Mindset
“Excellence is not a singular act, but a habit. You are what you do repeatedly.”
-Vince Lombardi
I recently had a chance to sit down with an athlete I worked with for seventeen years. We had some celebrating to catch up on.
Mikaël Kingsbury is the most successful mogul skier in history. One hundred World Cup victories. Twenty-nine Crystal Globes. Five Olympic medals across four Games, including gold in the first-ever Olympic men’s dual moguls event.
The numbers are extraordinary. But after seventeen years beside him, they aren’t the first things I think about.
I think about the teenager who walked into our facility. The athlete he learned to become. The man he grew into. And everything that happened between those first training sessions and one final Olympic run.
I began working with Mik when he was seventeen, shortly before he attended the 2010 Vancouver Olympics as a forerunner. Even then, his skiing offered a glimpse of what might be possible.
That summer, he was in our facility alongside Jennifer Heil and Alex Bilodeau, with an opportunity to see what Olympic champions did when nobody was handing out medals.
It took him a little while to understand what that required.
Talented? Absolutely. But he was still a teenager learning how to become a high-performance athlete. The ability was there. The habits needed some work.
Alex offered a daily reference point. Here was an Olympic champion, training in the same room, showing him what the next level looked like. If Mik wanted to compete with him in 2014, he had some catching up to do.
I remember starting one summer with a little dig about his fondness for McDonald’s. He wasn’t as strong as he needed to be, and I suggested that his current approach probably wasn’t going to make him an Olympic champion.
To his credit, he took the message and did something with it.
He became more intentional about his nutrition. He stepped up in the gym. He began to understand that talent had brought him into the room, but his daily choices would determine how far he could go.
He found another gear, and the results followed.
By the time Sochi arrived in 2014, Mik had become a serious challenger to Alex. Their rivalry brought an interesting energy to the training environment: two exceptional Canadian skiers, each capable of winning, each knowing exactly who stood in his way.
In the end, Alex delivered an incredible Olympic run and defended his title. Mik came home with silver.
When Alex retired, Mik carried that standard forward and continued raising it. He became the benchmark in the sport, year after year. Olympic gold followed in PyeongChang in 2018, then another silver in Beijing in 2022.
Throughout those years, I had the privilege of watching him mature into a leader in his sport and a man of character beyond it.
Something about him always stood out to me.
I’ve worked with people whose pursuit of excellence consumed almost everything around them. Mik could commit himself completely to his sport and still step away from it. He enjoyed his family, his friends, and the people who shared in his journey.
His ambition left room for a life.
I told him that the other night, when we finally had time to celebrate his gold and silver medals from Italy.
By then, his life had another centre of gravity.
At the bottom of the Olympic hill were his son, Henrik, his wife, Laurance, and the Kingsbury clan. They had come to watch him make history.
As it happened, all three medalists in the dual moguls event were fathers. After the competition, they gathered with their partners and children for a photograph.
For all the podiums Mik had stood on, this one held something different.
What most people watching couldn’t appreciate was everything it had taken to get him there.
In late summer, Mik tore an adductor tendon in his left hip while training on the water ramp. Much of the fall became a collective effort to help him recover and prepare for one final Olympic campaign.
There were setbacks. A worsening of the injury in early December. Changes to the competition schedule. Cancelled events that, in hindsight, gave us some valuable breathing room.
Eventually, so much came down to one event in Val Saint-Côme, Quebec.
On home snow, in front of his home crowd, he had the opportunity to win his hundredth World Cup race, secure his Olympic place, and rebuild confidence in what his body could do.
He delivered.
One hundred wins were in the books.
Then came the preparation for the Games, where restraint mattered as much as work.
We kept returning to the same question: What did he need to be ready to win?
Every run had a purpose. Every additional demand had a cost. The minimum effective dose became a very practical way of making decisions.
I remember spending a day on the hill with Mik and his coach, Michel Hamelin, there in case anything needed attention.
I watched him ski like a mogul surgeon. Precise. Efficient. In control.
Then he cased a mogul, and I lost my breath.
He got up and shook it off. I hurried onto the finish area to check on him, and he reassured me that he was fine.
Over dinner recently, he admitted he’d bruised a couple of ribs, but kept it under wraps.
Another thing for him to manage privately. Another adjustment he made before the Games.
Weeks later, I would watch him compete in Italy with pride and trepidation.
I knew what it had taken to reach that start gate. There was satisfaction in the work we had done together, but I also knew how much he wanted the opportunity still in front of him.
In the moguls event, he finished tied for the highest score and took silver on the tiebreaker.
An extraordinary achievement. His fourth consecutive Olympics with a medal.
And still, I knew he wanted gold.
Then came duals.
That day, I saw the champion I had watched emerge so many years earlier bring everything he had learned to one final Olympic performance.
The Mik effect was in full force.
Opponents pushed to stay with him and made mistakes. They lost their lines, ran off course, or missed jumps. Mik kept delivering.
It was an extraordinary spectacle. After everything that had happened over the previous six months, he finished his Olympic career on top of the podium.
And then he went to his family.
When we finally sat down to celebrate months later, the weight of it all had room to settle.
In my profession, you’re fortunate if you get to work with an Olympic champion. I’ve been privileged to work with several.
But seventeen years is a different kind of privilege.
You see the uncertainty before the confidence. The habits taking shape. The setbacks that never make the highlight reel. You have difficult conversations, make adjustments, and keep showing up for the work.
You watch a teenager become a man.
I feel fortunate to have shared that journey with Mik. I also feel a deep satisfaction in having contributed to something we saw through together, alongside so many good people.
For years, I had a rule: Olympic medals belonged around the neck of the athlete who earned them. However much I might have contributed, I never felt it was my place to wear them.
The other night, I let myself make an exception.
Perhaps, after seventeen years, I was ready to recognize what that journey had meant to me, too.
So I put his medals around my neck.
Mission accomplished.
