Vail skier will leave Youth Olympic Games with 2 gold medals
Fellow SSCV skiers Porter Huff and Jiah Cohen took second and fourth, respectively, in the men's competition
Thomas Lovelock/ OIS via AP
Liz Lemley is a two-time Youth Olympic Games gold medalist.
The Ski and Snowboard Club Vail prodigy claimed her second win in Gangwon, South Korea on Saturday, defeating Australia’s Lottie Lodge in the big final to win the dual moguls gold medal at Jeongseon High 1 Ski Resort. On Friday, she teamed up with fellow SSCV skier Porter Huff to win the mixed team dual moguls competition.
“I’m honoured to have the first gold medals in dual moguls in the (Youth) Olympics. It’s a beautiful feeling,” Lemley told Olympics.com.
A new round-robin format was utilized in the heats of this first-ever Youth Olympic Games dual mogul event. The four winners of the five-person groups advanced to the semifinals. All four Americans — Lemley and Steamboat Springs’ Abby McLarnon and SSCV’s Porter Huff and Jiah Cohen — won their respective groups.
“It’s was an incredible achievement to have all of our athletes earn spots in the finals,” said Freddy Mooney, who served as U.S. moguls coach, in an email.
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“Half of the eight finalists today were our four American athletes.”
Lemley defeated Manuela Passaretta of Italy 25-10 in a semifinal and took down Lodge 22-13 in the big final.
“I think it’s really cool,” Lemley said of her win. “I’ll bring home that I was bib one here and maintained my position and I think I learned how to be at the top.”
McLarnon, who defeated Passaretta 19-16 in the small final, couldn’t help but offer praise to her fellow Coloradan.
“I love Liz so much,” McLarnon told Olympics.com. “She just knows how to do this. She is so good at finding the right things to do, and when to do them.”
On the men’s side, Huff made his way to the final, where hometown favorite Lee Yoon Seung claimed the gold in a tight 18-17 win. Cohen barely missed landing on the podium again as well (he was third in the mixed team event with McLarnon), falling to Takuto Nakamura 19-16 in the small final.
“It was good. I felt solid through my heat races and then the lights got a bit dim, but it was fine. I just tried to ski as fast as I could,” Huff said of his run before adding that he believes dual moguls will be a great addition to the Milano-Cortina 2026 Olympic Winter Games.
“One event is just not enough for moguls.”
Lemley, who made her World Cup debut at 15, finished the 2023 season ranked fifth in the overall World Cup moguls standings and fourth for dual moguls. She is 10th this year after opening her season with a second-place finish in Ruka, Finland on Dec. 12. All told, she has five top-5 World Cup finishes to her name.
The World Cup will make its way to Utah this weekend for moguls and dual moguls competitions at Deer Valley Feb. 1-3. The site of the 2002 Olympics is significant in Lemley’s journey.
“It was my dad’s idea,” the 18-year-old said of her start in the sport. “After college, he watched the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. He was really inspired by moguls and he wanted to get me and my brother into mogul skiing. So we started skiing really early and got in the moguls programme.”
Lemley hopes to continue flying on — and off — the slopes. She earned her pilot’s license to fly four-seaters and prop planes last year.
“It feels good, like fun. My dad’s a pilot and he has his own plane, so I’ve been flying in that most of my life, and I’ve just really loved flying,” she said. The U.S. Ski and Snowboard profile indicates she’d like to one day join the Air Force and SpaceX.
“I’d love to fly a fighter jet,” she said to Olympics.com.
“I think my dream would be [to fly] an aerobatic plane, to really fly and do a lot of aerobatics, but I just really want to keep flying the rest of my life, so I don’t really care where just maybe commercial pilot, maybe just for fun.”
Her favorite aspects of mogul skiing translate to her other aeronautics aspirations, too.
“It’s really technical and it takes a lot of discipline, hard work and focus just to get the run down,” she said. “It’s hard but I find that really fun and it makes me feel good about myself.”
Based on what she’s seen on the moguls course over the last two days, McLarnon isn’t about to doubt her teammate’s ambitions.
“Moguls is about having the confidence to keep going, and being in the right mental state. You can do anything when you believe you can,” she said. “If Elizabeth says she’s going to go into space, she will probably do that.”
