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The Canadian who has turned the World Cup circuit upside down gets a jump in Pyeongchang
PYEONGCHANG, SOUTH KOREA— An Olympic moguls course is an intimidating thing, but Canada’s Mikael Kingsbury launched off the top Friday as if he didn’t have a care in the world. And, by the time he hit the bottom, he had the fastest time, the highest points for the jumps and a commanding lead in qualifying that sent him directly to Monday’s final.
“I love what I do,” said Kingsbury, who won silver at the last Olympics and is the presumptive favourite to win gold this time. “I’m going to ski and have fun.”
And why not? He’s already done all the heavy lifting.
Kingsbury has won the overall World Cup title for the last six years in a row. He had a streak of 13 straight wins, over this year and last, before a second-place finish last month. In between, he spent the summer relearning the hardest trick to give the judges absolutely no excuse to deduct any style points.
So the 25-year-old from Deux-Montagnes, Que., has no reason to be nervous here. Not for himself, anyway.
It was another story when teammate and close friend Philippe Marquis came down the hill. “I was more nervous to watch him than I actually was for my run,” Kingsbury said.
That’s because Marquis tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee — that’s the connective tissue that provides support and stability — a month ago. That should have been the end of his season but he raced downhill, around four bonejarring bumps every second, and landed two jumps at the Olympics.
“Phil is one of the toughest men I know and his attitude this week has been amazing,” Kingsbury said. “You couldn’t tell that this guy was missing an ACL . . . and the course is not easy on the body, so I’m just proud that he made it down.”
Marquis did well enough to make the top 10 and advance directly to the final. Teammate Marc-Antoine Gagnon finished 11th, sending him to the second qualifier.
Being injured, sadly, isn’t something new to Marquis, who had two shoulder surgeries leading into the 2014 Sochi Olympics. But to have this injury come during a season that was going so well and to have it happen so close to these Games was “haunting,” “devastating,” and “bitter,” he said.
So, with a knee that is taped well past the recommended limits and the words “engage” and “fire” written on his gloves to give him something to think about other than his knee, he is here to ski as long as he can in the three-round final.
“Whatever the outcome at the Olympics, just to make it top to bottom — that’s basically a miracle,” said the 28-year-old from Quebec City. “I couldn’t miss the Games. Too much hard work to be here.”
Kingsbury has worked just as hard but his road here has been far smoother.
He’s been so dominant for so many years that he has the record for the most World Cup moguls victories — 48. It is a result of his innate desire to keep pushing forward even when there is no one in front of him.
Kingsbury spent the summer on water ramps in Whistler, B.C., and Quebec City perfecting the hardest trick in the men’s field — a double-twisting back flip — to deal with a judging change introduced last season that essentially demands the skier be more upright off the jump.
This is a trick that he has been doing since he was a teenager and it’s the one that he and teammate Alexandre Bilodeau, the Sochi gold medallist, performed four years ago. But Kingsbury doesn’t focus on what has already happened, only what’s next.
So his answer to the rule change was simple: “I’m just going to get better at it.”
Canada’s head men’s coach Rob Kober is still “conspiracy theory-ish” about how the judging change played out, believing it may have been an attempt to cut into Kingsbury’s dominance. Others argue change was needed to bring clarity to a messy mixing of older straight-up aerial tricks and newer off-axis freestyle ones.
Either way, it only made Kingsbury stronger. He broke the jump down and spent three months working with air coach Steve Omischl to engrain slightly new body positions and timing, and now he’s scoring higher than ever.
But that judging change, combined with another one introduced after the last Olympics that reduced the overall value of the jumps and speed points and increased the judged portion of skiing, means Kingsbury is taking a lot of risk for less reward by continuing to do the double full and the other hardest jump, the cork 1080 (an off-axis triple twist). That doesn’t bother him in the slightest. “It’s the toughest run we can do, so why not do it?”
Whenever Kingsbury is skiing a moguls course, other athletes and coaches stop what they’re doing to watch, hoping to glean something they can eventually use to beat him. So far, they haven’t found it.
“The field is the strongest I’ve seen in my life,” race director Joe Fitzgerald said, at the FIS World Cup in Mont-Tremblant, Que., just before these Games. “Second, third and fourth place are phenomenal skiers that have been chasing him for a year or two.”
Fitzgerald likens Kingsbury to American alpine skier Mikaela Shiffrin, who also wins just about every time she clips on her skis. “They are two or three steps above other athletes. You might not see that again in your lifetime.”
Kingsbury takes all this talk about how great he is in stride; it’s cool but it doesn’t change what has to happen next.
“At 25 years old, I’ve already beat all the records, it’s amazing and I want to keep it going. I feel like I still have more in me,” he said.
Starting, he hopes, with a gold medal on Monday.
“Sochi was an amazing experience and I wouldn’t change anything, I won a medal in my first Olympics. I was a young kid, I was skiing but I felt like I was in Walt Disney . . . I know where I’m going now.”