Vantastic Voyage

Freestyle skiing events are usually pretty laid back. While the competition runs are serious, everything else is, well fun. I remember the events being kind of along the lines of big social gatherings and reunions: Great friends from all over the country getting to hang out with each other and cheer each other on. As a former freestyle skier, this is the image that I had in my mind when I headed up to Vancouver to watch my old friends and teammates compete in the freestyle events on the opening weekend of the 2010 Games.

But boy was I wrong.

I was no longer a friend, but merely a spectator in the stands, sealed off from the competitors. And the security kept it this way. I told my friend that I wanted to go say hi to another friend who was competing. My friend responded, “Well, you could probably say hi to him, but they’re not going to let you touch him.”

Of course, I thought he was joking, but in fact, he was 100 percent serious. Earlier, someone had tried to go give my competitor friend a high five, and he couldn't really reciprocate. I don’t know if this was because of doping control or what, but from what I could tell from way up in the stands, the athletes were kept pretty isolated from everyone and everything else going on at the event that day.

But then again, I guess that’s the Olympics for you. It’s the biggest event there is, and athlete security is just another part of the game. I wonder what the security is like for Bode Miller up there right about now.

-- McKENZY GOLDING

Wow. That’s really the only word that can describe how amazing the opening weekend of the Olympics was up in Vancouver. A group of friends and I rolled into Vancouver on Thursday night, and had a great time out on the town. It was incredible to see everyone out in the streets and decked head-to-toe in Canadian colors and gear. You could really tell that the people were genuinely excited and proud that their town- their country - was hosting the Olympics.

The mood became much more somber throughout Vancouver and all around the world before the Opening Ceremonies could even take place when a Georgian luge athlete, Nodar Kumaritisvili lost his life as a result of a terrible crash during a practice run. I personally really appreciated the fact that the committee officials took the time to talk about and honor Nodar during the Opening Ceremonies, and I feel that the moment of silence for him was one of the most memorable, necessary and uniting events that occurred during the Opening Ceremonies. It is important to recognize and remember this tragedy, and I hope that as the Games go on, the athletes will compete with Nodar’s spirit and dream in their hearts.

The games did go on, as they always do, and the next day the athletes were out going for the gold. My friends and I headed up to the freestyle skiing venue at Cypress Mountain to watch Hannah Kearney take home the first gold medal of the Games for the USA. We had to get there first though, which was quite the process. We had to take a bus to get to a “departure hub” where we got on yet another bus. Cars weren’t allowed to drive up to the mountain, so about 10,000 people had to be taken up to the venue in buses. The lines were super crazy!

When we finally got to the mountain it was sleeting, and then it just turned to a full on downpour of rain. Unfortunately, the venue was not very well prepared for so many people. They did have a warming tent, which was a lifesaver, but there wasn’t nearly enough room for everyone in it. At one point, I swear that there were about 8,000 people crammed in there and no one could move. It was a very interesting heating tactic. And on top of that, the line for food took up to 2 hours at some points. This made for a really long day, considering we got there at 2pm and didn’t get back on the bus until 9pm. But it was SO worth it.

Hannah Kearney won the gold medal by over a point with an amazing run. She did a perfect layout backflip off of the top air and a huge heli (360) off of the bottom air. On top of that, if I recall correctly, she skied the course in about 27 seconds. That is lightening fast! The favored Canadian, Jenn Heil, won the silver medal followed by another American, Shannon Bahrke. It was pretty cool to see Shannon on the podium. When I was a young kid skiing at Squaw Shannon would come by and coach us from time to time. I remember thinking that she was so cool, so nice and so good at skiing. Turns out that she is still all of those things, and I couldn’t be happier for her.

I felt so emotionally and physically drained after the day that if you didn’t know any better, you would have thought that I was competing. I can only image how the athletes felt! Anyways, it’s a good thing we went home and got a good nights rest so we could rally for the men's moguls event the next day.

The men's moguls event was amazing. You could tell that every single guy out there was really going for the gold. It’s an all-or-nothing attitude at the Olympics. You either win, or you explode. No one wants to get second place.

The first reason why it was so amazing to be there is because Bryon Wilson, a 21-year-old skier for the USA, won the bronze medal. I went to Junior Worlds with him in Russia a few years back, so it was so surreal to see him standing on the Olympic podium. Bryon threw a black double full off of the top air and he stuck it. That trick is really helping the sport progress, and it was nice to see the judges reward him for that.

It was even more amazing to be there because Alexandre Bilodeau, a Canadian skier, won the gold medal. The entire crowd erupted as soon as the commentators announced the winning score. I haven’t seen that level of excitement or heard that volume in a crowd in a long time. The pride of the country, and its ability to unite around a gold medal was both humbling and breathtaking. We got to witness history -- the first time that a gold medal has been won by a Canadian athlete on Canadian soil.

I hope you all get a chance to check out the freestyle aerial events this weekend. The athletes are all so impressively talented and hard working. I’ll bet that the average person out there watching couldn’t even fathom how knees can move that fast and how bodies can twist so perfectly through the air. It's an amazing sport, and these athletes deserve all the credit in the world for how much work they have put in every day to making their lifetime dreams come true. I hope you guys enjoyed the footage back here as much as I did on the frontlines up in Cypress. Enjoy the rest of the Games!

-- McKENZY GOLDING

This is the second part of McKenzy Golding's Olympic story before she heads up to Vancouver for the Opening Ceremony and to root on her former teammates in the moguls this Saturday and Sunday. Her dispatches will continue all weekend.

When I was 16, I actually made the U.S. Ski Team by placing second on the North American tour. All of a sudden, it was like I was playing a whole new game. I was no longer on a local team with my best friends and my brother, but on a team with Olympians and World Champions. I was on a team with people that I had grown up watching and studying on World Cup videos. To make the transition even more intimidating, it was the pre-2006 Olympic summer.

People hear the word “team” and assume that everyone gets along or is supportive of one another at the very least. But ours was a weird situation because we were technically labeled as a “team” but freestyle is an individual sport. When you go out there on competition day, you are trying to ski bigger, better and faster than your teammates. This tension is especially intense when the Olympics come around, because in a given ski season about seven girls and seven guys get to compete on the World Cup circuit. This is the “A” team.

But to go to the Olympics, you have to be the top four of these girls and top four of these guys to earn a spot. I remember being a rookie in Chile that summer before the ’06 Games ... and I have never felt more tense. It is cutthroat. That’s what happens when push comes to shove, because with a team as deep and as talented as the U.S., those four spots are really hard to get.

I spent the next five years on the U.S. Ski Team. Over time, I developed friendships and became more comfortable. I started to feel like I actually belonged on that level. My last full competitive season on the team, I made the World Cup circuit. The way it worked for me is that my season started in Winter

The Deer Valley World Cup event under the lights.
Park, Colorado, at an early-season event called “Selections.” I can’t tell you how much freestyle skiers dread this event. It makes or breaks your season. The top two finishers at this event get starts at the two U.S. World Cups (held in Lake Placid, N.Y. and Deer Valley, Utah). It is a high-pressure event, to say the least, because there are about 60 skiers competing for those two spots. Anyways, I got the job done and earned the World Cup starts.

But that wasn’t enough to set me up for the rest of the season. I had to actually do well at the U.S. World Cups to continue with the team on the circuit. I wanted it so badly, and felt like things were finally clicking. I was probably skiing the best I would ever ski when the Deer Valley World Cup rolled around that season. It was a duals event (where two skiers go face-to-face down the moguls course, and the judges score which run was better) held under the lights in a really exciting night event. The crowd was 1,000-plus people. My family was there, which always made an event better for me. The stage was set. I made finals and won my first dual before losing to Jenn Heil (who will be competing for Canada in the upcoming Olympics) in the quarterfinals. I had just finished top eight in a World Cup. This meant that I’d be promoted from the “C” team to the “B” team for the rest of the season, and that I would get to ski World Cups! All of a sudden, I was one step closer to my Olympic dream.

There are no words to describe how amazing the travel experience was for the rest of that ski season. It felt like we traveled everywhere. From Italy to Norway to Japan, I went to these places to compete, but I didn’t really get to see them. The schedules were pretty intense. We’d arrive at 1 in the morning and have training for the next two days. Then we would have a day or two of competition and leave to catch a 6 a.m. flight to the next competition site. Basically, we were living out of our suitcases for three months. It was so exhausting, but so worth it.

To be honest, I did not get any other good results that season, and I knew that I was going to have to work a lot harder if I was going to make it to the 2010 Olympics. But when I came home, I found out that my mom had gotten sick -- really sick -- during the time I was gone competing. I tried to keep skiing, but come January 2008, I realized that I couldn’t do it any more. My heart wasn’t really with skiing anymore. It was at home, with my mom. It was hard to know how much time I would have with her ... and I did not want to miss out on a minute of it. I needed to be there for her. So that’s what I did.

I officially retired from the U.S. Ski Team in April 2008, and I can’t tell you how hard that was to do. All of a sudden my dream was gone. Just like that. But my family has and will always come first -- and I wouldn’t trade that time that I had with my wonderful mom for the world.

Golding with her family, also at Deer Valley.
My time freestyle skiing was one heck of a journey, and I wouldn’t change anything about it. In the end, though, the Olympics weren’t in the cards for me, and I can honestly say that I am okay with that. Eight of my amazing former teammates are going to be up there in Vancouver going for the gold on the opening weekend of the Olympics. And you can be sure that I will be there -- not on the mogul course as I had once dreamed of doing, but in the stands, cheering them on. I wouldn’t miss being there for the world.

---McKENZY GOLDING

In addition to the GW class on the ground in Vancouver, blogger and former Olympic hopeful McKenzy Golding will be at the Games for the opening weekend. Golding will take in the events that she once competed in and hang with all of her former teammates -- before, during and after their quests for Olympic gold. Here is the first installment of her background story, all leading up to the best moguls coverage at the Games, only on the Vantastic Voyage.

The Winter Olympic Games. It’s the event of a lifetime that comes around only once every four years. Many athletes from around the world grow up dreaming about competing in the Games ... but only a few of these dreamers end up turning the Olympic dream into a tangible reality. I personally fall into the former category.

My Olympic dream was born during the 1998 Olympic Games in Nagano, Japan. On one particular morning, my mom, brother and I were gathered around our TV watching the freestyle skiing mogul event. Jonny Moseley, a skier from my hometown, Squaw Valley, Calif., skied an amazing run and won the gold medal. I was just 12 years old at the time, but I will never forget that morning. It was then that I knew I wanted to do what Jonny Moseley had just done, and so my brother and I joined the Squaw Valley Freestyle Ski Team the next day.

For those of you that don’t know, freestyle skiing consists of a “mogul course” that is composed of a section of moguls (bumps), then a jump, then another section of moguls, another jump, and finally a third set of moguls. The goal is to ski the course top-to-bottom without deviating from the mogul line. The athlete also has to do two different jumps -- usually a back flip and a heli (360 degree rotation) for women competitors, and a back full (back flip with a 360) and a cork-7 (an off-axis 720 degree rotation) for men.

With that said, it's time to get back to the story. My mom home-schooled me and my brother, which gave us enough time to go skiing every afternoon once we joined the freestyle team. We were really lucky kids -- to be out in the snow, skiing on one of the best mountains in the world every day! The team was fun, but it was a lot of hard work. I’ll never forget this coach named Raymond. He was Jonny Moseley’s coach, and he was great at what he did ... but, man, was he scary. He yelled a lot. I’ll always remember how he would hit my lower back with a pole to get me to “pop” off of the jump, and would make me hike all the way from the bottom to the top of the mogul course if I “blew out” on the last couple of bumps. I can say, without a doubt, that those first couple years on the freestyle team were the hardest I ever trained during my freestyle career.

As I started competing more and more, my mom would always remind me that she’s the one who taught me how to carve a turn, so she would get really upset whenever I called Raymond my “first coach.” Looking back, she was right. I was such a good skier because she taught me. And I guess you could say that Raymond did the fine-tuning. So anyways, the training was hard, but my brother and I got good real fast, and it seemed like things just started happening and falling into place.

At 14, I earned a spot to the Junior Freestyle Olympics and to U.S. Nationals. The year after that, I was back in Big Mountain, Montana, for another Junior Olympics start. I remember feeling so intimated by all of the great skiers around me, when my brother said to me, “Mac, you are training better than any other girl here. I really think you could win tomorrow.” I thought he was crazy, but as it turns out, he was right. The next day I came out on the top of the podium. What? I was the Junior Olympic Champion? It was so surreal.

I’ll never forget the feeling of standing on top of that podium, but much more importantly, I will never forget my coach for that Junior Olympics, Duke Peterson. He was truly one of the most genuine,

Golding and Duke
passionate and amazing people I will ever know. It was so special getting to share that moment with him -- to have him believe in me and my dream -- because he passed away not too long after that. At the time, I never would have believed that Duke would pass away so suddenly, but unfortunately, that’s life sometimes. From then on out, at the top of the mogul course before every competition run I would think to myself, “Do it for Duke.”

---McKENZY GOLDING

Check back soon for the next installment and video of McKenzy's trip.