It’s got the whiff of a superhero’s origin story.
Nine-year-old Mikael Kingsbury watched, mouth agape, as one of his childhood ski heroes Janne Lahtela of Finland won moguls gold at the Salt Lake City Games in 2002. Right then and there, in his family home in Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts, outside of Montreal, Quebec, he grabbed a pen and a scrap of paper and wrote a mantra.
I will win, he scribbled beside a drawing he made of the Olympic rings, before tacking it to the wall above his bed.
“It’s actually still up there at my parents’ place,” chuckled Kingsbury in an exclusive interview with Olympics.com, thinking back to those words, three thrusting syllables, which turned out to be a kind of prophecy. “I thought about taking it down. Maybe never, or maybe when I retire. But it’s still what I want right now, so it can stay there.”
He won Olympic gold at PyeongChang 2018 – what he calls a “dream come true” and “the best day” of his life – after scooping silver in Sochi in 2014 when he was barely into his 20s. So it’s a literal promise kept to his nine-year-old self, whom he insists would be “extremely proud” of what the 29-year-old version of Kingsbury is up to some two decades later.
A serious promise
But he didn’t stop there. Winning became like breathing.
He owns the records for most men’s moguls world cup titles and overall freestyle world cup crowns. His achievements make him, hands down, the greatest purveyor of the sport of moguls skiing in history. He’s the Michael Jordan of his corner of the freestyle skiing universe, the Lionel Messi, the Michael Phelps — whatever comparison helps you.
He’s simply the best to ever bump and jump his way down a moguls course. And on 14 January 2022, with a silver medal in Deer Valley, he stepped onto his 101st podium. It’s astonishing. Even by his own stratospheric standards.
“It’s a huge milestone,” said Kingsbury who prefers, always, to remain humble — which really must be a challenge when you consider his virtual stranglehold on the sport since he was named rookie-of-the-year on the world tour at the tender age of 17 (in 2009).
“I seriously never thought I would get here, especially when I started,” Kingsbury said, thinking back on the beginnings of his peerless career. “Just reaching 100 world cup starts is huge. It’s going to be a record that’s very hard to beat.”
Loving what he does
There’s nothing boastful in this appraisal. It’s simply a fact for Kingsbury, who’s far from tortured by his drive to dominate the sport. He doesn’t suffer for his medals, of which 71 of the 101 have been gold
“I like what I do, so it’s always easier,” he said with a smile. “If you like cooking cakes and you do them a lot, at some point you’re maybe going to cook the best cake in the world.”
Kingsbury’s love for his sport goes all the way back to when he decided to write that little note to himself and tack it up on the wall. Farther even than that. He was born in 1992, the first year moguls was included in the Olympic Games, and as far back as he can remember he was fascinated by the discipline and its top purveryors.
kingsbury 2018
“As a kid I had a lot of idols and models that I wanted to be like,” he said, recalling Lahtela, who inspired him so profoundly at the Salt Lake City Games, his boyhood idol Jean-Luc Brassard, the 1992 Olympic champion Edgar Grospiron, American pioneer Jonny Moseley – and all the other heroes of a sport born in the 1960s out of a desire among skiers to expand the possibilities in all directions.
“I wanted to jump like one guy, I wanted to be fast like that guy – be smooth like that other guy,” he went on, considering the influences that helped shape him into the the best of the best. “I wanted to kind of mix them all together and…be like the best athlete in the world. I wanted to take little parts of all my idols.”
Turning heads early
Born and raised in Canada’s French-speaking province of Quebec, near Montreal, it didn’t take long for Kingsbury to begin showing the kind of talent that gets noticed. He began reaching world cup podiums when he was still in his teens.
He made his Olympic debut in Sochi where he won silver behind his Canadian teammate Alexandre Bilodeau. As an added bonus, following that massive achievement, the gymnasium at his high school was promptly named after him.
In between his 2014 Olympic debut and the PyeongChang Games, Kingsbury took the sport by storm and unlocked all of its secrets. He’d changed the moguls game fundamentally by the time he arrived in the Republic of Korea in 2018 as the odds-on favourite for gold.
He was wracked by nerves before he claimed the crown he’d been aiming for since he was a boy. And even now, within reason, he still relies on those butterflies in the stomach to keep him focused and “in the moment.”
“It makes me ski better when I’m nervous because it means I care,” insisted Kingsbury. “You need those butterflies in your stomach to be at your best I think.”
Those useful jitters remain, even though he promised himself in 2018 that: “I’ve won the Olympics now so I don’t ever have to be nervous again for any competition event.”
He must have had the right kind of butterflies again on 3 February, at Genting Snow Park, when he kept a tight line, skied fast and flew perfectly over the jumps in the Beijing 2022 qualifying rounds. He finished, predictably, in first place to set up a legitimate charge at back-to-back gold medals — a feat only ever achieved once before.
Back-to-back gold beckons
“I like the sound of it,” he admits when the phrase “back-to-back” comes up, speaking from his small pre-Beijing 2022 training camp in Apex, British Columbia where he worked out the kinks and smoothed over the “last little things that can make me shine.”
But this undisputed champion of his sport has nothing to prove.
“I’ve done it before and I always believe that when you’ve done something once, you can do it again,” said Kingsbury who’s skiing in his third Olympics after recovering from a back fracture suffered in December of 2020. He calls it “the first major injury” of his career and knocked him out of a whole season of world cup action, but it also helped him “learn a lot about” himself.
“I have the skills,” he said with determination in his voice. “I have the tools. I have everything to do a back-to-back.
“But if I focus too hard on trying to win, it’s going to be a bit harder,” added Kingsbury, who wrote that promise to himself when he was nine years old that remains open-ended and without limits – I will win. “I’ll focus on the little things and when I do that, usually I ski my best.”
“It was just this little boy’s dream,” Kingsbury concluded, having often tried to remember more clearly what drove him to write that note that winter day 20 years ago. “It’s crazy that I made it happen and that I’m pursuing the dream one more time right now.”
Mikael kingsbury Beijing 2022 training