Beijing 2022 OWG preview: Moguls
Feb 01, 2022·Freestyle
The Beijing 2022 Olympic Winter Games officially get underway on February 4, 2022, when the Opening Ceremony will welcome athletes, nations, and the world to the 24rd iteration of the quadrennial celebration of winter sports.
However, well before the Opening Ceremony the women and men of moguls skiing will be getting their laps in on the picture-perfect piste at the Olympic freestyle venue at Zhangjiakou Genting Snow Park, with the first of four days of training going down on Monday, January 31, with qualification for all athletes taking place on Thursday, February 3.
Men’s finals will then open Freestyle Skiing medal competition on Saturday, pushing out of the gates with Q2 at 18:00 and the super finals at 19:30 local time. The women will follow on Sunday, also at 18:00 and 19:30, respectively.
PyeongChang 2018 Olympic Winter Games moguls results
Women:
Gold - Perrine Laffont (FRA), Silver - Justine Dufour-Lapointe (CAN), Bronze - Yulia Galysheva (KAZ).
Men:
Gold - Mikael Kingsbury (CAN), Silver - Matt Graham (AUS), Bronze - Daichi Hara (JPN).
Laffont, Kawamura, and Anthony lead women’s field
Coming off the last season it seemed like the women’s gold would be Perrine Laffont’s to lose, as the 23-year-old dominated 2020/21 campaign by taking four victories in five competitions, while claiming her four consecutive moguls crystal globe, before going on to also take gold at the Almaty 2021 world championships in Kazakhstan.
And while at the end of last season most would have assumed that Laffont would be the clear cut choice for gold medal favourite in Beijing, the women’s field has become much more complicated through the 2021/22 season.
That being said Laffont is still very much in the conversation heading into the Games, but there is a handful of athletes ready to upset the French champion on her mission to defend her Olympic title from Korea.
One of the athletes that should challange Laffont in a fight for gold medal this week is without doubt Anri Kawamura, as the 17-year-old is entering the Olympic competition as the current moguls World Cup leader. The young Japanese rider continues to impress in 2021/22 and with three wins and three top-3 finishes so far in the campaign, it’s hard not to see her as one of the main contenders for victory also on the biggest stage this Sunday.
Going further down the list we have Jakara Anthony, who is following the aforementioned duo closely behind in third place on the moguls standing. The 23-years-old Australian is also leading the way in dual moguls as well as in the overall moguls standing with as many as eight spots on the podium this season, including two victories. In fact, Anthony has landed outside of top-3 only once in 2021/22 so she is perhaps the safest bet for the Olympic podium of any on the women’s side. The three-way battle between her, Laffont and Kawamura will be must-watch viewing through Beijing and beyond.
But with a stacked teams from USA and Japan around, Justine Dufour-Lapointe (CAN) hoping for her third Olympic medal, Yulia Galysheva aiming for her second, and a couple of other athletes ready to give their best, it’s a wide-open situation on the women’s side and we can’t wait to see how it all plays out at the end of the weekend.
Kingsbury favourite, but Horishima could steal the show
On the men’s side of things, anybody who even remotely follows moguls skiing knows that one man stands alone as the king of FIS Freestyle World Cup, and that man is Canada’s Mikael Kingsbury.
With nine moguls and freestyle overall World Cup titles to his name, Kingsbury comes into Beijing 2022 after recently setting another huge milestone with his 100th World Cup podium. Six World Championships golds, silver medal from the Sochi 2014 Games and gold from PyeongChang in 2018, Kingsbury has basically won everything there is in mogul skiing. Still, he will be certainly looking to add one more Olympic medal to his record this Saturday, while hoping to shake up a couple of all-time standings, where he yet has to move atop the list.
It’s still Alex Bilodeau (CAN) leading the way in all-time Olympic gold medals ranking with two victories, while Edgar Grospiron (FRA) sits on top of the list for most podiums, with three. Soon, however Kingsbury could tie both records as that’s exactly what he’s hoping to achieve with nothing else but a gold medal in his sight in Beijing.
Kingsbury is THE man, and everyone else is just trying to keep up… though some athletes are proving better able at that than others. And the one that Kingsbury and the rest of the moguls field should perhaps be most worried about is Japan’s Ikuma Horishima.
Horishima is coming off a hugely impressive streak of podiums so far in 2021/22 with nine-straight, in which he managed to beat Kingsbury for the win as many as three times. And to say that Horishima seems resistant to pressure might not be giving the 24-year-old skier enough credit. Instead, it feels almost like he grows taller the higher the stakes, skiing faster, turning tighter, and jumping higher when it’s all on the line. It’s the perfect mix for a competition as big as the one coming up in China, and Kingsbury will definitely have his eye on Horishima when we get down to business at Zhangjiakou Genting Snow Park.
But besides the duo of Kingsbury and Horishima we can’t fail to mention the likes of Walter Wallberg of Sweden, Benjamin Cavet of France, Matt Graham of Australia, or Pavel Kolmakov of Kazakhstan, just to name a few of those athletes ready to make some noise this week at the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games.
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