Ryan St. Onge thought it was "a fluke, an accident" when he made the U.S. freestyle ski team at age 14.

At the 1997 Junior World Championships, St. Onge competed in the archaic discipline of ballet skiing, and the top three finishers automatically earned a place on the team.

"I was second," St. Onge said, "but there were only three people competing," and one of them was his older brother, Chad.

St. Onge had grown up skiing at Killington, Vt., and Winter Park, Colo. but had really come from a sailing family that lived in Connecticut, until he was 8. When Ryan was 9, his parents took him and his brother out of school to sail in the Caribbean for a year.

Their mother, Sara, had sailed across the Atlantic as a girl, and knew there was a lot to be learned at sea.

"At first, we did school on the boat the traditional way. My mom would sit us down with a textbook but pretty soon," he said, "I was learning dead reckoning and how to use the sextant and that was math class."

"Seven months later, any one of us could have single-handedly taken it across the ocean," he said. No matter that Ryan was in third grade.  "I loved it."

Yet in eighth grade, St. Onge found himself on the U.S. Ski Team - not entirely convinced that his accomplishment was legitimate.

He decided to explore it further and spent the summer of 1997 practicing all three freestyle disciplines (moguls, aerials, and ballet).  That fall, at another team selection event, he made the U.S. team for aerials in addition to ballet.

"It felt more like I made the team, as opposed to being let on it," St. Onge said.

It also meant that he was now a teammate of Eric Bergoust's, and St. Onge was mesmerized by the 1998 Olympic gold medalist's attention to detail.

"Eric was dominating aerials. He was so unique," he said. "I saw him twisting fast. I saw how he had the straightest jumps. And he would land perfectly straight."

As St. Onge would soon learn, Bergoust was also a mad scientist: immersed in the physics of the jump, the architecture of the ramps, and obsessed with studying the minutia of aerials.

For St. Onge to have access to Bergoust, he said, "was one of those mind-expanding experiences - to experience what excellence is."

Meanwhile, St. Onge was proving to be a natural when it came to learning the tricks.

"He was one of those kids - you'd look at him and just know the kid would do something great if he stayed in the sport," said Trace Worthington, the 1995 aerials world champion. "He had the skills. He was a natural acrobat. And he was a trampoline hog. He used to spend the entire day on it because he loved it - not because it was a job. He was like a skateboarder that way. He was having fun and you couldn't get him off it."

St. Onge had no idea that his lust for airtime would soon turn into a profound love for the sport during his second or third season.

"I think everyone has this moment, the first time they do a ‘lay full' (double flip with a twist)," St. Onge said. "It happens between the flip and the twist. You do your first flip, and you look down. You're still rising and you can see the ground getting smaller and smaller. And then you go weightless. I think when people find that moment for the first time - if you can appreciate it - you're never going to want to leave that moment."

His expectations began to rise and he started to think he had a realistic chance to make the 2002 Olympic team at age 19. To improve his odds, he learned three new triple jumps and had a strong start to the Olympic season. But his love suffered a severe jolt when he crashed hard on a ‘full, double full, full' (three flips and four twists). 

"I wasn't used to that," he said of the seismic wipeout.

He waited three weeks to try the trick again. When he did, he landed hard a second time and smashed his chin on his knee.

"It was like a switch went off," he said. "All my rushing and thinking I was good enough to skip over things to go up in difficulty - it all came to a head."

For the rest of the season, even his easy jumps went poorly by his standards, and he did not make the 2002 Olympic team.

"I knew something was wrong but I didn't know how to fix it," St. Onge said.

Only in the past three years did he figure it out, and the process of salvaging his technique, he said, "saved my life."

"This is by far the best I've ever seen him jump," U.S. aerials head coach Matt Christensen said in February.

If all goes well this week at the Freestyle World Championships in Inawashiro, Japan, St. Onge may earn a medal to go with his two World Cup victories this year - a season in which he finished second overall in the World Cup standings, the best ranking of his nine-year career.  

With the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games less than a year away, St. Onge feels like a different athlete compared to the lead-up to Torino where he made his Olympic debut.

In the four years before the 2006 Games, St. Onge won four World Cup events (including two during the Olympic season) but was not consistent enough to finish in the top-three at other competitions.  And in Torino, he didn't adapt well to change and his performance suffered.

"The day of the jump, I was saying, ‘Hey, everything's not perfect here and it's the Olympics. Things are supposed to be perfect at the Olympics. I need it to be perfect to jump.

"Had I just accepted it and said, ‘OK, this is how it is,' I'm sure it would have had a positive effect on my performance."

In the stands were his parents, who had interrupted their seven-year around-the-world sailing odyssey to see him compete. During their years at sea, Ryan had occasionally joined them on their 60-foot boat when he had long training breaks. He would get on in faraway places like New Caledonia and disembark on islands such as Vanuatu. During the Games, the St. Onges docked their vessel in Thailand and flew to Italy to watch their youngest son ski, but Ryan's Olympic moment was brief.

In the qualifying round, St. Onge dragged his right hand upon landing his first jump. His second jump was clean, but his total score ranked 16^th, and only the top 12 athletes advanced to the final.

Two other Americans, Bergoust and Joe Pack (the 2002 Olympic silver medalist), didn't make the final cut either, but St. Onge was so haunted by what he had done that when he went to bed, he said his right hand "felt like it was on fire. I could still feel it rubbing up against the snow all night long."

After the Games, St. Onge's parents decided to separate. At the end of the 2007 season, Ryan met his father, Cary, in Thailand, and the two sailed back to the U.S. to sell the boat.

Around the same time, St. Onge was re-examining his own relationship (with aerials) and decided to make a major change.

He knew he was having problems with his takeoff, but didn't realize the extent of it until he reunited with his old coach Todd Ossian for private sessions in Park City, Utah. Ossian re-introduced him to the attention to detail that St. Onge was lacking, and employed Dartfish video technology, which enables coaches to overlay different attempts at the same jump for comparison and analysis.

"You have about 17 feet in which you have to go very smoothly from vertical to horizontal," St. Onge explained. "You have to stay straight throughout the whole process or you lose rotation.

"Most of the time, I'd try to stay too straight the entire way up the jump. I didn't lean back enough and I'd come off the ramp too vertical.

"Another problem is that the more forward you are on the jump, the more G forces you have and when you're facing two to three Gs on takeoff, it doesn't matter how strong you are. The pressure at the top of the jump crumples you.

"I had been searching for solutions and resolutions since 2002. I'd try all sort of crazy things that didn't lead anywhere. One idea was to get into a huge pike going into the jump and extend it at the top," he said.

Ossian helped St. Onge devise a four-year plan to address his flaws. Then, in the summer of 2008, St. Onge left the aerials scene in Park City and moved to the Olympic Training Center in Lake Placid, and worked with Dmitriy Kavunov, a Soviet-born gymnast who coached Canada's aerials team at the 2006 Olympics. 

Kavunov's largest contribution to St. Onge's plan was consistency.

"He only let me take a jump when I knew I was going to land it," St. Onge said. "I was used to being the guy who would take 35 triples in a summer day. I cut it down to five or six triples a day and they all had to be exactly what he wanted, or you'd go home. We didn't work through the problems. I just had to nail it."

"For me," Kavunov said, "a high number of jumps makes sense when you do good, but if you do 20 and miss 10, it doesn't make sense to do 20. I think maybe in his old trampoline practice, he never paid enough attention to this."

There is no way to simulate a takeoff (or a landing) on a trampoline, however. So all summer, they used a ramp covered with synthetic material that allowed him to ski down to the kicker, take off, and land - ski boots and all - into a swimming pool.

The result of the perfect-or-nothing approach "was that it didn't allow bad habits back into my training," St. Onge said. "You're not just getting rid of the habit - you're not letting it resurface."

To improve consistency, St. Onge also had to scale back the difficulty of his tricks which, in aerials judging, automatically devalued his scores.

"It was 100% a step backwards," he said, "and it was difficult because the U.S. Ski Team relies on results to operate. They measure success in terms of medals and that's how coaches are held accountable. So for me to take a step back and not worry about results for two years went kind of counter to the U.S. plan for me.  I still haven't proven to them that I went the right way, but for me, I felt I had to do it to keep jumping."

When St. Onge finally increased the difficulty factor on January 30, at the World Cup in Deer Valley, Utah, he earned his first victory in more than two years. Two weeks later, after his 26^th birthday, St. Onge won again in Moscow.

"You see a huge change," said Worthington. "There's no second-guessing. Before, it was like, ‘Hopefully I'll pull it off. Now, you can tell he's saying, ‘Watch this'"

"Initially, I thought his plan was too complex," said coach Christensen, "but it's clearly working. I think he's 80 percent of the way there. His landings are coming back fast. When he peaks, it's going to be perfect for the 2010 Olympics."

Aimee Berg is a freelance contributor for teamusa.org. This story was not subject to the approval of the United States Olympic Committee or any National Governing Bodies.

Tags: 2006, 2010, Freestyle Skiing, Ryan St. Onge