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Kaila Kuhn mugs for the media after winning a gold medal at the Olympics on Saturday.
> Photo by Chris Randour / U.S. Ski Team
GOLD MEDAL!
Kaila Kuhn wins the gold in team aerials and can’t wait to share it when she visits Boyne City in March
The Boyne Citizen hired freelance sports writer Ed Klajman to send us reports on Kaila Kuhn from the Olympic Games in Italy. Klajman is covering his fourth Olympic games, this time for the Boyne Citizen and other publications. Here is his third report for us.
By Ed Klajman
MILAN – The next time Kaila Kuhn comes home to Boyne City, she’ll be bringing back an Olympic gold medal – and she cannot wait to share it with everyone there.
“I can't even describe the support that I've gotten from my hometown, Boyne City,” she said at a Saturday press conference in Livigno, site of Olympic aerials freestyle skiing, where two hours earlier she had won the mixed team event title, along with male teammates Chris Lillis and Connor Curran.
“It's a small town of about 3,000 people, and they have me in the local newspaper, they put me on billboards, and there's signs in local stores that say ‘Kaila Kuhn ate here,’ and almost everybody in Boyne City woke up at 4 a.m. to watch me,” she said. “Coming from a small town where everybody knows everybody, that support has been incredibly overwhelming,” Kuhn said.
She added that she’s planning to visit at the end of March, and hoping to share her medal “in every way” she can, including putting it “around all of the little kids’ necks.”
Three days earlier, Kuhn - who entered these Games having won both individual and team gold at last year’s world championships - had expressed her disappointment at finishing off the podium in the individual event, where she ended up fifth.
“I let myself be upset about it for a couple hours, but then I knew that I had to switch gears, and that competition wasn't over and I wasn't going to let that beat me down for too long,” explained the 22-year-old, who also represented Team USA at the Beijing Olympics in 2022, where she finished eighth and did not compete in the team event. “So, I just let it motivate me for my jumps today.”
In her first jump in the qualifying round - where seven countries were pared down to four for the final - she scored 106.89 points on her back-full-full-full. That was the only female jump of the entire day to exceed 100 points. And her follow-up jump in the final, which scored 94.44, turned out to be the day’s third-best, bettered only by her own initial jump and a finals jump of 96.59 by individual gold medalist Xu Mengtao of China.
As a team, the American trio combined for a total score of 325.35 points, which was 28.44 ahead of the field. Switzerland claimed the silver medal with 296.91, while China won bronze, scoring 279.68.
“We did some of the best jumps we've ever done, and we put it down when it counted,” said the University of Utah student. “It’s incredibly different than the individual event, and it almost felt like less pressure to me, just because we are not necessarily putting pressure on each other. It was really just motivation, and they (Curran and Lillis) were there pumping me up the whole time. We are putting pressure on ourselves to do well, and we want each other to do well equally, but we know that win, lose or draw, we will still be family, we will still be friends, and we will still be teammates.”
The gold medal, she added, followed years of dedicated hard work and preparation.
“It just comes from the thousands of jumps that we do to train for this exact moment,” said Kuhn, who won the last World Cup competition prior to the Olympics in January, and finished third this year in the overall aerials standings.
“It has not been easy, and we've all had our falls, but we put it down when it really, truly matters, especially during the team event. So, confidence for us comes from our training, comes from each other, and comes from our coaches. The US team has had such a strong history,” she said.
Kuhn’s Olympic experience will wrap up with Sunday's closing ceremony, televised at 2:30 p.m. EST on NBC and Peacock plus a primetime replay at 9 p.m.
If there was one small disappointment to her Olympics off the field of play, it was not being immersed in a traditional athletes village, in a central location like most Games have had. These Games were different, spread out more than any other in history. Livigno was the site of only freestyle skiing and snowboarding.
“We want to maximize our Olympic experience as much as possible, which means going to all these different events and watching Team USA win as many medals as we can,” she explained. “And I think most of us would agree we wish we could go see more events like the skating events and the cross-country events. But we're with a lot of our buddies here - with a lot of our fellow freestyle skiers. So, I think we lucked out with one of the better villages and we were just super stoked to be here.”
> Kaila Kuhn was ‘paralyzed by fear’ of jumping 50 ft. at the Olympics so she turned to hypnosis - Story from The Athletic/New York Times
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