The King and I
The greatest freestyle skier of all time added another Olympic medal to his collection this week. It was also another heartbreaking near-miss
The thing you have to understand about Mikael Kingsbury is that he did the impossible.
He took a high-variance sport, one where you speed down a ski hill, constantly turning over uneven terrain — and also perform two separate aerial tricks — and crushed it into inevitability.
The greatest moguls skier of all time, the greatest freestyle skier of any discipline, the most accomplished athlete to ever strap two skis to their feet, Kingsbury, the 33-year-old from the mountains north of Montreal, just wins constantly.
Except at the Olympics.
On Thursday in Milan, Kingsbury finished his final run at the moguls competition and was in the gold-medal position with one skier left. Cooper Woods of Australia, 25, who had never won a World Cup moguls competition in his life and only had one podium finish, promptly put down a run that tied Kingsbury’s score. The Australian won the tiebreaker due to a higher turn score, and so he gets the gold medal. Kingsbury took silver.
Sports, man.
Kingsbury’s list of accomplishments is so long it is hard to pick which parts to highlight. He has 100 World Cup victories, having smashed the freestyle record years ago. He has 13 season-long moguls championships. There is a prize, the crystal globe, given to the skier in any discipline who accrues the most points over a season, basically an award that acknowledges the greatest skier on the planer in that year: he has nine of those. Nine!
And, after Thursday’s results, he has three Olympic silver medals, to go with one gold. It is at once an incredible accomplishment — no one has ever won medals in moguls at four separate Olympics — but one that also must be, on some level, tinged with disappointment. How does this keep happening to him?
At Beijing 2022, Kingsbury put down a run that left him in gold-medal position with one skier left. Significantly, he had bested Ikuma Horishima of Japan, the only moguls skier who has ever really rivalled the man known as The King, and only occasionally at that. And then a young fellow from Sweden, Walter Wallberg, flew down the course to win the gold medal. This may sound familiar, but Wallberg had never won a World Cup race up to that point in his life.
Kingsbury, it must be said, has been gracious about the silver medals. In Beijing, he seemed aware that he had lost to someone who had put down the run of his life, and he told Wallberg, “welcome to the club” at the finish.
The Toronto Star’s Bruce Arthur, in Milan, wrote that Kingsbury tossed his skis to the ground in frustration after going through the usual post-race hugs and handshakes, but that Kingsbury also said it was just an emotional release after the tension of the competition.
He also quoted Woods, the gold medallist, who said this of Kingsbury:
“I mean, now he’s had silver three times, so I completely understand it being frustrating. He’s the top dog of the sport, and I’d be frustrated, too. But in saying that, he’s been a wonderful man and a respectful friend also after that, which has been really nice.”
The thing I’ve been thinking about: thank goodness for Pyeongchang. I covered the moguls competition at those Olympics, and the tension around Kingsbury was remarkable. He was so dominant, and at his athletic prime, and if he didn’t win the gold he was going to go on that list that no competitor wants to be on: couldn’t win the big one.
He said all the usual things in the build-up about how he wasn’t really feeling the pressure and he was just focusing on putting in the work and going through his normal preparations, but it wasn’t entirely convincing. He was trying so hard to keep it casual that he almost sounded indifferent: what, the Olympics? Yeah, cool, I guess.
When he blasted down the slope at Phoenix Snow Park to win gold, that mask fell away. He whooped in joy, but more than anything he seemed overcome by relief. He had accomplished his Olympic dream, something he had put on paper and attached to his bedroom wall as a little kid.
I remember being greatly relieved for him. I’d interviewed him a bunch of times, and he was always modest and pleasant. His English is excellent, but he had an endearing way of occasionally wondering if he had used the correct expression. He was once telling me about his arsenal of tricks and said that he had many weapons in his back pocket.
“Jumping, I mean,” he said, to clarify. “I do not have a knife in my back pocket.”
Whew. That would be dangerous.
That gold medal from Korea has only grown in importance with each of Kingsbury’s subsequent near-misses.
The King will always be an Olympic champion. Given the ridiculous nature of the rest of his career, it would feel wildly inappropriate if he wasn’t one.