Freestyle Skiing

With the flush of a Japanese toilet, Canadian moguls skier Kristi Richards rescued her Olympic dream.

More on that later.

Richards heads into the World Cup moguls competition at Canada Olympic Park in Calgary Friday ranked No.1 in the season standings. She placed first and second in the two season openers, a drastic turnaround from the 28-year-old's dismal performance last season, when her skiing was so inconsistent that she failed to find the podium once.

"Actually, it was consistently bad," she says.

So bad that the 2007 world champion's chances of qualifying for the 2010 Olympic team were in serious doubt.

Richards's career low was triggered by a high. She became world champion a year after finishing seventh in the 2006 Olympics in Turin. Everything seemed to be on track for her ultimate goal: to compete in her second Olympics, in her own backyard.

She grew up in Summerland, B.C., skiing out of her grandparents' cabin at Apex Mountain in the Okanagan Valley, one of three children born to her engineer father and her Hungarian-born mother, who works as an accountant in her father's business.

She remembers the day she set her sights on 2010. It was July 2, 2003, during her rookie season with the national freestyle team, three days after she blew out her knee. She hobbled on crutches into Whistler, B.C., to hear the news: Vancouver had won the bid.

"I said, this is going to be awesome. I'm going to do everything I can do to be there," she says.

But last season, when athletes could use their top two results to count toward Olympic qualification, Richards heaped pressure on herself. She felt so much anxiety about achieving good results that her muscles would cramp up for hours after competitions. When she faltered early in the season, panic mounted.

"It just started to snowball," Richards says. "Every weekend was harder to get out of after that."

Her results were dismal by her standards: 15th, 32nd, 13th and 11th. After finishing 34th at the Olympic test event at Cypress Mountain, B.C., she sat at the base of the Olympic course and cried.

She qualified for the world championship in Inawashiro, Japan, only because she was defending champion, she says.

The pressure came to a head the night before that event. Richards holed up in a hotel with her sports psychologist, Penny Werthner, who works with many freestyle skiers and is an assistant professor at the University of Ottawa's school of human kinetics.

"I was probably in my room with her for about three hours the night before [the event], bawling my eyes out," Richards says.

It's unusual to probe deeply into an athlete's psyche on the eve of a major competition, but Richards was desperate. "I really needed to figure it out, now."

Werthner has worked with many athletes hobbled by stress; she helped kayaker Adam Van Koeverden overcome his disappointment with an eighth-place finish in an 2008 Olympic race in Beijing and go on to win silver.

"It's really helping each athlete figure out what their preparation should look for before their competition and hopefully having some sort of flexibility built in ... because that helps them cope with and manage the anxiety of competition," Werthner said in an interview.

"So it's how you manage that thought process and figure out for you - for each athlete - what are the kinds of things that scare me? Or take me out of the place I want to be in? And how do I train myself not to stay there."
Richards remembers Werthner asking, "Do you want to ski tomorrow?"

Werthner reminded her that she didn't have to.

Richards badly wanted to ski. She just had a long list of nagging fears telling her otherwise. Will I be a different person if I succeed? What happens if I fail? What if I get hurt? Maybe I'm not good enough. And the most crippling of all, what if I don't make the Olympics?

She wrote them down on the sort of paper found in bathrooms worldwide. Then she flushed those fears away. It was a huge turning point, she says.
Richards placed fifth the next day, her best result from that awful season.

She felt calm and light and at ease that day, and she spent the off-season nurturing that feeling. She and her boyfriend, professional free skier Mark Abma, have also been fixing up the house they bought in Pemberton, B.C. She painted her kitchen her favourite colour, purple.

She's landed on the podium at four successive races this season. The two Europa Cup races were a warm-up, but her first- and second-place finishes at two World Cup qualification contests in Finland last month have gone a long way to assuring her a spot on the Canadian Olympic team.

"We knew she was capable of doing this kind of performance," Peter Judge, chief executive officer of the Canadian Freestyle Ski Association, says of her rebound. "The problem was getting her to believe that."

So what has changed?

When Richards stands at the top of Canada Olympic Park's moguls course tonight, she will pause for 30 seconds before her race. In her mind there won't be any thoughts of 2010. Or injuries. Or fear.

"Simply just breathing, being in the moment, and letting everything go," she says.

And every time she clicks into her skis, Richards says she is aware that this is her choice.

"It's feeling and listening," she says. "Just hearing that click before you skate away in the snow, how it crunches under your skis. The powder flying over your head. Those are the things that are amazing and magical.

"When I look back [to my childhood], I think, what are the times that I remember? It's the laughter of a group of friends all trying to jump over some tree. I think that's the root of why we do what we do."

- With a report from Alex Blair