VAIL, Colorado — Vail Valley snowboarder Clair Bidez had to keep her photo shoot for the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue a secret for about seven months.

Bidez, a Minturn native, was featured, along with fellow valley notable Lindsey Vonn, as well as snowboarder Hannah Teter and aerial skier Lacy Schnoor, as athlete-models in this year's version of the swimsuit issue.

Bidez said she first learned about the possibility of being a model for the swimsuit issuee through Nikita, her snowboard sponsor.

“I started talking to them, and they asked if I'd be interested,” she said.

While the athletes are all shot in snow, Bidez said the photo sessions were done last July at Whistler, where there was still snow at the highest elevations.

And the shoot was a hard secret to keep.

“I told the people closest to me and that was it,” she said. The hardest part, she said, was that the photo shoot came right in the middle of summer training for the U.S. Snowboard Team.

Mostly, people accepted a kind-of-mumbled response that she'd been off at a photo shoot.

“I only had to tell a couple of people, ‘I can't tell you,'” she said.

Bidez said she'd done some photo shoots for Nikita, but had never really done any modeling. And she'd really never done any modeling dressed in not much of anything.

“I was really scared going in,” she said. “But it went so well. I felt so comfortable right away.”

Ultimately, she said, she just decided “I'm doing this, so suck it up.”

And, Bidez said, it helped to have her mom, Patty, along for the trip.

“She didn't go on the shoots, but just to have her there for support was a big deal,” Bidez said.

After three days of Sports Illustrated publicity parties, Bidez said it's time to come home for a while to heal up an injured ankle.

“Other than that, I'm not sure what the plans are,” she said.

Business Editor Scott N. Miller can be reached at 970-748-2930 or smiller@vaildaily.com.