Alex Jenson’s Olympic dream is within reach.
Over the past month, though, that reality has been equally exciting and frustrating.
“It’s right there,” the 20-year-old Waterville freestyle skier said by phone Wednesday. “It’s hard because you know that you can do it.”
After training sessions Wednesday and Thursday, Jenson finished eighth in the U.S. Freestyle National Championships beginning Friday in Steamboat Springs, Colorado.
The event, which concludes Sunday, is another step in what Jenson hopes will lead her to her goal of competing in the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea. More important for her immediate future, she enters the weekend fresh off the best performance of her career and with one of the rougher stretches as a full-time skier behind her.
On March 5, Jenson took home her first win on the North American Cup circuit in Killington, Vermont, in the moguls, and also added a sixth-place result in dual moguls the following day. Her previous best finish as a member of the U.S. National Ski Development Program was sixth, a spot she earned on four separate occasions.
“It was one of the more challenging courses,” Jenson said of the win. “It was a pretty icy course, but growing up on the East Coast I’ve skied way worse at Killington so it wasn’t all that different from what I’ve done in the past.”
The win was a big relief, Jenson said. In the three Nor-Am Cup races prior to the March 5 victory, she placed 34th, 33rd and 12th, respectively, in moguls races.
“It was pretty frustrating,” Jenson said. “Skiing wasn’t fun for a little bit.”
That, she said, was the biggest change she and her coach, Chris Marchetti, made prior to the victory. They wanted to make skiing fun again. Whether it was the pressure of being an Olympic hopeful or trying to balance skiing full time while studying biology part time at the University of Utah, the reason she got into the sport got lost in the shuffle.
“I was kind of putting so much emphasis on this season to ski well that it was kind of taking away from what I was capable of, and we kind of pinpointed that,” Jenson said. “It was kind of, just like, take away the seriousness of it and come up with a different game plan, because I was having a tough time skiing top to bottom runs.”
For Jenson, it was getting back to how she felt when her parents first took her skiing as a 2-year old in Taos, New Mexico, or the weekend ski trips to the family condo at Sugarloaf after they moved to Maine.
It was about recapturing that feeling when she first got into freestyle skiing at the suggestion of a former coach at a trampoline camp at Carrabassett Valley Academy in Kingfield as a 9-year-old.
“(Marchetti) said we’re going to change the game plan and we’re going to have fun with this now,” Jenson said. “It kind of took the stress away.”
Jenson added that she felt good heading into this weekend’s competition, particularly given that she had a week off to prepare after skiing in four competitions in four consecutive weeks. Her hope is to have a strong finish to the season before returning to her training in Utah.
“I just kind of have to ski my runs and have a solid Nor-Am tour and post scores needed to make the team,” she said. “After we finish up here I’ll take a couple of weeks off, let my body recover and then get right back into training at the Utah Olympic Park.”
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