THE INVISIBLE KING OF THE HILL
24-year-old superstar is the winningest skier in moguls history
He can walk through the airport in most Canadian cities without anyone recognizing him, but Mikael Kingsbury is arguably this country’s most dominant athlete in any sport.
We’ve reached the point where Kingsbury makes headlines only when he fails to grace the top of the podium on the World Cup moguls circuit.
Automatic? Not quite, but almost. Just call him Mikael the machine.
“I think the numbers speak for themselves,” fellow Canadian freestyle team member Philippe Marquis says. “He’s 24 right now and he’s the winningest mogul skier of all time. He’s pushing the sport with new tricks like never before.
“He’s the Sidney Crosby and Connor McDavid of our sport. He’s definitely redefining the limits.’’
Redefining the limits is a way of life for Kingsbury, who won World Cup gold for a record 34th time this weekend in Ruka, Finland.
When it comes to raw skills, no one can match the 24-year-old daredevil from Deux-Montagnes, Que. His speed is unparalleled, along with his ability to turn tricks high above the mogul field.
“He has a very unique air sense,” Marquis says. “He can do stuff that only gymnasts and trampolinists and aerial skiers can do. So that’s a very good tool for him.”
Consistency is arguably Kingsbury’s greatest asset. The World Cup overall freestyle champion for the past five years, Kingsbury captured the world championship title in single moguls in 2013 and dual moguls in 2015.
The five-foot-eight, 150-pounder can’t count the times O Canada has played in his honour.
“It’s simple for me,” Kingsbury says when asked to explain his routine dominance. “I have fun and I try to do the best I can on every run I do.
“I try to focus more on the process I need to do to win instead of the outcome. If you start thinking too much about the outcome — about winning or being on the podium — it’s rarely going to work. If you focus run by run, one jump at a time, one bump at a time, you will become faster and it will be way easier to be consistent because you’re right in the moment.”
No one would blame Kingsbury for dwelling on the golden moment that slipped away at the 2014 Sochi Olympics. His countryman, Alex Bilodeau, knocked him out of first place to silver with the world watching.
Four years is a long time to ruminate over what went wrong and right on the ultimate stage. But Kingsbury believes he can expect himself to perform at the 2018 Winter Olympics only if he makes excellence a daily habit. Not one to read his own press clippings, Kingsbury is doggedly trying to improve, even if he is already better than all his competitors — not that you’ll ever catch him saying that.
In September, Kingsbury nailed a cork 1440 — a partial backflip with four twists — during a training session in Australia. No one has ever landed the trick in World Cup moguls competition.
“It was exciting to see him stressed,” Marquis says. “He’s been so good for so long and from a very young age pushing the limits. So I haven’t seen him very stressed many times.
“So that was cool to witness that a guy like that could be stressed and freaked out. It shows how human he is.”
While he prides himself on living in the moment, Kingsbury is a big believer in creative visualization.
At age 10, he found a picture of the Olympic rings on the Internet and printed it off in colour. Then, he wrote “Je vais gagner” — “I will win.”
That picture still adorns the ceiling of his childhood bedroom, and he stares at it before falling asleep when he is at home with his parents.
“The rings are still there,” he says. “They haven’t moved. Until it happens, I’ll just leave them there forever.”
In spite of his gaudy resume, Kingsbury comes across as just one of the guys with little in the way of ego.
Confident? Yes? Cocky? Not a chance.
“He never lets his head get bigger than he actually is,” Marquis says. “He’s down to earth, which is fantastic for his teammates, because it would suck for us to spend time with him if he was the opposite of that. We have good times all around. He’s such a great little guy.”