Can Kelly Sildaru stop Ailing (Eileen) Gu’s three-gold freeski charge?

From Estonia, a small Baltic nation without mountains, 19-year-old Kelly Sildaru arrives in Beijing for her first Winter Games as one of only a handful of freeskiers capable of knocking Team China’s Ailing (Eileen) Gu out of contention for a second Beijing 2022 gold, and potentially a historic Olympic treble.

“Since I was born, Estonia hasn’t had super good athletes winning in the Olympics,” Sildaru told Olympics.com ahead of the Games, vaguely aware of the likes of Andrus Veerpalu and Kristina Smigun – the cross country skiers who won Estonia’s only Winter Games' golds in 2002 and 2006.

“I kind of don't understand what it means in a way,” added Sildaru. “I feel like my parents and other [older] people in Estonia understand more the importance of what I'm doing right now than I do.”

Youth Olympic champion in 2020

It’s not technically Sildaru’s first trip to an Olympics (of a sort) as, in 2020, she won slopestyle gold at the Youth Olympic Games (YOG) in Lausanne, Switzerland when she was still just 17. It’s worth noting that she beat one Ailing (Eillen) Gu – who went home with the silver that day.

Sildaru was a full-fledged veteran at that stage as she’d already virtually exploded onto the action sports scene in Aspen in 2016, barely into her teens, to become the youngest gold-medal winner in X Games history when she took the gold in her favourite slopestyle.

It started an avalanche of success for Sildaru who won six slopestyle X Games and four Dew Tour golds between 2016 and 2022. She added a world championship to her CV in 2019, just a year after missing what would have been her first Olympic Games in 2018 with a damaged knee.

And while she competes in the halfpipe and big air freeski events, too, it’s the slopestyle – with its all-around requirements and the word style built right into the name – where she excels.

It’s what she enjoys best too.

“My favourite is slopestyle because I've been doing it the longest and also I feel it's more interesting,” she said of the event consisting of a course which combines rails and jumps and asks for near-perfection and a varied set of skills.

Slopestyle preferences for Sildaru

“The halfpipe is like one thing and big air is just one jump,” added Sildaru, who’s become known for her ability to spin in any direction, left or right, skiing regular or switch (backward). “But in slopestyle, you have so many different things you can do, and I think that's really cool and exciting.”

It is here, in the slopestyle event at Beijing 2022, where Sildaru has the best chance to stop tournament darling Ailing (Eileen) Gu – born in the United States but competing for host nation the People’s Republic of China – from becoming the first action-sports athlete to win three gold medals at the same Games.”

Whereas Gu is an acrobat first – a skill set that helped her win her first gold medal here in China in the Olympic big air debut, Sildaru is a creator. She pulls tricks in the rail section that the rest of the field simply can’t match.

“I'm a rails skier more -- I don't like doing jumps too much,” added Sildaru who rarely falls and just seems to ooze class on the slopestyle course. “I mean, if I had to choose rails or jumps, I would definitely choose rails. And I think it's because I've just worked on so many rails back home in Estonia, and I just feel so much more comfortable.”

The slopestyle course is for the freeskiers who can do it all – get technical through the rails, go big on the jumps and go clean. As USA men’s freeski slopestyle specialist – and Beijing 2022 big air silver medallist Colby Stevenson said: “You have to have the fluidity, creativity, amplitude, you know, going big, and, like, basically perfection.”

While all the pre-Games talk has been focused on Gu – the fashion model and freeski prodigy who’s heading to Stanford University in the fall – the quiet Sildaru has been ramping up toward her big debut a bit under the radar.

On the outside looking in

Sildaru is no longer the youngest on the tour and has recovered from the ACL injury in 2018 that saw her miss a whole year. In the most recent FIS world cup season, she’s won two out of the three slopestyle events – with France’s Tess Ledeux – who earned silver behind Gu in the recent women’s big air competition – winning the other one.

It’s quite an achievement, considering she had to do a lot of her winning last year skiing without poles after suffering a broken wrist.

Occupying a space outside of the media frenzy that’s swirling around Gu, Sildaru is in striking distance to earn Estonia’s first Winter Games gold medal in 16 years (and the first outside cross country skiing).

“I'm just super happy to be here at the Olympics and be healthy right now,” said Sildaru, the rail queen from unlikely origins, who’s got the style and the goods to cause a major upset to the host nation’s ambitions.

“So, yeah, that's the kind of thing for me right now,” she shrugged, ready for what comes. “Winning a medal here at the Olympics, that would mean so much to me."