Patrick Deneen: Moguls World Champion

Only three things matter in the spine-jarring, knee-hammering sport of moguls: the quality of turns, the execution of two airborne tricks, and speed.

And when it comes to speed, one of the fastest mogul skiers in the world is American Patrick Deneen.

Last March, Deneen bolted down one of the world's steepest bump-filled courses, in Inawashiro, Japan, and won the world championship title in less than 48 seconds, scoring the second-fastest time on each of his two runs.

"He happened to put some of his best stuff of the year at the right time," said US head moguls coach Scott Rawles, "and 50 seconds is not a big window for two runs of skiing." It was Deneen's first victory, it was decisive, and it was just his second full season on the international circuit.

In addition, one month before Worlds, Deneen also out-performed all of his US teammates at the Vancouver Olympic test event, finishing in fourth place.

Deneen didn't exactly come out of nowhere - a year ago, he was voted the 2008 FIS Rookie of the Year thanks, in part, to a trio of third-place finishes on the World Cup - but one would have had to look pretty hard to find where Deneen grew up.

On a map, Cle Elum (klee ELL-um) is a tiny speck in the center of Washington state, on the east slope of the Cascade Mountains. Its 1,770 citizens include the five-member Deneen family.

Patrick, the youngest of three children, was born 21 Christmases ago and was raised on a horse-and-hay ranch. His father, Pat, Sr., managed a ski area. His mother, Nancy Harcus, raised quarter horses, and Patrick's bedroom was above the barn.

He quickly embraced both of his parents' passions.

As an equestrian, Patrick competed in reining, the same discipline as his mother. In reining, riders are judged on how well they can guide a horse through a pattern of moves that include sliding stops, circles, and spins, and changes of gait and direction. He won a few consecutive youth championships on his white gelding, "Spider." 

Deneen also grew up on skis.

As soon as he could walk, his father tucked him under his arm, walked into a Seattle ski shop, and said, "Guys, I need the smallest boots and skis you got."

Mr. Deneen was thinking about something Jean-Claude Killy once told him on a commercial shoot in the 1960's. "I had asked him, 'Why are you European racers so good? Why are you so much better than the US?' And he said, 'I don't remember ever not skiing.' It stuck with me for 20 years," Deneen said. "A really good skier just told me how you get really good skiers."

Yet the shop clerk replied, 'You're nuts!'"

Patrick was only 11 months old.

But after digging around in the back, they managed to find a tiny pair of boots and skis that were about 80 centimeters long (31 inches).

Mr. Deneen stuffed paper in the toes of the boots and took his only son to a small groomed run. Friends and family lined both sides of the slope, and as Patrick began sliding down the hill, one-by-one, from alternating sides of the run, an adult would call his name. Patrick would naturally look in the direction of the sound. And as he looked, his skis would turn. Left, right, left, right.

The next season, 2-year-old Patrick was skiing on his own but he had to beg ski patrollers to hoist him onto the lift because he was so small. At age 7, he started racing and excelled at slalom and giant slalom. At 12, he made the transition to moguls.

"It wasn't my ability to go fast that appealed to me at first," Deneen said about moguls, where speed counts for 25% of the score. "I liked the fact that there was jumping. It was different than skiing gates."

The sound of the turns was different, too. One rainy Memorial Day weekend up at Mt. Hood, Deneen was at a freestyle camp coached by former US freestyle team member Tony Gilpin.

"Most people made a swooshing sound around the bumps," Gilpin said, "and when I skied, I made a pounding noise. Patrick wanted to make the sound I was making and pound down the moguls really fast. I showed him the angle of the ski and what part of the mogul to ski on and it just clicked."

"It was really a turning point," Deneen said.

"I was basically teaching him to ski down the back side of the mogul," Gilpin explained. "The back side is sloped down the hill. If you're hitting the face of the mogul, you're going uphill and going slow. But to ski down the back side, you've got to have the right body position and trust that you're not going to fall over. He really got it. He was 9 or 10 - 11 at most.

Home schooling allowed Deneen to compete in all three of his loves - reining, ski racing, and moguls - and his parents were as involved as they could be.  

"In all my kids' lives, I missed only two events," said Pat, Sr.

"Not just games, but we attended every practice," Nancy added, explaining that she and Pat shared the philosophy that when they had kids, they wanted to create a close-knit clan by investing their energy in family pursuits. "We [parents] were really fortunate that we didn't have to work full time, except for ourselves, so we could interrupt our day."

Patrick was a versatile athlete, but as a teenager, he wanted to pursue excellence and that required focus.

"One day when he was about 14, he said, 'Mom, I'm going to have to concentrate more on my skiing,'" Nancy said. "He was so cute. He didn't want to disappoint me. He knew he could do horses at any age. He said he'd get back to it."

Two years after giving up equestrian, Deneen competed at the 2004 US Freestyle Nationals and was matched against the 2003 World Cup moguls champion Travis Cabral in dual moguls (a non-Olympic discipline in which two skiers compete side-by-side). In the round of eight, Deneen blew past Cabral, but the judges awarded the victory to Cabral based on the subjective components of the score: turns and air.

Although Deneen was eliminated, the 16-year-old's performance at Heavenly, Calif., turned heads.

"I think it was eye-opening for all of us," US coach Rawles said.

 Deneen made his World Cup debut less than a year later, in January 2005, but his season ended prematurely when patellar tendonitis in his left knee worsened to the point where he couldn't ski and he had to walk backwards down slight inclines.

For five months, Deneen sat around his parents' house. When the pain subsided, he changed the way he landed his jumps.  When he tried competing again, he did so without any expectations and did well enough to make the 2006 junior world championship team. At junior worlds, in just his second event after the injury, he captured a bronze medal in dual moguls.  

He made his way back onto the US team and ended his first full season emphatically. He ranked fifth in the 2008 year-end World Cup mogul standings, and his 2008 Rookie of the Year trophy was so big that it eclipsed his mother's equestrian trophies back home in Washington. (The two have a friendly hardware rivalry.)

Yet one US coach warned Patrick's dad at the season finale, "There's a sophomore year slump. You'd better be ready for it."

"I've never seen the kid slump in his life," Mr. Deneen thought.

Patrick went back to work immediately. He hadn't been flawless that year; he had several stumbles that had thrown off his timing, so he and Gilpin went to Blackcomb, B.C., for two weeks in the summer and solved the problem.

Deneen had another goal for the 2009 season. He would ramp up his speed even more. By doing so, his opponents would be forced go faster and if they couldn't handle the higher speeds, they would be prone to making errors.

Deneen knew he could handle the speed - not only technically, but physically.  

"Part of it, I think, is his mass, his size," Gilpin said of the 5-7,175 lb. Deneen. "He's not a tall moose. He's a little round meatball.  He has a powerful body and it's all compacted. It just rolls the down that hill - you get it going and it really goes. It's incredible to watch."

Sometimes Deneen's speed experiment worked, but sometimes it backfired. At the last two events before his World Championship debut, he failed to make the final round.

He flew home to Wahsington and spent 10 consecutive days working on a home-made jump on the ranch. His dad was there every day, towing Patrick to the top of the hill on a snowmobile while their border collie, Munchie, raced ahead of them. Deneen's mother filmed every jump. Four days before leaving for Japan, Deneen learned a new trick - a backflip with an iron cross, called a "Back X."

He had never tried it in competition, but it served him well in Japan. As the fourth-to-last skier to compete in the final, he laid down the fastest run of the day while sticking the Back X on the top jump and nailing a D-spin off the bottom air.

The three men who had beaten him in the qualifying round subsequently faltered, and the US had its first men's moguls world champion since Nate Roberts in 2005.

Patrick's father was there and hugged his son through the fence.

Suddenly that day at the Seattle ski shop 21 years ago, with his infant son tucked under his arm, didn't seem so loony.

Recently, Patrick was asked if he could remember a time when he was not skiing.

He thought about it for a while and said no - just like Killy, the three-time gold-medalist from France.

Then he quietly added something even more encouraging, "I never remember not being good at it."

Aimee Berg is a freelance contributor for teamusa.org. This story was not subject to the approval of the United States Olympic Committee or any National Governing Bodies.