One step at a time

On a rainy morning in early June, Hannah Kearney braids her blonde hair into her trademark hairstyle - two braids beneath her helmet - shoulders her Volkl skis, and begins to climb.

By lunchtime, she will have climbed 795 stairs. By dinnertime, another 530.

By the end of October and her 23-week off-season training schedule, she will have climbed about 79,500 steps, or the equivalent of trudging to the top of the Empire State Building 42 times.

In ski boots. And a wetsuit.

The stairs aren't even an official part of her training. They are just a means to an end for the 23-year-old former World Champion mogul skier. The steps take her to the top of the single water ramp at the Olympic Jumping Complex in Lake Placid. From there, she skis down the plastic ramp and, on this morning, does a back layout over and over again into the 54-degree pool.

Kearney is trying to become a better acrobat, she says, which means jumping into the pool about 1,500 times before the snow flies.

She's not trying to vindicate her performance at the 2006 Olympics, which was disastrous, she says. She is just trying to work on the one weak link in her mogul skiing: her airs (jumps). A mogul run is scored on time, turns, line, and airs, with the overall score for each run judged evenly between those four elements (so her two airs account for a quarter of her total score). Her skiing is already close to perfect, and Jeff Wintersteen, head coach of the U.S. Freestyle Team, calls her the best skier in the world - "head and shoulders above everybody else," he says.

"But she doesn't dominate in her jumping as she does with her turns and her skiing," he explains. "She's not that far off. If she could raise that level, it could be no contest for her."

At the 2010 Olympics next February, Kearney will yet again be a heavy favorite to win (she's half Canadian too - her mom is from Montreal). But a gold medal is not the goal. She just wants to have fun this time around and ski to the best of her ability. It's an attitude Wintersteen supports.

By all accounts, Kearney was a child prodigy on skis. She grew up in Norwich, Vermont, and her parents enrolled her in the local Ford Sayre ski program. She picked freestyle over racing and soon learned both ballet and mogul skiing, but not aerials.

"My plan was to never do a flip on snow," she says. "I did upright aerials but inverted aerials never appealed to me."

She began competing at age 9, so for the next seven years her parents drove her to Waterville Valley every winter weekend. At Waterville, she joined Nick Preston's Black and Blue Trail Smashers Team. After the 2002 Olympics, where Jonny Moseley did his off-axis "dinner roll" air and ushered in the era of inverted tricks, Kearney reluctantly began to incorporate a back flip into her runs in order to stay competitive.

By the time she graduated from Hanover High School in 2004, Kearney had already made the U.S. Ski Team, won four Junior World Championship titles (moguls and dual moguls in 2002 and 2003) and two World Cups.

The following March, exactly three weeks after her 19^th birthday, she was crowned the 2005 World Champion in moguls. At the 2006 Olympics, she was the heavy favorite.

Even though her demeanor and forthrightness belie her youth - she speaks quickly and assertively, as if each sentence is a 20-second mogul run - she wasn't mentally prepared for the Olympics. High expectations and added attention made for a bumpy ride in Torino. Her only other experience with the Olympics had been watching the Games on TV. In real life, she realized that there were no sappy stories, no fanfare, no music playing in the background. 

"I was expecting some," she pauses briefly, "I don't know what I was expecting. It's the Olympics. It's this incredible event, and yet it's just the same."

In retrospect, she realizes that it was the same competition she faced regularly on the World Cup tour - the same competitors, the same judges, the same course. "It's just the title that makes it different," she says, "Winning it would mean a lot more. However, you still have to ski the exact same run to win it."

Instead, she struggled in her qualifying run and finished 22^nd. Only the top 20 qualify for the final.

"It was heartbreaking," she says. "I had a disastrous result, and I didn't have fun. I didn't enjoy it."

"In fairness, it wasn't just [Hannah]," says Wintersteen. "It was the team approach. ... There was a lot of talk of really dominating, and we started thinking more about results than about the skills and our performances."

After the Olympics, Kearney eased her disappointment with two podiums at World Cups in March, and she ended the season by winning both the moguls and dual moguls national titles near home at Killington, Vermont.

She was back on form going into the 2006/07 season. But on February 5, 2007, she was training at a World Cup in France when she tore the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) in her left knee.

"The coaches encouraged me to push it really hard [on the training run]," remembers Kearney. "So I landed my top air and was skiing really fast in the middle section, and I hyper-extended my knee. I remember it feeling like I jammed my finger but it was my knee. Turns out it was my ACL."

Rather than derailing her skiing career, the injury actually got it back on track.

"I was really burned out at that point," she says. "I had never had a chance to be at home or be a teenager. I made the ski team when I was still in high school, so I [felt I] had no control over the path. That was it."

She also admits that she didn't know what she was getting herself in to. "I didn't realize the World Cup tour was living out of a suitcase," she says. "I just hadn't thought about it."

"When I got hurt, I got to go home, be with my family, go to my brother's hockey games, and I adopted a dog," she adds. "It just made me happy."

Her younger brother Denny plays hockey for Yale University, where he's a sophomore. Her dog is a Rhodesian Ridgeback named Lola, who stays with a family in Lake Placid when Kearney is training there so she can see her every day.

But it was recovering from the injury itself that gave her a fresh perspective on mogul skiing.

"I realized I really wanted to come back, and I really wanted to train hard, and I learned how to train," she says.

Kearney admits that training wasn't her forte in the past. "I played sports in high school, so I'd used that as my default training. Then after I graduated, I lost focus. I didn't play soccer anymore, and I didn't have track. I didn't really train. I didn't lift weights. I didn't really know what I was doing."

Wintersteen concurs. "Since [Hannah] was a little kid, she was always a bit of a skiing prodigy," he says. "She didn't work very hard compared to a lot of her peers. She just relied on her talent. "

Prior to her knee injury, Wintersteen and his staff encouraged her to add conditioning to her off-season program. "She would be like, 'Why? I'm already on the podium now and I don't do all that stuff,'" explains the coach.

Rehabbing with renowned strength and conditioning specialist Bill Knowles at iSport http://www.isporttraining.com/ in Killington, Kearney finally learned how relevant a condition program is.

Kearney now downloads training programs, complete with video demonstrations, created by the U.S. Freestyle Team's conditioning coach and says she follows them closely. Where before she might take an afternoon off because she was tired, now she does all the prescribed workouts, even if her legs feel like lead.

Although her rehab took a year longer than planned - she suffered a concussion shortly after returning to the World Cup in early 2008, which put her out of contention for the rest of the winter - she says the added rest only helped.

She began the 2008/09 season by winning a World Cup in December 2008 - a dual moguls event in France. She went on to win the overall World Cup title and a bronze medal at the 2009 World Freestyle Championships.

"I was actually somewhat excited that she didn't win the World Championships," confesses Wintersteen. "It lights a fire, and Hannah's better when there's a fire lit."

That fire is currently focused on improving her skills in the air. And if that carries to the top of the Olympic podium in Vancouver, all the better.

"I'm prepared to just enjoy it and ski to my best abilities," she says of the 2010 Olympics.

Meanwhile, there are many stairs to climb.