Sports
Norge Ski Club's Bickner Earns Second Straight Olympic Berth
Wauconda's Kevin Bickner won the U.S Olympic Team Trials in ski jumping and heads to Beijing hoping to follow his 18th-place finish in 2018.
FOX RIVER GROVE, IL — Kevin Bickner already has one Winter Olympics appearance under his ski jumping belt, but that didn’t keep the Wauconda native from asking for another one for Christmas.
And on Saturday, Bickner got exactly what he wished for. Bicker, a member of the Norge Ski Club, earned his second straight spot onto the U.S. Olympic ski jumping team by recording the longest jump at the Olympic Team Trials in Lake Placid, New York.
Bickner, 25, heads to Beijing for the start of the Winter Olympics in early February, four years after he was the top American finisher in PyeongChang. On Saturday, he completed a jump of 96 meters on his first effort before following that jump with a 96.5-meter jump to secure the first-place finish.
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“There is a lot of work that went into this,” Bickner said in a press release. “Over the past year, I’ve been coming back from some time off and get back to where I was a couple years ago. I’m super excited to be going back to the Olympics. It has been a little but more difficult this time around and I knew this was going to be an important event to win to secure that spot.”
Bicker heads to Beijing hoping to follow up on his 18th place finish in the normal hill competition in 2018. His performance in PyeongChang was the best by an American in 16 years.
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Bickner holds the U.S. distance record at 244.5 meters and earned the Olympic berth after finishing ahead of fellow American Decker Dean. The remaining spots on the U.S. team will be determined in upcoming European competitions ahead of the start of the Beijing Winter Games.
Bickner starting ski jumping competitively at age 9.
“I remember as young as 3 years old, he was constantly climbing on things and jumping on this and that and it was almost more worrisome (than ski jumping),” his mother, Maureen Bickner, told TeamUSA.org in 2018 for a feature story. “It was good to get him into a sport where he could have that adrenaline rush in a controlled way.”
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