Turin, Italy 2006 Winter Olympic Games

Olympic Freestyle Skiing Analysis

TURIN, Italy – The Olympics are rad, especially when you're fat and out of shape like me and not there to try and win a gold medal. So, I was a great spectator and should have gotten a gold medal in Turin for apres-skiing: from nightly parties, to sitting next to Ted Ligety's mom when he won the gold in Alpine skiing. What a fun Games.

That's more than I can say for the U.S. freestyle moguls team.

Expectations are always high for U.S. freestyle skiers in the Olympics because we've dominated this sport for so long. "Hot dog" skiing was invented in the United States and Americans have the greatest infrastructure to support it. We've been so successful that the sport's critics assume that it's easy for freestylers to win. However, our Olympics history tells a different story.

Freestyle skiing became an Olympic sport in 1994, and since, U.S. moguls skiers have won only two gold medals – myself and Donna Weinbrecht, three silvers and two bronze. What's the deal?

For Turin, the team was over-hyped. The team was made up of the best mogul skiers in the world and I strongly believed in and predicted a U.S. sweep. But, there were two key factors that led to that not happening: timing and style.

•Timing: Jeremy Bloom was on fire last year and the judges loved his style. Every year or two, someone develops a style which is just pleasing to the judges, and this year they love the Aussie, Dale Begg-Smith, who won the gold.

•Style: It's hard to explain, but you know it when you see it. When someone has the favored style and they match it to a flawless performance, they become unbeatable. The others in the field end up trying to wow the judges in other aspects to overcome the winner's style but this usually leads to mistakes, especially in a pressure cooker like the Olympics, where the top three all ski perfect runs, but the best style wins.

U.S. women struggled
All of the U.S. women knew they were going to need to ski way better than their abilities in order to overcome the favored styles of Norway's Kari Traa and Canada's Jennifer Heil. Yet, the U.S. women were dismal. The problem is, when you need to ski above your potential, the pressure of the Olympics tends to make you do worse. In a World Cup, you might be able to pull it off and podium or even win, but in the Olympics, you end up not even in the top five, or in Hannah Kearney's case, in 22nd place.

Heil won the women's event with clean turns and nice jumps, edging out Traa, who won gold in 2002. I initially thought that Traa should have won gold after she did an off-axis 720 and Heil did not, but they both skied incredibly well. However, Heil's win proves my point about style.

Dawson's run lone bright spot
Style also ruled for the men. Begg-Smith's gold medal run was so smooth he could have balanced a cup of cappuccino on each of his shoulders. It wasn't the most exciting, most difficult or fastest run, but his textbook turns and clean jumps played right into the judge's hands. They gave him almost perfect turn points which count for 50 percent of the overall score, compared to 25 percent for air and 25 percent for speed. Begg-Smith played it smart and leaned on his smooth skiing technique to put him over the top.

Mikko Ronkainen's silver medal run was super fast, almost out of control, and kept everyone on the edge of their seats waiting for disaster to strike, but he held it together and laid down the fastest time of the three medalists. Then there was American Toby Dawson's run, where he threw the most difficult jump of the three guys, the 720 mute grab off the top. Then he blazed through the middle and nailed the corked 720 off the bottom jump.

I loved this run because I know how hard it is to reach down and grab your skis while doing a 720. The amount of balance and precision that goes into that trick is insane. Each of their runs was flawless, but the emergence of Begg-Smith as the winner, even though he did easier jumps and was slower, is a credit to the notion that the judges liked his style above the others.

The future for U.S. moguls
Looking forward to 2010 in Vancouver, the U.S. team needs to rebuild. Bloom will be playing football, Travis Cabral says he'll be making films and Travis Mayer will be back in college. Dawson says he's done, but that's garbage. He'll be back and probably will be the team's best hope for a medal. In the wings is Nate Roberts, who has been seething after not getting named to this year's team. He'll be good for the team because, most likely, the aerial portion of this event is going to get crazier and he's great in the air. I am sure we will see the double back flip and there is no doubt that the winner will be doing a 1080 similar to the one Canada's Alexandre Bilodeau did in Turin.

However, the coaches will have to figure out a way to put a finger on the ever-changing style preference of the judges. I believe the judges don't know what they're looking for until they see it, which leaves it to the coaches and athletes to progress their skiing and push the envelope of technique in order to force the progression of style. This sport was built on uniqueness, and the athletes who create rather than imitate will eventually be rewarded.

The International Skiing Federation has to take a stern look at where they place the degrees of difficulty on the tricks. I'd like to see the scoring change and reward more aggressive skiing. The winner should be the skier who is a little more hot dog, freestyle, and wild.

After all, freestyle is a show-off sport meant to entertain a crowd much like a circus. That is what it delivered in Turin to a packed house of rowdy fans, with tunes blaring. After the events, the athletes partied together and had friendly arguments about how they'd done.

What a fun Games!

Updated on Sunday, Feb 26, 2006 5:00 pm, EST

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