Perrine Laffont dreamed of becoming at the age of 23 the first double Olympic champion in the history of mogul skiing: she missed out on her final of the 2022 Olympics on Sunday and will leave China with a very disappointing fourth place.
A few tenths of a point from third place
With a total of 77.36 points, Laffont achieved his worst passage on the Chinese track. She failed just a few tenths of points from third place on the podium occupied by the Russian under neutral flag Anastasiia Smirnova (77.72). The gold went to the untouchable Jakara Anthony (83.09), ahead of the American Jaelin Kauf (80.28). For the 23-year-old skier, crowned Olympic champion four years ago when no one was expecting her at such a party, this is a huge disappointment. She had dominated the three seasons following her coronation in Pyeongchang (South Korea), winning the World Cup and winning the big freestyle skiing crystal globe in 2019 and 2020.
During a slightly more complicated 2022 Olympic season in the World Cup against competition, in particular from Anthony and the Japanese Anri Kawamura (only 5th in the final on Sunday), she had revived in a good way in January and in February at two events in North America.
Failed to “let go”
On the Zhangjiakou track, she had achieved a good qualification on Thursday evening with 81.11 points. But on Sunday, during her three “runs”, she never managed to improve her score (79.86 in round 1, 77.62 in round 2 and therefore 77.36 in round 3). She admitted after her final that she had not “managed to relax” to join the fight to reproduce what she was doing in training and to mingle with the Olympic gold that she so wanted. “It’s not the result we wanted and it’s hard,” she said in the mixed zone.
“I didn’t manage to ski like I did in qualifying. It’s still Olympics, it’s one day races and it happens. I don’t know what happened in the whole throughout the evening, while training had gone well,” she added. Having become the headliner of the French winter sports team at the Olympiad between Pyeongchang and Beijing, Perrine Laffont was one of the great hopes for the title at the 2022 Olympics. With the silver medal in the mixed biathlete relay, the tricolor counter remains stuck on a podium after the first two days of competition in China.