Having returned to competition by winning in Ruka last weekend, French skier Perrine Laffont does not hide her joy.
Victorious in her return to competition after a year-long hiatus just days ago, 2018 Olympic ski mogul champion Perrine Laffont is delighted to continue “to write her little girl’s dream as she had promised herself”.
After the winning comeback in Ruka, Finland, the 26-year-old Pyrenean is expected again on the moguls’ wall on Friday, for an individual race, and on Saturday, for a parallel race, in Idre Fjall, Sweden. “Returning to competition was definitely one of the biggest challenges of my career”the five-time crystal ball winner and five-time world mogul champion explains on social media, the day after her victorious recovery.
“Am I capable of this? Am I still at the level? Do I still know what competition is?, he lists. Thousands of questions have run through my mind over the past few months. “But I think we can say: we did it! (we did it!)congratulates Laffont,“those who enjoyed skiing,those who skied with their heart and those who continue to write their little girl’s dream as thay promised themselves”.
623 days later
“It’s like a dream”she whispered with red eyes, when she won after 623 days without racing (since March 2023), ahead of her number one rival, the Australian Jakara Anthony.
His decision to definitively leave again to attack the magnate’s walls was, though, “pretty late”Laffont told AFP in early October, believing he had done so “I spent six months out of twelve resting”. If she has returned to training very gradually since May,without “the pressure to be ready in December”,“it was very recently that we said to ourselves that all the lights where green”.
“Last winter was a year without World Championships and the Olympics will come in 2026,” he explained. And then it also allowed me to digest these last ten years (at a high level). I felt like I would recover after the 2022 Olympics, but a lot was asked of me. I needed to cut it.
“The Games in France, I have no doubt they will be great”
“It was a good year to understand myself. For ten years I had been in a spiral, with my head on the handlebars, never to get back up. There were always new goals. This free time allowed me to analyze everything that had happened, even digest it, as my body and brain were in full swing. It was also a new understanding of my needs: I won everything in my sport, we asked ourselves the question of what was next, what I wanted to do after this year, he explained.I have a slightly clearer vision of the future, of what I want and need.”
Longer? “Obviously” in fourteen months there are the Milan Cortina Olympics. And those from 2030 attributed to the French Alps are “in the back of my mind”. “This summer I was able to experience the Paris Games from the inside. It makes you want it. I experienced the Games in South Korea (2018), China (2022), Russia (2014), they were not the most impressive. “The Games in France, I have no doubt they will be great.”