Shortly after the 2022 Beijing Olympics, U.S. ski jumper Kevin Bickner decided to retire.

Bickner, age 25 at the time, was frustrated and burnt out. The first few years of his professional career were spent bouncing between the United States and Europe, where most ski jumping competitions take place. In 2017, he set a national ski flying record — a mark which still stands today. The next year, he earned a personal-best 39th-place finish on the World Cup circuit. He was the U.S.'s top ski jumper.

After that, his results on the international circuit started to decline, dropping to 51st during the 2019 World Cup season and 54th in 2020. Though he made the U.S. team for Beijing — his second Olympic appearance — his lackluster performances left him wondering if he had accomplished all he would as a professional athlete.

“I wasn’t enjoying the sport anymore,” said Bickner. “I decided that it was time to end that chapter of my life and join the real world.”

He spent the next year as a “ski bum,” racing down Utah’s snow-covered mountains all day and working a restaurant job at night. It took the pressure off the sport he had loved since he was 9 years old. 

Around the same time Bickner retired, the U.S. national squad entered into a cooperation with Team Norway, the longtime leader in the sport, in which the two countries agreed to share coaches, resources, training facilities and expertise. American athletes began moving their lives to Norway, training among Norwegian athletes and staff for the entire competition season.

It was a historic partnership with a monumental purpose. No American ski jumper has won an Olympic medal since the inaugural Winter Games in 1924 or cracked the top 10 in the World Cup since 2015. The United States needed help developing its skill, and Norway hoped to cultivate more competition to keep the sport alive.

As Bickner watched the new arrangement unfold from afar, he became curious about how precipitously his former peers were improving.

“I was watching from the sidelines because this sport has been a big part of my life, and I still wanted to stay involved to some degree. I would talk to my old teammates a lot and see how they were doing, and they were all talking about how great [the new system] was,” Bickner said. “I noticed it wasn’t one or two. Every single one of my teammates had a personal-best year for them.”

Soon, the people around him began encouraging him to dust off his USA jumping suit. Initially, he dismissed them. He enjoyed the slower pace of his new life, and he already had said goodbye to his time as a professional.

Or so he thought. After a lot of thinking — and one especially poignant conversation with his then-roomates — Bickner wondered if everyone was right.

“There was that little voice in the back of my head that kept telling me, ‘You never really reached your full potential. You always thought you could go further in the sport, and you quit early,'" Bickner remembered. 

It was a big commitment; it would mean trading his relaxed lifestyle for one based in a new country across the ocean from everything that was customary.

But Bickner was no stranger to making big changes. When he was 16, he moved from his childhood hometown outside Chicago to Park City, Utah, where the U.S. Ski Jumping Team is based. Then, for the eight years prior to his retirement, he and many of his teammates spent the majority of the year in Slovenia, which the United States used as its home base during competition season. 

So, he decided to give it a shot. In the two years since, he’s not only returned to his peak, but surpassed it.

Bickner finished the 2025 ski jumping season as the second-highest ranked U.S. man within the World Cup (28th) and the world ranking list (29th), as well as the highest in the Grand Prix (19th). All three results were personal bests. His performance also helped the U.S. men to an 8th-place finish in the Nations Cup — the nation's highest placement since the 1984-85 season.

It’s so much easier to enjoy the sport when you’re happy after every competition, and it’s a lot easier to keep the motivation going and to work hard when you’re satisfied with how you’re doing.

Since joining forces with Norway, American jumpers have gained access to force plates which measure balance and power, cameras which record and analyze jumps from multiple angles, artificial intelligence systems which identify weak spots and create specialized training plans accordingly, and more.  

The technology has revolutionized ski jumping. It’s an incredibly technical sport which requires athletes to maintain perfect form through every part of the jump. Because humans are not inherently aerodynamic beings, the skills ski jumping demands take years to refine.

Athletes typically take a maximum of just five or six jumps off a hill during every training session, Bickner said. That doesn’t offer much time to identify and fix any issues that come up.

“You can spend all this time on the hill, but it’s hard to make changes on the hill because everything goes so fast,” Bickner explained. “If you go in there and jump on [the pressure plate] 20 times, and after every jump you analyze it with your coaches, then you can figure out changes that you need to make and bring to the hill. That, I think, helps you make really big strides and helps make your jumps on the hill more productive."

Norway isn’t the only country with access to those resources, but combining that access with the wealth of expertise in Norway — collected over the almost 200 years since Norwegians invented the sport — completely changes the game.

“The way that [Norwegians] view the sport is very analytical. Every single thing I do is studied — each tiny little movement or position,” Bickner said. “I think that [I’m] really almost relearning the sport.” 

Bickner, now 29, has had to do a lot of relearning since his un-retirement. Not only has he changed his physical training regimen, but his mental one, too.

As a young ski jumper, Bickner put a ton of pressure on himself, he said. He thought about his athletic future not in time blocks based on a single season, but in terms of the four years between Olympic competitions. Instead of focusing on the tiny details, he mostly thought about the big picture. It was exhausting, both mentally and physically.

Though his schedule is a little more demanding than the one he followed during his days as a "ski bum," one thing he’s carried over from the break is the ability to slow down. That altered perspective has been instrumental in Bickner’s success this time around.

“I think I went into it with a completely different mindset,” Bickner said. “I was older. I had this prior experience. I knew the things I wanted to do differently, and I just kind of took a leap of faith.” 

It took Bickner some time to get his jumping legs back. During his first year back on the hill, he mostly competed on lower-level international competitions instead of the World Cup, and his results weren’t what he hoped. 

Bickner never questioned his decision to return to the sport, though. 

“I knew it was part of the process. This wasn’t going to be a one-year thing,” Bickner said. “It took a lot of hard work. It took a lot of frustration, but I knew I hadn’t yet honed my skills as well as they could be, so I just kept working at it.”

As another Olympic season approaches, the pressure to excel certainly exists. Being a part of a national team that hasn’t won an Olympic medal since 1924 carries its own unique weight. But Bickner’s true objective for this season, he said, is simple: progress. 

“It doesn’t matter how many times you go to the Olympics, that’s always a goal, but for me, I want to try and look at [my] longevity in the sport,” Bickner said. “[This year] doesn’t have to be a season where I’m breaking records or winning events all the time. I just want to continue that trajectory of having a better season than I did last year, because then it shows that I’m making steady improvements.”

For now, he’s just taking it day by day, jump by jump, and enjoying his time on the hill. 

“I think for the future of my career, it’s always uncertain until that season ends, and I analyze how I did that year and decide if I have the motivation to keep going forward or if I think my time in the sport is done,” Bickner said. “But I don’t expect to be done anytime soon.”