Freestyle Skiing

This season, something clicked.

And while most Canadians still don't know his name, his competitors certainly do. When Alexandre Bilodeau competes in his event, he is at the top of his game.

Bilodeau started the year with three straight silver medals and a fourth-place finish in men's moguls. Then, in Cypress, the Rosemère, Que. native landed at the top of the podium and never looked back. Five straight gold-medal finishes later, Bilodeau was World Cup champion, World champion, and at just 21 years old, Canadian champion - All in one.

It's hard to say what causes any athlete to hit a breakthrough season. But for Bilodeau the key was a change in perspective.

After emerging as a promising 18-year-old rookie in 2006, Bilodeau's spark seemed to fizzle. In his first Olympic appearance in Turin, he finished a disappointing 11th. In 2007 - his second season on the circuit - the result was an overall third. And in 2008, at the age of 20, Bilodeau fell to fourth place.

"I wasn't performing as well as my skiing (could be)," said Bilodeau in a recent interview with CTVOlympics.ca. "So I tried to find why."

In search of answers, Bilodeau sat down with a sport psychologist to take a closer look at his performances. With the psychologist's help, he seems to have found the problem.

"I was trying too much. I wasn't myself up there," Bilodeau explained. "And I was thinking maybe too much of results."

Bilodeau said it took two things to get him to take a step back, take a breath and get back on track. One was a quote by another successful young athlete.

"There's a famous sentence that Tiger Woods says all the time," Bilodeau said. "'Golf is not who I am, it's what I do.' And I took a look at that philosophy this summer. In the last couple of years, skiing was in my head 24-7, 12 months a year, seven days a week. Now, it's something-it's only what I do, not who I am."

But the real grounding force was Bilodeau's older brother, idol and best friend, Frederic. As a young child, Frederic was diagnosed with cerebral palsy - a disorder that affects body movement and muscle co-ordination.

"The doctor told him that he wouldn't be walking at 12 years old," said Bilodeau. "And how he's 28 and he's still walking. And he skis."

It's something that helps Bilodeau keep his perspective.

"When I look at my brother, it's like a ground. It puts me back to the ground, to reality that not everyone has the same chance in life," he said.

"When I'm skiing and complaining because it's raining, it's nothing. He would be up there, and he would be skiing, and he wouldn't be complaining, and he would be like, ‘Oh great. I've got a chance to ski and train to be a world champion one day.'"

While Bilodeau was named to the 2010 freestyle team just over a week ago, he has yet to qualify for the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver. But with his brother's outlook in the back of his mind, the 2006 Olympic veteran says he's prepared to deal with the pressure as it intensifies next year.

"It's not something that's going to bother me at all," he said. "It's always, as an amateur sport, in the news. And the only comments I hear are that I represent Quebec well, I represent Canada well, and people are proud of me and proud of who I am."

And while an Olympic medal is just about the only thing missing from his trophy cabinet, Bilodeau constantly reminds himself that life reaches further than the top of the Olympic podium.

"It won't make me a better man in my life if I'm Olympic champion. It's only going to be a good opportunity for me, but I'm not going to be a better man."