In the summer of 2017, at a ski camp for girls in Whistler, Canada, young campers were asked to write down a list of their future goals. One of the skiers in attendance that day was 16-year-old Megan Oldham. On a piece of paper, inside a journal decorated with vibrant colors and star-shaped gems, she began making her personal list.
The first goal showed just how far she wanted to go with skiing: “Become an Olympic champion,” she wrote down.
Next up was a general life goal, not too out of the ordinary: “Raise a happy family.”
And then she wrote down the final item: “First woman to land a triple.”
Becoming an Olympic champion was a very ambitious goal itself, but the third item may have been the boldest.
Earlier that year, Oldham had been watching X Games as fellow Canadian skier Kaya Turski and German skier Lisa Zimmermann became the first women to land double corks.
“That was fresh in my mind,” Oldham recalls, “and I was like, well, I can't be the first one to do a double. This is kind of a crazy reach, but maybe in, like, five years from now, I could be the first one to do a triple. So I just wrote it down.”
Progression can happen quickly, but the idea of triple corks in women’s skiing still seemed like a long way off. As for Oldham, she had talent, but she’d only started freeskiing less than two years earlier. She wasn’t even competing in pro contests yet.
Now, nearly nine years later, Oldham is about to compete in her second Winter Olympics for Canada. She’s already achieved one goal from her journal. Could another milestone be on the horizon?
'You're so close, yet no one remembers'
Before she was a freeskier, Oldham was a gymnast and figure skater. She’d even had some success in the early part of her gymnastics career, albeit at lower-level competitions.
Oldham had done some skiing with her family over the years, but once her older brother, Bruce, took up freeskiing, he realized that she might enjoy it as well — and that she might actually be quite good at it.
He encouraged her to give it a shot, but Oldham — skeptical of the idea — pushed back at first. After some persistence from Bruce, she agreed to do a trial day. Oldham was immediately hooked.
She found that her skills from gymnastics translated well to freeskiing. The feeling of being in the air and spinning around was what she loved most about gymnastics, but freeskiing introduced a greater sense of freedom.
“Freestyle skiing had that aspect that was really open where you could express what you wanted to and I really love that,” she says.
Oldham soon dropped her other sports. At 14 years old, she was getting a late start in freeskiing, but her background more than made up for it.
Although freeskiing had joined the Olympic program in 2014, the competitive side of the sport was not something on Oldham’s radar at first. She was content to show up on weekends and push herself to learn new tricks. But eventually she was introduced to small, local contests, and as things clicked, she continued to improve each weekend and soon found herself in higher-stakes competitions.
“All of a sudden, I snap my fingers and I'm already competing in World Cups or Nor-Ams,” she recalls. “It just happened really fast.”
Oldham took the World Cup circuit by storm, winning the slopestyle title as a rookie during the 2018-19 season. A few years later, she was in Beijing as a member of Canada’s 2022 Olympic team.
In her first event, big air, Oldham finished 4th behind China’s Eileen Gu, France’s Tess Ledeux and Switzerland’s Mathilde Gremaud.
“Fourth is such a bittersweet position,” Oldham says, “because you're so close, yet no one even really remembers.”
While the result was disappointing, she left with zero regrets.
“It was nice for me because I really did showcase my best skiing there,” she says. “I did the biggest tricks I'd ever done, I grabbed as well as I could, I landed as well as I could. I physically had nothing else that I could have put out there that would have scored better.”
Where she does have some regrets is the slopestyle contest that came afterward. Oldham finished 13th in the qualifying round, one spot shy of making the final, due at least in part to a miscalculation. Her plan had been to put down a clean run capable of getting her into the final, so she dialed back her trick on the final jump, as well as one of her rail tricks, and ended up missing the grab on that jump.
“I think I just needed to trust my ability to know that I do have those bigger tricks and that they are pretty consistent, and just stick with what my training had been,” she reflected.
The missed grab, in conjunction with the scaled-back run, cost Oldham enough points that she ended up a mere .36 behind Gremaud for the final spot. Oldham was eliminated, while Gremaud went on to win the final.
“I definitely felt like I left that Games a bit hungry to show more at this next Games,” she said, “because I do feel like there was potential for me to do better.”
A world first for women’s skiing
That summer, a few months after the Beijing Olympics, Oldham was going through her room when she came across her old ski camp journal and saw that goal she’d written down: “First woman to land a triple.”
Oh, wow, she thought to herself. I'm actually kind of close to being there. I wonder if that's something that's possible.
While training on an airbag in Austria that summer, she decided to try the triple cork 1440, a trick with three inverts and four rotations that had never been landing in women’s freeskiing. “That's when I was like, ‘Okay, this could be possible,’” she recalls.
A few months later, in December, she went to Australia for two-and-a-half weeks and did more airbag training. She started with double cork 1080s before progressing to triple cork 1440s. She experimented with different grabs, finding that a safety grab made it difficult to stay on-axis. A mute grab, on the other hand, gave her precisely the control she needed.
Afterward, she returned home for a 10-day period before heading off to X Games and recalls feeling nervous about the trick. Working with her sports psychologist, she instituted a daily routine.
Twice a day, Oldham visualized the trick in her head. And twice a day, she would stand up and physically go through all the motions she would be doing on the takeoff and in the air. Those four repetitions were all she would allow herself to do, but she did it every day while she was home.
“I just didn't want to do too many because I feel sometimes it can get in your head if you do it too much,” she says.
When Oldham arrived at X Games in January 2023, those daily repetitions were ingrained in her mind. X Games big air contests tend to produce some of the sport’s most progressive movements, and she was ready to do her part to make freeskiing history.
But Oldham had never landed the triple cork on snow before — only on an airbag.
On her first attempt, she got the rotation around, but due to the impact of the landing, she wasn’t able to ski out of it. It was the same result on her second attempt.
The third time was the charm. Oldham landed a smooth triple cork on her third attempt, crossing off item No. 3 from that list of goals she’d written five and a half years earlier. The end result was an X Games big air gold medal, one she would pair with a slopestyle gold medal later that weekend.
Of the emotions that flooded her, Oldham recalls a sense of relief most of all.
“I had so much built-up time and energy that had gone into it, that I was like, I really want this to come to life,” she says. “There was just a lot of relief, of happiness, of like, yay, all this hard work paid off.
“And then also, of course, there's this huge risk factor. So when you land something like that, you're like, oh my gosh, thank goodness I'm okay.”
Three years later, it’s still the accomplishment that sticks out most in her mind when she thinks about her career so far.
“That was just a whole process," she said, "not just the trick itself, but like, I think there was a lot of fear revolved around it, and knowing that no one's done it before, it just makes you a little bit anxious about the ‘what if.’
“I'm really proud of myself for putting in the time and effort to go after that dream and make it happen.”
Next up?
Oldham hasn't attempted a triple cork since that historic day. The big air jumps at World Cup events, which tend to be smaller than the one at X Games, typically aren’t conducive to it.
“I will do it again someday,” she says, “but I definitely think that it needs to be the right time and place.”
This season, Oldham said her focus would be on learning double corks in all four directions and upgrading the tricks she typically has in her runs.
“These days, the judges are really critical about clean runs,” she adds. “So having bigger tricks is great, but if you can't do them perfectly, they're not going to score well.”
Oldham finished 2nd in last year's World Cup standings for slopestyle before capping the season with slopestyle bronze at the world championships. This season's notable results have included a 2nd-place slopestyle finish at a U.S. Grand Prix event in Aspen and a 3rd-place big air finish at X Games. She now owns a total of four world championship medals and eight X Games medals.
Next up for the 24-year-old is the Milan Cortina Olympics, where she’ll be competing in slopestyle starting on Saturday, Feb. 7, and big air starting on Saturday, Feb. 14. She’s part of a loaded field of medal contenders in both events that includes Gu, Gremaud, Kirsty Muir (GBR), Naomi Urness (CAN), Flora Tabanelli (ITA) and more.
Oldham knows the bar will be set high, but that’s part of what motivates her to keep pushing the sport.
“I think it's sick that all these girls are going to events and rather than doing safe runs, we're all trying to show what we really can do,” Oldham says. “I want to be part of that movement — go to these events and not shy away from doing my bigger tricks, because I want to show the rest of the community that that's where the level's at.”
Now that Oldham has manifested one of her goals from nine years ago into reality, there’s another item from that list — “become an Olympic champion” — that’s attainable in Livigno. But a medal of any color would be a huge deal.
“I think it would just be indescribable,” she said of that prospect. “I think just knowing all the hard work that you put in and the goal that you have, I can't even really imagine what it’d feel like. But pure happiness, I'm sure. And a lot of excitement.”