Canada’s Mikaël Kingsbury continues dominance in moguls, hopes his experience pays off at Beijing Olympics

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/02/2022 (1336 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

BEIJINGWhen freestyle skier Mikaël Kingsbury won the Lou Marsh Trophy as Canada’s top athlete back in 2018, it was difficult to argue a case against his candidacy.

How do you quibble with almost never losing? That year Brooke Henderson had become the first Canadian in 45 years to win the Canadian Open. And Connor McDavid had separated himself from his hockey bretheren, pocketing a scoring title and a Ted Lindsay Award as most outstanding player as selected by his peers. Both Henderson and McDavid ended up as Lou Marsh finalists.

But Kingsbury won the vote for a simple reason: No Canadian athlete had come close to dominating a sport the way he dominated moguls skiing. Not only did Kingsbury win gold at the Pyeongchang Olympics. He won almost every World Cup event he entered, save for the two in which he finished second. The top-of-the-class consistency was staggering.

Canada had produced its share of great freestyle skiers through the years, but it had never produced one as machine-like as Kingsbury. No country had.

“The reason it’s so impressive is that he wins all the time — it’s a sport where it’s kind of tough to be really consistent,” Michel Hamelin, Kingsbury’s coach, was saying recently. “To repeat the same run over and over — it’s one of those sports where it’s quite difficult to do. And you’ve seen it with every other great athlete in the past. They did amazing, but Mik tripled the number of wins and podiums.”

Four years removed from that watershed calendar year, Kingsbury will arrive at the start gate of Saturday night’s final at the Beijing Olympics under slightly different circumstances. He’ll still be the gold-medal favourite under the lights at the Secret Garden Olympic Moguls Course, especially after he won Thursday’s qualification round with a seemingly effortless run that automatically advanced him into the final three rounds with nine other skiers.

Teammate Justine Dufour-Lapointe, in search of her third straight Olympic medal, was the only other Canadian to advance directly to Saturday’s final, finishing 10th in the women’s qualification round. Sister Chloe Dufour-Lapointe, who became the first Canadian woman to compete in freestyle skiing in four Olympics, finished 11th, meaning she’ll join compatriot Sofiane Gagnon, who finished 14th of 25, in Saturday’s second-chance qualifier. Laurent Dumais, Kingsbury’s training partner, finished 24th of 28 in the men’s field and also has work to do in the second qualifier.

“I just did what I needed to do. I didn’t try to do too much,” said Kingsbury. “And sometimes you’re going to see that with a lot of athletes at the Olympics. They start very strong in their qualification and they make a lot of mistakes. It makes it very tough to come back when you’re pushing.”

Indeed, in qualifying with the best score, Kingsbury will get the advantage of skiing last in the final — a position that allows him and his performance team to, as they say, “control the day.” With the other competitors’ scores in and registered, the idea is that Kingsbury will know exactly the score he needs to win. On Thursday he said he could both go faster and do harder tricks off the course’s pair of jumps should the need arise — and raw speed and level of difficulty, of course, are both factored into final scores. But this course here in China isn’t easy — it’s “sharp,” is how Kingsbury described it, with the frigid temperatures hardening the artificial snow. And with such sharpness comes risk. So knowing exactly the level of difficulty that’ll likely be required on Saturday will come in handy.

“It’s nice when you go last,” Kingsbury said. “It’s the best position, tactically. But yeah, I didn’t try to win today. Every time I ski in qualification, I don’t try to win. But I end up winning, often.”

If Kingsbury can win his second consecutive gold — and his third straight Olympic medal, including silver in Sochi — he would do his part to pull off a national four-peat. It was Kingsbury’s old rival, Alex Bilodeau, who won the epochal moguls gold in Vancouver in 2010, the first gold medal won by a Canadian at a home-soil Games. And it was Bilodeau, too, who edged out Kingsbury for gold in Sochi four years later.

But as accomplished a career as the long-retired Bilodeau produced, Kingsbury has no doubt eclipsed it. On the World Cup circuit, Bilodeau won 11 individual moguls titles in 64 career starts. Kingsbury has won 49 in 78.

“And one thing that Alex didn’t have is consistency. Alex was really intense one run out of 10. But Kingsbury was quite intense for 10 out 10,” said Hamelin. “For Alex it was like, ‘How are we going to be able to beat (Kingsbury)?’ One of the strengths of Mik, he’s able to put nine out of 10 that’s for sure going to win, and one out of 10 that’s going to be able to fight, but maybe finish second.”

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Even if all that’s true, the circumstances are different than they were in 2018. Kingsbury, as good as he still is at age 29, is no longer a singularly dominant force. Since he last competed at the Games he has not only weathered the first significant injury of his career — breaking two vertebrae in his upper spine back in 2020 in a nasty training fall in Finland — he has also run into an up-and-comer who has occasionally been his superior. While Kingsbury has won four of seven World Cup moguls events to lead the overall standings this season, the three he didn’t win were all claimed by the Canadian’s chief rival, 24-year-old Ikuma Horishima of Japan.

On a bitterly cold Thursday night in the mountains, a 50-minute high-speed train ride northwest of Beijing, Kingsbury watched Horishima and a handful of other would-be medal contenders falter in Thursday’s round. Horishima, a two-time world champion, wobbled through a loose run and finished 16th. Australia’s Matt Graham, the 2018 silver medallist in Pyeongchang, lost control of his qualification run and didn’t finish. Kingsbury, who in 2018 acknowledged he’d battled the worst nerves of his life to win gold, said he wasn’t necessarily surprised.

“Maybe the nerves,” he said, speaking of his struggling competitors. “Sometimes when you’re nervous you wanna maybe push a bit more. I have the experience. I have two Olympic medals at home. I know how to win this thing. So I’m maybe a bit smarter …”

As we were saying, the circumstances are different this time around. And come to think of it, maybe they’re working in Kingsbury’s favour.

Dave Feschuk is a Toronto-based sports columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @dfeschuk