montrealgazette.com
Summarize this content to 100 words:
Mikaël Kingsbury
Age: 33
Event: Freestyle skiing
Hometown: Deux-Montagnes
Two years after he joined the freestyle club at Mont Saint-Sauveur at age eight to take up mogul skiing, Mikaël Kingsbury put the Olympic rings above his bed with the words: “I will win.”
He wasn’t bluffing.
Kingsbury has become the most dominant force in the history of moguls skiing, cementing Quebec’s long history of dominance that started in the 1990s with Jean-Luc Brassard and continued with the likes of Alexandre Bilodeau and Montreal’s
Dufour-Lapointe sisters, Maxime, Justine and Chloé.
In recognition of his long reign, Kingsbury was chosen as one of Canada’s flag-bearers for the Feb. 6 opening ceremony of the Milano Cortina 2026 Olympic Winter Games, alongside skicross medallist Marielle Thompson of British Columbia, the Canadian Olympic Committee announced Wednesday. In a life replete with accolades, Kingsbury called it “one of the best honours in my life.”
At Milan Cortina, Kingsbury will headline a Canadian Olympic freestyle skiing team distinguished by the number of Quebecers it includes. In the moguls/dual moguls events, five of the seven male and female skiers are from Quebec. In aerials, all five of Team Canada’s high flyers are from the province. Canada’s six-member mixed team for slopestyle/big air is 50 per cent Québécois.
Quebec’s disproportionate weight in what are fairly niche sports has been linked to its strong community of aerial skiers and its numerous role models. As well, the large number of small ski hills throughout the province with terrain centres and mogul runs, and the fact the only training centre for acrobatic skiing in Canada is in Lac-Beauport, have also played a part. Plus the type of deep-seated passion that kept a boy like Mikaël skiing bumps for 25 years.
On Jan. 10, Kingsbury became the first athlete to reach 100 World Cup victories in freestyle skiing when he took gold at the men’s singles moguls event at Val St-Côme.
“The King has done it,” Team Canada said on social media.
“It still feels kind of crazy — like a ton of bricks falling off your shoulders. It feels good to know I can win 100, knowing I still have a month left (before the Olympics),” Kingsbury told the Canadian Olympic Committee.
His parents presented him with the gold medal as he held his 16-month-old son, Henrik, in his arms.
In his 16 seasons competing in the International Ski and Snowboard Federation (FIS) World Championships, Kingsbury has finished on the podium 15 times. Nine of those times he won gold.
He won medals at the last three Olympics, taking silver in Sochi in 2014, gold in Pyeongchang in 2018 — when he was named Canada’s Athlete of the Year — and silver at Beijing in 2022.
Despite the pounding nature of his sport, which involves performing aerial acrobatics while travelling at 40 kilometres an hour, Kingsbury has only been badly injured once. He fractured two vertebrae landing a jump while training in Finland in 2020, which kept him out for months.
This year, he withdrew from the December World Cup opener in Finland because of a groin injury suffered during training in August. After winning the moguls event at Val St-Côme in January, he pulled out of the dual moguls event the next day to protect his body before the Olympics.
Kingsbury will also be competing in dual moguls, making its Olympic debut in Milano Cortina, in which competitors face off against each other on side-by-side tracks.
It has been a more difficult season than most for Kingsbury on the World Cup circuit. His teammate, 24-year-old Julien Viel of Quebec City, has been ascending and is ranked fifth in moguls and first in the world in dual moguls. But Kingsbury says he is healing well and this month’s win in Val St-Côme shows he can still win gold even if he’s not at 100 per cent. Their main competitor will be Ikuma Horishima of Japan, who sits atop the overall moguls rankings.
At 33, Kingsbury’s a seasoned veteran in a regime that favours young knees and hips. He has said these Olympics will “probably” be his last. But he has also shown he still has the fire to compete. In 2019, he became the first person to complete a cork 1440 — an off-axis aerial trick where a skier performs four full horizontal rotations while simultaneously flipping off-axis — in competition. He credits having exceptional spatial recognition for his ability to do that move repeatedly.
In Italy, the hope is Kingsbury’s mastery of space, combined with a lifelong dedication to winning, will result in another Olympic medal.
rbruemmer@postmedia.com
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