to model for them, but it helped (as you can see at the right) that Bloom also had the physique to pull it off. As for the Kevin Costner thing, his older sister, Molly Bloom, is the subject of a current movie, Molly’s Game because she ran an underground poker ring for Hollywood celebrities, athletes, business tycoons, and the Russian mob.

How much talent and/or fame can one family stand?

What we’ve not mentioned thus far is Bloom’s nonprofit: Wish of a Lifetime, a tribute to his grandmother. The nonprofit grants wishes to seniors all over the country (it started by granting wishes to just five seniors a year, but now works with 250 seniors across the United States and Canada), and this is where NPDD got interested. Jeremy Bloom’s nonprofit granted the wish of one 90-year old resident of Breckenridge, Colorado to mush a dog sled team.

Harriet McGehee attempted it on a sledding trip to Alaska seven years ago, but bad weather prevented the helicopter from taking off, and she wasn’t able to realize her dream. Enter Wish of a Lifetime. As it happened, a board member of Wish of a Lifetime, Char Bloom, lived in McGehee’s county. The organization was able to reach out to local connections to make good McGehee’s wish. Good Times Adventures of Breckenridge donated the sled ride, and Keystone Resort donated her stay at a hotel.

Bloom drove the sled for the first around, then became a passenger (she is 90, after all).

“That’s one of the more unique wishes we’ve been able to grant,” Tom Wagenlander, the executive director of Wish of a Lifetime, said.

How epic is this?

With so much attention paid to Millennials and Gen X-ers these days, let’s pass this one around so that our seasoned brethren get some love, eh?