“I had won everything, I was wondering what would happen next”… Perrine Laffont looks back on her long break of over a year

La skieuse de Lavelanet a gagné sa première épreuve de Coupe du monde, le 30 novembre en Finlande, pour son grand retour à la compétition. MAXPPP – Grégory YETCHMENIZA

The Ariège mogul skier made a winning return to the World Cup after a 21-month break. Rejuvenated, she is enjoying this successful challenge at 26 and is even considering pushing on to the 2030 Olympic Games in France.

Victorious upon her return to competition after a one-year break a few days ago, the 2018 Olympic mogul ski champion Perrine Laffont is looking forward to continuing to write her “little girl's dream”as she had promised herself. After her winning comeback in Ruka, Finland, on November 30, the 26-year-old from Ariège is expected back on the moguls wall, this Friday, December 6, for an individual event, and Saturday, for a parallel race, in Idre Fjall, Sweden.

Read also: Mogul skiing: Frenchwoman Perrine Laffont wins in Ruka for her return

“Coming back to competition was surely one of the biggest challenges of my career”, opens the five-time winner of the crystal globe and five-time world champion in moguls on social networks the day after her victorious comeback. “Am I capable of it ? Am I still at the level ? Do I still know what competition is ?, she lists.Thousands of questions have crossed my mind in recent months.” “But I think we can say: we did it! (we did it!)”, rejoices Laffont, who “enjoyed skiing with all her heart” and who continues to write her childhood dream as she had promised herself”.

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623 days without competition

“It's like a dream”, she breathed, her eyes red, when she won after 623 days without competition (since March 2023), ahead of her rival No. 1, the Australian Jakara Anthony. His decision to set off again for good to attack the mogul walls was however “quite late”, Laffont said at the beginning of October, estimating that he had “spent six months out of twelve resting”.

Queen of freestyle, Perrine Laffont has Won it all. Olympic moguls champion at 19, world champion and five-time World Cup winner. EPA – MAXIM SHIPENKOV

If she has resumed training very gradually since May, “without pressure to be ready in December, it was very recently that we said to ourselves that all the lights were green.” A year earlier, the skier from Ariège, “on her knees”, had given up on the 2023/2024 season to “regain mental freshness”. “The batteries were at zero at the end of winter” 2022/2023, rewound the one who was already participating in the Olympics at only 15 years old, in 2014 in Sochi (Russia).

“Last winter was a year without a World Championship and the Olympics are coming in 2026, she justified. And then it was also to allow me to digest these last ten years (at a high level). I felt that I had bounced back after the 2022 Olympics (and the disappointment of its 4th place, editor's note), but it had asked a lot of me. I needed cut.”

The 2030 Olympics “in a corner of the mind”

“It was a good year to understand myself. I had been in a spiral for ten years, with my head down, never getting up. There were always new goals. This time off allowed me to analyze everything that had happened, to digest it too, because my body and brain were pulling. It was a new understanding of my needs too: I won everything in my sport, we asked ourselves what was going to be next, what I was going to want to do after this year, she explained. I have a slightly clearer vision of the future, of what I want and need.”

Read also: Mogul skiing: Perrine Laffont crowned in parallel, her fifth world title

In the short term ? Laffont hopes to “increase crescendo” her level and makes the next World Championships in March 2025 in Switzerland the No. 1 objective of her recovery winter. In the longer term ? “Of course” there are the Milan Cortina Olympics in fourteen months. And those of 2030 attributed to the French Alps are “in a corner of the mind”.

“I was able to experience the Paris Games from the inside this summer, it makes you want to go, concludes the champion. I experienced Games in South Korea (2018), China (2022), Russia (2014), they were not the most spectacular. Games in France, I have no doubt that it will be grandiose”.