7, 6, 5, 4… Uemura Aiko Narrowly Misses out Again

Written By: guyjin on February 14, 2010 No Comment

One of the sweethearts of the Japanese media in the current Japanese Olympic squad is 4 time Olympian Uemura Aiko. She has been at or near the top of her sport of mogul for more than a decade, having achieved top ten finishes in the last 3 Olympics in Nagano, Salt Lake and Torino.

What has been remarkable about Uemura’s olympic results has been the fact that she has managed to improve by one place on each occassion. In Nagano, in 1998, she managed 7th place, before finishing 6th in Salt Lake in 2002 and 5th in Torino in 2006. Uemura was considered one of Japan’s best medal chances in Vancouver, due to her gold medals at last year’s World Championships. But in competition earlier today she fell just short once again, and again lifted herself one more place in the Olympic standings with a 4th place finish in mogul competition. The US took the gold (Hannah Kearney) and bronze (Shannon Bahrke) medals, with Canada (Jennifer Heil) chipping in for the silver. Uemura finished 0.75 points away from the prized Olympic medal.

Uemura was born in Hyogo prefecture in 1979, and began alpine skiing as a young girl. Her first experience on skis was as a three year old, before her parents moved to Nagano in 1986, where she began skiing seriously, joining the ski club in her junior high school. In 1994, on a trip to Whistler, Uemura was impressed by the freestyle skiing of Olympic gold medalist Sergei Shuplestov at a mogul event, and also watched Satoya Tae (who would later win an Olympic gold medal for Japan) at the same event. When she got back to Japan she made the switch to mogul, and hasn’t looked back.

Uemura won 2 World Championship gold medals (mogul and dual mogul) in 2009, and one World Cup gold for the 2007-2008 season. She also has two bronze medals from the 2001 and 2005 World Championships and a silver for the 2001-2002 World Cup season. Unfortunately, an Olympic medal has proven to be more elusive.