Nicole 'Nikki' Stone (born February 4, 1971, Princeton, New Jersey, currently residing in Park City, Utah) is a former American Olympic skier.Nikki Stone, who competed in the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, is best known for being the first American to win a gold medal as inverted aerial skier. Aerial Skiing is a sport where athletes ski into a 10-foot snow jump at approximately 40 miles per hour, flip and/or twist to a height of 50-feet, and land on a 45 degree hill.Eighteen months before this second Olympic appearance, Stone sustained a career-threatening spinal injury in which doctors believed she would never jump again.