Happy New Year!

Welcome to my first blog post of 2019! I’m currently in Calgary, Canada, where the first World Cup of the year will be going down tomorrow! (: Since my final post of 2018, I’ve been training on a few different venues in Colorado to make some final adjustments before the North American leg of the World Cup Tour that takes places during the remainder of January. The next 3 stops on the World Cup Tour (in Calgary, Lake Placid, and Mont Tremblant) serve as the final qualifying events for World Championships in Deer Valley, Utah (the home mountain of the US Moguls Team, my home crowd, and my absolute favorite stop on tour!!) !

Holiday Training – Winter Park, CO

First up for this training block was Winter Park, where a few of my teammates and I trained on Ambush alongside the Australian National Team and a development Australian team — the Australian Mogul Skiing Academy. We were greeted with soft snow, sunny weather, and an epic full course, creating the perfect training environment for a few days.

The mogul course at Winter Park (Photo: The Mogul Skiing Academy).

During these 8 days of training before the next 3 World Cup stops, my biggest goal was to train lots of competition-style top-to-bottom runs in order to foster overall consistency, qualitative execution, and iron out any and all mistakes. I’m pretty happy with how I accomplished this goal both in Winter Park, and our second and final stop for a few more days of training — Telluride, Colorado! For a sneak peek of my favorite run from Winter Park, click here!

Next Stop – Telluride, CO

Switching venues gave me the opportunity to practice learning the ins and outs of an entirely new course — a task that I am faced with regularly when moving from one event to the next on the World Cup Tour. Strategy with respect to how you attack the course is incredibly important and has the potential to propel your competition run to the top of the field, especially on a technically challenging venue.

While in Telluride, I was also faced with a few other variables that gave me great practice for my upcoming competitions. One such variable was the course conditions — on our final day of camp, we were met with nearly a foot of fresh snow! Also while in Telluride, we were granted with the opportunity to do an exhibition-like mogul show that some of the general public stopped by to watch. This was a fantastic competition-simulation scenario for me and allowed me to put some of the skills I’d been working on to the test!

Ready to GO (:

All in all, I feel more ready than ever to attack the upcoming events throughout the rest of January, starting tomorrow!! In other news, our Men’s Team completed qualifications today and 4 boys made it through to tomorrow’s 16-person final round! (That’s the most we’ve had qualify for finals so far this year, which is super exciting!!)

I’ll aim to send out regular updates as I compete over the next month, so keep an eye out both here on www.oliviagiaccio.com and on my Facebook Athlete Page for more! (:

The course I’ll be competing on this weekend in Calgary, Alberta!

The Australian & US Women’s Teams at the bottom of the course after Day 2 of Official Training.

As always, thanks for tagging along!!

All the best,

Olivia