Moguls skier Andringa living Olympic dream as 22-year-old
It’s before dawn on his first day in South Korea, and Boulder Olympian Casey Andringa still can’t believe he’s there.
“‘Surprised’ doesn’t even really touch on what I’m feeling right now,” said the 22-year-old moguls skier whose Olympic journey includes horribly timed injuries and sickness obscured by a perfectly timed peak in his skiing. “I have dreamed of being here for my entire life. I want to pinch myself.”
Andringa was 6 when he saw Jonny Moseley spin the off-axis, backflipping 720 he called the Dinner Roll in the 2002 Winter Olympics, missing the podium. The first-ever inverted trick on skiing’s grandest stage redefined mogul skiing and supercharged the nascent sport of freeskiing. And it sparked a fire in a transfixed young boy in Boulder.
“I watched him do the Dinner Roll and all the excitement around it and I turned to my parents and said, ‘I want to do that,’ ” Andringa said.
The next year he joined the Winter Park moguls team. The next decade he spent perfecting his craft on the dimpled slopes of Mary Jane.
Andringa was a hotshot bumper with the Ski &
Snowboard Club Vail at age 18 and close to making the U.S. Ski Team when he tore the meniscus in his knee just before the Junior World Championships. A year later, still nursing the injured knee, he fell dangerously ill with crushing headaches and a high fever at a training camp in Switzerland. Bedridden and getting sicker, doctors were pondering emergency brain surgery when he responded to antibiotics attacking the aggressive infection. It took him months to regain his strength and then he blew out the meniscus in his other knee.
He worked his way back, just missing a nomination to the national moguls team in 2016-17.
Last summer, he camped in the woods during his training to save cash for the upcoming season. While he didn’t say he was giving it just one more season, he felt the clouds of doubt.
“There have been a lot of times where I felt the world was telling me to quit, and it just seems like each time I would get close to my dream, something would go wrong,” he said. “It just never seemed to line up. There were definitely points where I would sit there and think, ‘Am I making a mistake by pursuing this?’ But then the other half of me would realize that those are just little obstacles. If I can overcome them and learn from them, I can be in a better place than I was before. And that’s how I got here. It’s been one giant learning experience after another. And that makes this so much sweeter.”
In December, he posted his first overall victory at Winter Park, winning six runs in a row to earn a position on the U.S. Ski Team and an invitation to the World Cup circuit. In his first World Cup contest at Calgary last month, he got seventh. A few days later at the World Cup in Deer Valley, he got fifth, locking in a spot on the U.S. Ski Team’s Olympic moguls squad.
Half of those men and women on the U.S. moguls team hail from Ski & Snowboard Club Vail, a rare dominance from one program. Andringa’s teammates include the club’s Tess Johnson of Edwards, Summit County resident Emerson Smith and Morgan Schild.
Andringa said all the credit for the success of Vail-trained mogul skiers goes to coaches John Dowling and Riley Campbell.
“They truly are the two best moguls coaches in the world right now,” Andringa said. “The technical aspects of their coaching is so on another level. Not only that support, but we are all a family. All of Team Vail is like one giant family.”
Dowling, in his fifth season at Ski & Snowboard Club Vail, said Andringa is skiing the best of his life and he has more skills to showcase.
“He has tricks he’s been working on and only bringing out now, so he feels like he has another level he can go to, which is important in his mind. Mentally, he feels like he’s got another step,” Dowling said. “When he is skiing his best, he is a threat.”
For Andringa, all the sacrifices have finally paid off. He’s in the Olympics.
“This was my dream I have had for my entire life,” he said. “I get choked up when I talk about it just because there really is so much coming to fruition.”