The World Cup: A Wide Variety of Skiers from Around the World

The world’s best aerial and mogul skiers come from all over the world to compete in the World Cup at the Deer Valley Resort. The World Cup is held from Thursday, February 4th until Saturday, February 6th. International competitions have been held at Deer Valley Resort for seventeen consecutive years, including the 2002 Winter Olympic games, fourteen World Cups, and two World Championships.

The World Cup brings a wide variety of skiers from all over the world, and it allows locals to come and enjoy watching those great competitors fly into the air and race their way to the podiums. About eight to ten thousand people come to support and attend the World Cup, many of which are locals, and the competitors - both male and female - show a vast variety of different tricks and skills throughout the competition.

About one week before the World Cup, volunteers prepare both the aerial hill and the mogul jumps. Their job is to build the mogul jumps, and keep them nice and intact; this is very important job, because throughout the day, the jumps do deteriorate. About fifteen volunteers create the jumps for the moguls. The procedure of making each of these jumps is simple but is very time consuming. They start with wooden box that is filled with snow and water from snow guns, and the snow freezes and is turned into ice, creating a hard, compressed jump for the skiers that is about three feet tall. There is a similar process to making the aerial jumps, although the volunteers instead blow snow and water onto concrete concrete walls made of plywood and steel.

The first place winner for male aerials was Qi Guangpu, who competed in the 2010 Winter Olympics, won a silver medal in the 2011 FIS Freestyle World Ski championships, and later won a gold medal in the 2013 and 2015 FIS Freestyle World Ski Championships, in Voss, Norway and Kreischberg, Austria. The first place winner in the Female aerialist was Yu Yang, representing China.

Above is the dual mogul course
from the competition.

For the male dual moguls, the winner was Anthony Benna, who competed in the 2010 and 2014 Winter Olympics, representing France. The winner for the female dual moguls was Justine Dufour-Lapointe, the reigning Olympic champion in the moguls and the youngest freestyle Olympic champion at the age of 19.

All of the competitors work very hard, but the support from the fans makes it all worth it in the end. The volunteers work hard as well, and contributed so much to help make the World Cup possible. The World Cup allows competitors from all over the world to show their skills and abilities, and grants so many possibilities to those skiers. A fun and interesting competition, it shows a variety of skiing, and hard working skiers.