LIVIGNO, Italy — Late Sunday morning, under the bluest Alpine sky, the greatest mogul skier in history stood about 5 feet away from his ultimate challenger.
Canada’s Mikaël Kingsbury closed his eyes, visualizing his start. Japan’s Ikuma Horishima wiggled his arms and legs, keeping things loose before the biggest race of his life.
Who is Kingbury? A casual fan might ask.
“The way you think about Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, Babe Ruth, Muhammad Ali,” American mogul skier Nick Page explained not too long ago, “(if) you put all their careers in a bottle — Mik has stats that can beat all of them.”
And who is Horishima? “The best skier in the world right now on moguls,” according to Kingsbury himself.
The two set off in a white cloud of bedlam. Two bodies bobbing and bounding. All eyes aimed at the 245-meter mogul course, darting back and forth like Geiger counter dials.
Mikaël Kingsbury (R) and Ikuma Horishima (L) compete in the freestyle skiing men’s dual moguls final. (Jeff Pachoud / AFP via Getty Images)
On the course, Kingsbury and Horishima kept their eyes forward while deploying all four other senses to detect each other’s every move. Five days ago, these two competed in the traditional single moguls event, where solo runs were assessed and ranked by judges. Kingsbury won silver. Horishima won bronze.
Now it was mano a mano.
Careening down the course, both rode the fine line between making a legendary run and losing control. Horishima blinked first. The slightest wobble turned into an unbalanced rockslide. Horishima stayed upright, but opted to bypass the final jump on the course and hurtled toward the finish line. Meanwhile, Kingsbury, whose nickname is “The King,” remained perfect and reclaimed his domain.
“It’s a different style of adrenaline,” Kingsbury said later, wearing gold. “In singles, I’m a bit more calm. In duals, I become a different human. You’re against someone. You want to win. It’s a race.”
In the lead-up to these Olympic Games, mogul skiers did everything possible to explain to anyone who would listen what was coming. In a conversation after practice a few weeks ago, Jaelin Kauf leaned forward to say, “Just wait, you have no idea.”
They all said the addition of dual moguls to the Olympics was long overdue. They were right. The last two days proved it. First, by the women on Saturday. Then by the men on Sunday.
Standard “singles” moguls have been an Olympic staple since debuting in 1992. But in recent Olympic cycles, it has felt as if the Winter Games were missing something. Dual moguls has been included in the FIS Freestyle World Ski Championships since 1999.
Kauf, an 11-year veteran on the U.S. mogul team, has never known the sport without duals as part of the competition. Its omission from Olympic competition has felt like a massive whiff for both moguls and the Games.
That changed in June 2022, when the International Olympic Committee (IOC) voted to add head-to-head dual races. Milano Cortina was the test run. The test was passed.
There is something inherently maniacal about moguls. So much happening in such a short amount of time. A course pocked with inverted landmines. Races decided by both speed and technical jumps.
And there’s something inherently appetizing about one-on-one affairs. Emotions, mind games, tactics. Characters coming to life. Winning and losing with no one else to credit and no one else to blame.
“It’s a great spectator sport, where even the Average Joe who knows nothing about mogul skiing can follow it,” Kauf said. “It’s just different. The energy is different. People are going to love it, I promise. I love it.”
Jakara Anthony and Elizabeth Lemley compete in the women’s dual moguls semifinals. (Adam Pretty / Getty Images)
Kauf was right. It was impossible to look away from the ending of the women’s competition. And it was impossible not to watch what could go wrong. Like Kauf’s semifinal run.
One moment, France’s Perrine Laffont was crashing to earth on a botched landing. The next, Kauf was off-balance, bucked by a mogul, spinning sideways, slamming her shoulder off one mogul and her back off the next.
The crowd at the bottom of the course in Livigno gasped. Kauf’s friends and family, amounting to a small army, shrieked. Some put their hands on their heads. Others covered their eyes. Soon, everyone snapped back into it, seeing both Kauf and Laffont gather themselves and continue zig-zagging downhill. Past the finish line, both Kauf and Laffont hunched over, trying to figure out exactly where they were hurt and how badly.
Kauf won, advancing to the finals. Perrine’s wreck took her outside the course boundary, and she was ruled as DNF — did not finish. Kauf climbed on the back of a snowboard for the long ride back up the slope to the starting line, aches and pains turning into bruises and injuries. “Gonna be a little sore from that tomorrow,” she said after finishing with a silver on Saturday, falling to Aussie Jakara Anthony in the day’s final race.
Watching the competition, Team USA member Tess Johnson, having been eliminated in the quarterfinals, summed it up: “That’s dual moguls. I’ve been saying it for a year now that everyone is going to fall in love with dual moguls. It’s dramatic, it’s chaotic, it’s unpredictable.”
Anthony, ranked No. 1 in the world in women’s moguls, won gold by surviving five sprints over the course of about 90 minutes. She doesn’t see duals as a different discipline, but as “a different sport.”
“You just have to beat the person next to you,” Anthony said. “You have to have awareness of what’s going on beside you, and know when you need to push a little more. There’s a little more strategy to it.”
Sometimes the strategy is to go fast and win by a wide margin. Other times, the strategy can be to dial in tricks to gain an edge with judges. Occasionally, the strategy is simply to just survive.
In the other women’s semifinal, Anthony raced Elizabeth Lemley, the gold medal winner this week in single moguls, who was aiming to set up an all-U.S. final with Kauf. Those hopes were dashed when Lemley wiped out in the bottom third of the course. Slotted for the consolation final, Lemley met with a team doctor and trainer, gathered her gear and went back to the line.
Loosening up her left arm while climbing back into the starting gate after her crash, Lemley, who’s returning from an ACL surgery, beat Perrine thanks to a judging advantage to win bronze.
If anyone has done anything tougher in these Games than what Lemley did in that moment, we haven’t seen it.
“I was just blocking (the pain) out,” Lemley said as Perrine walked off in the distance. “I’ll deal with that later. It was time to win a medal.”
Finland’s Olli Penttala and South Korea’s Daeyoon Jung compete in the men’s dual moguls. (Michael Reaves / Getty Images)
Don’t get it twisted. The allure of dual moguls isn’t in crashes and catastrophes. The last thing you want to see is a skier starfishing down the mountain.
The beauty is in the duel and in the bracket.
Page wore bib No. 13 during the men’s dual moguls competition Sunday. He went against Finland’s Rasmus Karjalainen in the first round. Then he advanced to face second-seeded Horishima. He knew it was coming.
“It’s like the U.S. Amateur in golf or like March Madness,” Page said. “Even as someone who’s in it, I’ll try to trace through what the entire bracket might look like for me. OK, if I win this one, who might I get? I can kind of paint this picture and all these hypothetical scenarios — well, this person is really strong, and that could be a matchup, and I might have to see that person if I want to get to the gold.
“You want to figure out how it might shake out.”
Page went all-out, trying to pull off the upset. Horishima went all-out, trying to hold him off. In the end, a wild race saw Page bomb down the course, lose control for a split second, and slip outside the course barrier, resulting in a DNF. Horishima also lost control, ricocheting off a mogul, but got his skis back on the snow and crossed the finish line skiing … backwards.
It was one run of many.
And another that proved 2030 can’t come soon enough.
