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Park City’s Nick Page off to strong start

Moguls skier opens World Cup season in fourth

Nick Page twists through the air during his qualifying run at last season's Deer Valley World Cup event. Page opened the season with a fourth-place finish in Finland.
David Jackson/Park Record

Seven-hundredths of a point. That’s how much separated Park City moguls skier Nick Page and Australia’s Matt Graham for the third spot on the podium during the first moguls World Cup event of the season in Ruka, Finland on Dec. 3. 

Page narrowly missed out on his second career World Cup podium, but that was the kind of start to the season he was hoping for. 

The same could be said for the rest of the American freestyle skiing team. Park City’s Cole McDonald came in eighth, and Olivia Giaccio and Jaelin Kauf led the U.S. women’s moguls team with top-five placements. On the aerials side, Chris Lillis and Justin Schoenefeld scored top-eight finishes, and three American women placed in the top eight of their event.



“It’s nice to see our team doing well,” Page said. “I’ve had my foot on the gas pedal, but I’ve seen a lot of people around me have done similar. So, just to see them also get really strong results and also be skiing with a lot of confidence and be right on that edge knocking on the door of podiums and wins is really cool. And I think it shows how strong our team is looking.”

Page had the third-highest score in the qualifying round and easily advanced to the first finals round. He once again had the third-best score in that round to move on to the six-man superfinal. 



The Parkite had the slowest run of the five men who finished, but he made up for it with his air scores. Page ramped up the degree of difficulty when he landed a cork 1440 on his second jump.

“I knew I kind of made a little bit of a mistake at the top of the run, so about halfway down the middle section, I realized I needed to pull out that big cork 1440 if I still wanted a chance to stay relevant and stay in the mix with Mikael Kingsbury,” Page said. “About 10 moguls before the bottom air, I committed just to doing that big trick that I wasn’t planning on. I was able to land it and score some more points that I desperately needed at that time.”

Page’s trick score of 17.8 was nearly a point and a half higher than the next competitor in the superfinal round, and in a tight field, it was almost enough to put Page on the podium. Just over a point separated second-place Ikuma Horishima and fifth-place Ludvig Fjallstrom. For Page, a few mistakes cost him.

“If you go back through the results, (there were) about three points in deductions, and that kind of came from the landing on the bottom air and a little bobble in the top section,” Page said. “You take those three points off – let’s say I ski a nice run that doesn’t get any deductions – and that run’s an 83. Ski a little bit faster, it’s an 84, and boom, an 84 is the winning score. It’s definitely within grasp, I just need to stay patient with it and know that I’ve got it in the tank.”

It was still an encouraging start for Page, who scored a sixth-place World Cup finish and a junior world championship title following his fifth-place finish at the Olympics. The World Cup stops in Idre Fjall, Sweden, this weekend, and it’s the site of Page’s sole World Cup podium back in 2020. There will be two more stops before Page and the world’s best moguls skiers duke it out at Deer Valley in early February.

“The pieces have been there, I’ve shown that I can do it,” Page said. “But now, it’s starting to be at a place where it feels much more consistent and somewhere where I can really stand in that gate, thinking, ‘What do I have to do to win this run?’ rather than ‘Man, I’m going to try to ski the best run that I can and hope that it gets close.’ So, I’m definitely getting to a spot where there’s a lot of confidence and somewhere where it’s much more competitive, which is exciting.”


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