At the Olympic Winter Games Beijing 2022, moguls will be one of the many bizarre freestyle skiing events. You may have heard that Mikal Kingsbury is the moguls king, but how is the competition scored? How do we keep score, and what are the guidelines?
Most importantly, why?
Skiers will see this more clearly than anybody else. Moguls occur on ski slopes because skiers push snow to one side when they spin. As other skiers tread in their wake, the snow piled up.
The word “moguls” comes from the 1960s German dialect word “mugel,” which means “little hill,”.
Mogul races were originally harum-scarum competitions over bumps, but they evolved into the serious art form of freestyle skiing during the ‘hotdogging’ decade of the 1970s.
Edgar Grospiron, who won the first-ever gold medal in men’s moguls at the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville, famously observed, “You have to understand that this sport is called freestyle and practised by people who have free minds.”
There are some weird outcasts out there that came up with the idea. While rule-followers, they also like testing the limits of those rules.
Nowadays, a snowcat plough is used to create the initial shape of a mogul, which is subsequently refined by hand. Mogul skiing in the Olympics has also been improved.
Under 30 seconds is needed to traverse the 235-meter long, 28-degree sloped course that features 3.5-meter-wide moguls. Acrobatic leaps are performed by the competitors from the course’s top and bottom air bumps.
Sixty percent of a competitor’s score will come from their ability to execute mogul turns, twenty percent from their speed, and twenty percent from the difficulty and style of their jumps.
The Canadian’s run was “very energetic and accurate and clean, there didn’t seem like many movements,” olympic.ca quoted Justine Dufour-Lapointe as saying.
When they touch down, what do they see? What do you think, does it look perfectly stable on its two feet with no wobbles at all?
“You can’t just take a leap of faith and hope for the best when you reach the ground,”
You need to land your trick since there are 40 bumps waiting for you after you touch down.
Skiers who specialise in moguls frequently use ramps built over lakes for practise.
“Once we get the hang of it on the trampoline, we then put it into the water ramp and then attempt to find a good condition day where it’s powder snow,” said Gerken Schofield.
When We Feel Confident Enough, We’ll Take Them Out For a Moguls Run.
Skiers use trampolines to perform workouts called Brassards, named after Canadian moguls legend Jean-Luc Brassard, which help them perfect their moguls technique.
