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Q&A: Mikaël Kingsbury’s trainer on what makes the Olympian so special

admin Nobyembre 10, 2022

Scott Livingston knew right away that Mikaël Kingsbury was a special athlete.

Kingsbury was 17 years old when he first started working with the strength and conditioning specialist and high performance trainer, whose clients at the time also included fellow Olympic moguls skiers Alexandre Bilodeau and Jennifer Heil.

Heil, at the time, was an Olympic gold medallist at Turin 2006 and would go on to score silver at Vancouver 2010 while Bilodeau, best known for his golden moment on the slopes at those Vancouver Games, would wind up defending his Olympic title at Sochi 2014.

“Mik was a young buck who came up when I was training those two and kind of understudied with them and then took off in his career,” Livingston, who’s based in Mont Tremblant, told Sportsnet last month. “We’ve been working together ever since.”

“Ever since” includes 13 years of winning just about everything in sight. In 120 World Cup starts since debuting to instant success in 2010, Kingsbury has reached the podium 101 times, including 71 gold medals. He won the Crystal Globe, awarded to the best all-around skier at the end of every World Cup season, nine consecutive times beginning in 2012. He’s competed at two Olympics, medaling twice – silver in Sochi behind then-teammate Bilodeau, and gold in PyeongChang in 2018.

He is, undoubtedly, the best and most decorated moguls skier to ever hit the slopes – and now, the 29-year-old is set to defend his Olympic title in Beijing.

So, what makes Kingsbury such a special athlete? We spoke with Livingston to learn about the Olympian’s training process, his “unflappable” focus, medal expectations, and the thing he never skis without: joy.

EMILY SADLER: What was it about Mikaël, at the very beginning of your time with him, that first made you realize he was a pretty special athlete?
SCOTT LIVINGSTON: We knew that Mik was the next great athlete in terms of talent, but he was also, when I first started working with him at 17, really green when it came to training. He was a young man who obviously had some talent but needed to flourish, grow, and become a professional. You knew he was talented back in those days.

Part of what has made him so incredible to watch over the years is the consistency with which he wins. Health is obviously a big part of that. What are some of the things that you guys work on to nurture that?
It’s a process over years of developing the athlete, not just the skier – making sure that he has all of the foundational elements that he needs to be successful.

We go through what I would call a sort of a three-phase process every year where we kind of debrief after the season: What worked? What didn’t work? What does he want to improve on? Where does he feel he still has weaknesses?

We look at him at the beginning of the off-season and we recognize where are the cracks in the foundation, so to speak, that we need to patch and make sure everything’s healthy.

Then we build a really robust physical foundation of strength and fitness and all the things that he needs as an athlete. And then we spend the back third of the off-season on the specific stuff, the kinds of rigours that he manages in his sport.

A mogul skier has to hit a very complicated jump, hit it quickly, and then he has to start running moguls again so he doesn’t have time to find himself in space … he has to be fast. So, we work on those things, so that he goes into the season and he’s got that great foundation, he’s got all the things he needs to do to complete the work.

[Editor’s note: In November 2020, Kingsbury sustained a spinal injury in Ruka, Finland, while landing a jump in training, fracturing his T4 and T5 vertebrae. The injury forced him to miss the first month of the competition season, sidelining him from competition for the first time since 2009. He returned to the slopes two months later… and, of course, he won gold.]

I want to touch on his injury recovery. Obviously it’s an incredible feat just to come back from that physically, but I’d love to understand how you worked with Mikaël to mentally come back from that, too.
When you have that type of injury, for me as a professional, I have to impress upon him that he’s going to be okay. We’re going to fix it, we’ve got the time, we’re going to make it happen, so that he then has that psychological confidence to go about his business and do the work.

You’re always playing with the psychology of making sure they don’t feel a sense of threat and fear and concern and everything else.

I know going back to Ruka [this past December to open up the 2021-22 World Cup season], there was trepidation and a sense of, ‘Okay, I have to overcome this to move forward.’ And so, you know, he put a lot of stock in being successful at that event and he wanted to win it and he won it. And once he did that, he’s been running the course pretty solid ever since.

Mikaël obviously has high expectations for himself, and everyone anticipates that he will meet those goals in Beijing considering his track record is pretty incredible. From your perspective, what do you see in him right now in terms of his preparedness and medal hopes?
I would say from a physical preparation perspective, he’s in as good a condition or shape or a prepared state as he’s ever been for competition before.

With Mik, when it comes to his ability to deliver on game-day, I mean, that’s unquestionably the truth of who he is. He’s kind of unflappable.

I’ve worked with a lot of athletes in my life and he’s probably the best – if not, the top three – athletes I’ve ever worked with. He really is kind of a standalone, special athlete in his own world, you know? I mean, the top three guys in gold medaling, their cumulative wins are not as much as his entire career wins. So, I mean, it tells you a lot about who he is.

I don’t expect that there’s any cracks in the in the armour right now, so it’s a matter of, on game-day, does he deliver what he’s more than capable of delivering? And if he does, he’s certainly one of the favourites – if not the favourite – to win a gold medal.

What is it exactly that makes him the best? Is it simply a case of, some people just have… it?
I think some people will say that word and they don’t really understand what “it” really means. For me, it’s a combination of a number of factors. One is, he is technically one of the best, if not the best, freestyle skier both in what he does from a mogul skiing skill delivery and his jumps. He has both of those and his speed. So, in the game, he’s the very best.

But then on the outside of that, mentally, he’s one of the most connected, sort of pseudo-unflappable athletes I’ve ever seen. He really doesn’t get fazed by much or shifted by much – and if he does, you don’t know about it.

The third thing is the one element of his game that he has developed very significantly … he became the athlete he is probably about halfway into his career … there was a point at which he really realized, ‘This is what I have to do, this is my profession, this is how I’m going to carry myself, this is how I’m going to deport myself in my work and deliver myself.’ And it became very dialed, you know? So, then he became the professional he is.

So, you have the skill and technical/tactical, you have the mental, you have the professional, and then the last piece is that he loves what he does. He’s absolutely joyful in what he does. You’ll see a lot of athletes that have the first three, but they’re not really happy anymore for some reason or they’re struggling with their happiness and what they do — there’s always a question mark of, you know, ‘How long do I want to do this?’

Like, I have no idea when this guy’s going to stop because he just loves what he’s doing. He loves skiing, he loves winning. He loves delivering himself. Those four things make him the best. And I’ve worked with a lot that had the first three, but it’s that fourth one that is always this little asterisk, you know?

I love that. I almost wonder whether we, collectively, talk about that enough – joy. There’s just so much pressure, right? And it would be so easy to kind of fall out of love with the sport, I would imagine.
I think it’s one of the things, to your point, that doesn’t get spoken enough about.

You’re supposed to be having fun. And Mik has fun. So, he not only delivers himself professionally, but he’s having fun doing it – and that’s really special to see in him.



Q&A: Mikaël Kingsbury’s trainer on what makes the Olympian so special
Source: Pinas Ko Mahal
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