Olympic Skier Kai Owens Embraces Personal History in Return to China

The 17-year-old moguls star was adopted and raised in Colorado, but her sport brought her back to the country where she was born.

ZHANGJIAKOU, HEBEI, China — Fifteen years or so ago, hundreds of miles south of this wind-whipped ski town, Amy and Jonathan Owens walked into a hotel conference room to meet their new daughter. Then 14 months old, the girl was asleep in the arms of her orphanage’s nanny when the American couple arrived, and upon waking she began to cry at the sight of the strangers there to adopt her. “She calmed down pretty quickly,” Amy says. “We were fortunate in that way.” At the time the girl was called Shiqi, but they made that her middle name and instead rechristened her as Kai, which in Mandarin means “victorious.”

Now 17, Owens didn’t live up to her name in the literal sense Sunday night at Genting Snow Park, where she finished 10th in women’s moguls at the 2022 Winter Games behind, among others, silver medalist and fellow U.S. freestyle skier Jaelin Kauf. Then again, it’s hard to imagine anyone in the 30-member field—not even eventual winner Jakara Anthony of Australia, whose stellar final run had a cadre of Aussie reporters hollering and hugging one another in the media mixed zone–better exemplifying the idea of an Olympic champion than Owens, given the boomeranging journey she had to take just to reach the bottom of that bumpy hill.

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Abandoned in a town square in the city of Lu’an as a newborn, Owens moved to the United States after her adoption and quickly took to her parents’ Coloradan lifestyles, landing stateside in October and first stepping into skis that winter. By 2 1/2 she was able to navigate moguls, and at 3 she could hold a “zipper line” on the tricky terrain, zooming straight down the fall line with her hips gyrating and her upper body still.

“She’d just go, turn-turn-turn-turn,” Amy Owens says. “The coaches were like, ‘Yeah, that's really not normal.’” Three years later she started freestyle skiing; by 14 she had become the youngest American to win a continental cup competition; and in 2021 she was named rookie of year on the World Cup women's moguls circuit. “She was hooked,” Amy says. “Just loving it.”

Embracing her personal history took more time. This was true at school, where she was often the only Asian kid in her class, and on the slopes too. “For a long, long time, she didn’t want the ski community knowing she was adopted,” Amy says. “Because she didn’t want her adoption to be bringing her attention. She wanted her ski abilities to be bringing her attention.”

But that is changing. She wears a jade necklace gifted by her parents, a nod to her birth name. (The character for “shi” means poem, and “qi” is a form of fine jade, Amy says.) She studies Mandarin. Last week she FaceTimed her parents from the athletes’ village in Zhangjiakou to glow about visiting a local culture museum inside the games’ “closed loop” system, where she snapped videos of exhibits and wrote her name in hanzi in calligraphy ink. And, adds Amy, “She’s really excited about all of her new Chinese followers on social media.”

Before the pandemic, when it looked like qualifying for Beijing might be on the table, Amy suggested that they visit China before the games “so there’s no emotional issues going back” when the stakes were highest. That never happened, of course, but while Amy feels a weight was lifted off her daughter thanks to the games’ strict COVID restrictions, other challenges quickly presented themselves: Last Tuesday, on her second day of training, Owens crashed coming out of the top jump, landing on her head, injuring her rotator cuff and suffering a gnarly black eye.

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Owens did her best to distract herself from the possibility that her Olympics might be over before they even began, riding a Team USA-issued bike around the athletes’ village and engaging in the time-honored tradition of pin-trading. (“So if you see any rare ones, let me know,” she says. “I’m just looking for every country that I can get, and I’m really into the Chinese ones, the year of the tiger.”) Meanwhile multiple doctors, including a psychologist, teamed up to help make Owens whole—or at least as best they could, given that her eye was still partially swollen shut. "We were trying to push out some of the swelling,” Owens says. “It was tough. I was taking it one day at a time, trying to keep high spirits.”

Those who know Owens expected nothing less. “There were things written in her adoption paperwork that we were given that still hold true,” her mother says. “The biggest thing we still laugh about is it said, ‘Obstinate at times.’” Sure, there were moments of self-doubt; Amy recalls fielding more than one such call as Kai questioned whether she could return to form. But there was a reason why one of the first things head U.S. mogul coach Matt Gnoza told Amy after the injury was, “We all believe that if anyone can do this, it’s going to be Kai.”

Given the potential risks of competing without a full slate of training runs, few would’ve blamed Owens if she had simply eased down the slope, taken it easy on the jump, called herself an Olympian and gone home. In fact, that’s precisely what some of her doctors suggested. “I was like, ‘Good luck convincing her of that,” Amy says. “She’s just tenacious as hell.”

Instead she busted out back-to-back D-spins—essentially an inverted cork, performed while somersaulting backwards off the ramp—at the starts of her qualifying and first final runs, impressing the judges before a technical error in the second final run led to a points deduction that kept her out of the medal round. “Rough crash, but I’m lucky to be here,” she said after her first run of the night, the fuzzy, swollen remnants of her black eye peeking through her ski mask.

Amy expects that Kai will need “some processing time” upon returning home to the Vail area following Beijing, so high are her expectations for herself. But there are also signs that Owens understands the victory that she achieved simply by taking off down the mountain: Not long after Kauf claimed the seventh women’s moguls medal for the U.S., tying the all-time record for a single nation in one freestyle ski event (China, aerials), Amy and Jonathan, who caught the action from a Team USA watch party in Park City, Utah, received a call from their daughter.

The cell service was spotty, but her words rang through loud and clear:

“We did it! I’m an Olympian now!”