When the best freestyle skiers in the world converge at the upcoming Toyota Waterville Valley Freestyle Cup, those not in the know about the sport’s history might think: Quaint, lovely Waterville, N.H., for an epic international event? How surprising.
But if you know, you know: Waterville Valley is practically the Mac Daddy of the sport of freestyle skiing. From the late 1960s when it hosted one of the world’s first “hot dogger” events, to the early 2000s when its freestyle program pumped out multiple world champions, to today, where freestyle still thrives there, Waterville is a giant.
There may not have been a world champion and 2010 Olympic Gold Medalist Hannah Kearney, complete with the ski helmet pigtails emulated by skier girls far and wide in her honor, and the Jacoby Ellsbury Sox jersey made famous when she wore it under her uniform skiing for that gold, if not for Waterville.
“Once I joined (the freestyle program at Waterville), I was hooked,” she told the Boston Herald.
“I had friends there. I liked the coaches,” she said. “More than anything, it was about being in that culture; with people who knew me the best and who loved freestyle as much as I. Because what makes a good resort for someone is about the culture even more than the conditions.”
Conditions will be spot on when the Cup comes Jan. 24 and 25; Waterville has been prepping for it all season long, and has had more than a half a century of experience with similar events.
Since 1969, Waterville has hosted several world-class freestyle ski competitions, including the Freestyle National Championships, National Open Championships, and the Hot Dog Competition: National Championships of Exhibition Skiing.
Wayne Wong, considered the father of freestyle, was there for one of those first event years in 1971, and is as excited about this year’s as he was that.
Back then he was a 21 year old kid, he said, heading east from Vancouver just to try to be in the same air as his early-freestyle era idols.
“I didn’t know what to expect,” he told the Herald. “But I knew many of my idols would be there: Suzy Chaffee, Bobby Byrne, all the people I saw in movies and who were my heroes. To me just being in the same venue as they was going to be everything; never mind competing with them. I was just like ‘oh my gosh!’ I never expected to win.”
Wong won big and went on to compete for years and, to this day, serve as the kind of master ambassador of the sport.
Having the world up there now, (last year was the first year of such a major event there in 33 years) feels like “coming full circle,” he said. “It validates what Waterville was – and is – in freestyle.”
The sport has evolved in many ways since Wong competed; in his day moguls were more of a rough and tumble natural field of bumps which you chose your jump spots on individually. Today mogul fields and the jump areas are built out, and speed counts toward your total score.
For bumps, he said of those early years, “We just had and start and finish on True Grit (the same trail that will be used this year). What we did in between was up to us.”
The new more “set” mogul course is very different from those years, he said, but just as thrilling to watch. “It’s not what we did, but it’s real and it’s exciting; it’s the metamorphosis of the sport.”
In Wong’s day, too, Freestyle was about three events – moguls, aerials and ballet, with most athletes competing in all three. Ballet went away when freestyle became an Olympic event; the Olympic committee considered it too objective to judge fairly.
Today, athletes focus on one of the two – bumps or aerials. Waterville is all about the bumps.
Both Wong and Kearney are delighted to see Waterville back in a place at the center of the freestyle world, and both believe keeping it going there would be great for the sport, the region and skiing as a whole.
“I would love to see this help grow the audience for the sport of mogul skiing,” Kearney said. “Look at what Killington has done for racing. There’s no reason the same cannot happen around this event at Waterville.”
“The 2034 Olympics will have freestyle at Deer Valley (Utah),” Wong said. “It would be great for Waterville to keep at this at least until then. The momentum they can build is great.”
Kearney says the course – which she’s taken on before– will be phenomenal. But she has one other emotion to share about the event.
You see, in her world champion era, while she returned to Waterville often to train (“I’d train with the younger kids just to be in that culture I loved) there was no event at this level at Waterville.
“So the real emotion is jealousy,” she said, “I didn’t get to experience this there. These athletes are lucky.”