Can Kelly Sildaru stop Ailing (Eileen) Gu’s three-gold freeski charge?

From Estonia, a small Baltic nation without mountains, 19-year-old Kelly Sildaru arrives in Beijing for her first Winter Games as one of only a handful of freeskiers capable of knocking Team China’s Ailing (Eileen) Gu out of contention for a second Beijing 2022 gold, and potentially a historic Olympic treble.

“Since I was born, Estonia hasn’t had super good athletes winning in the Olympics,” Sildaru told Olympics.com ahead of the Games, vaguely aware of the likes of Andrus Veerpalu and Kristina Smigun – the cross country skiers who won Estonia’s only Winter Games' golds in 2002 and 2006.

“I kind of don't understand what it means in a way,” added Sildaru. “I feel like my parents and other [older] people in Estonia understand more the importance of what I'm doing right now than I do.”

It’s not technically Sildaru’s first trip to an Olympics (of a sort) as, in 2020, she won slopestyle gold at the Youth Olympic Games (YOG) in Lausanne, Switzerland when she was still just 17. It’s worth noting that she beat one Ailing (Eillen) Gu – who went home with the silver that day.

Sildaru was a full-fledged veteran at that stage as she’d already virtually exploded onto the action sports scene in Aspen in 2016, barely into her teens, to become the youngest gold-medal winner in X Games history when she took the gold in her favourite slopestyle.

It started an avalanche of success for Sildaru who won six slopestyle X Games and four Dew Tour golds between 2016 and 2022. She added a world championship to her CV in 2019, just a year after missing what would have been her first Olympic Games in 2018 with a damaged knee.

And while she competes in the halfpipe and big air freeski events, too, it’s the slopestyle – with its all-around