Kim Lamarre
Lac-Beauport / Quebec City, Quebec, Canada | Active: 2009-2019 | Known for: Sochi 2014 Olympic bronze, repeated ACL comebacks, early Canadian women’s slopestyle progression | Current: FIS-listed not active after later competing independently outside the main Canadian team structure
Sochi did not begin with a medal run. It began with a mistake. Kim Lamarre crashed on her first trip through the women’s Olympic slopestyle final at Rosa Khutor in February 2014. The course was still new to the Games, the weather was flat enough to keep everyone honest, and the discipline itself was being introduced to a global audience that had never seen women’s ski slopestyle in the Olympic program. Lamarre came back on her final attempt and put down the run that mattered, scoring 85.00 for bronze while teammate Dara Howell took gold. That sequence still explains her better than any medal table does. Her career was never the clean, uninterrupted rise of a federation-built star. It was the career of a skier who kept returning after damage, then delivered when the runway narrowed.
Lac-Beauport, Quebec City, and the local roots that mattered. Lamarre was born in Quebec City and grew up in Lac-Beauport, which helps explain the tone of her skiing. She started skiing at two, picked up snowboarding at seven after her mother brought a board home from the factory where she worked, and then shifted toward park skiing after watching the film Propaganda at 13. That is a very specific route into freeskiing, and it shows. She did not come out of a straight race-to-park pipeline. She came out of a broader sliding culture where boards, skis, jumps and style mixed together. Team Canada also notes that, as a teenager, she was mentored by JP Auclair. That matters. Auclair’s influence helps make sense of Lamarre’s later reputation for skiing with more feel than stiffness, even when the contests got technical.
The first breakthrough was followed by the first rupture. Lamarre reached the Winter X Games in 2009, which already placed her inside the top layer of women’s freeskiing at a time when the discipline was still building structure. Then came the ACL tear. That injury did not end the story, but it shaped the way the whole career would read. She returned in 2011 and immediately produced two of the strongest early results on her record: bronze at Winter X Games Europe in Tignes and fourth at the FIS World Championships. Team Canada also notes that she was named to the inaugural national ski slopestyle team for 2011-12. Those details matter because they place her in the first real generation of Canadian women trying to turn slopestyle from scene credibility into formal international standing.
The lost seasons are part of the résumé, not a side note. Successive ACL tears then took away most of two more seasons. That is not a decorative hardship line. In slopestyle, knee damage changes everything: speed into the rail line, confidence on switch takeoffs, absorption on hard landings, trust on the final booter. By 2013-14 she had been left off the Canadian team and was paying for her own training and travel. That is one of the most revealing chapters in the whole page. Instead of fading out, she pieced together the winter that brought her closest to the center of the sport. In December 2013 she finished second at the Dew Tour in Breckenridge. In January 2014 she won bronze at X Games Aspen. One month later she was an Olympic medallist.
Sochi 2014 was bigger than one score. The result itself is easy enough to remember: bronze in the first women’s Olympic slopestyle event. The context is better. Slopestyle in Sochi still had the energy of a sport proving itself. The course rewarded riders who could hold it together through rails, manage speed into the jump line, and land clean enough to preserve shape through the whole run instead of only the headline trick. That meant switch takeoffs, stable transitions, disciplined grabs and enough composure on the landings to keep the run moving. Lamarre’s bronze also landed inside a Canadian double podium, with Howell on top. For Canada, it was a statement winter in freestyle. For Lamarre personally, it was the payoff to self-funded preparation after being pushed outside the main team picture.
A straight timeline shows how unusual the path really was. The public checkpoints line up clearly. X Games Aspen came first in 2009. The ACL interruption followed. In 2011 she returned with X Games Europe bronze in Tignes and fourth at the FIS World Championships. The 2013-14 season brought second at Dew Tour Breckenridge, X Games Aspen bronze, then Olympic bronze in Sochi. In April 2015 she finished third at the AFP World Tour Finals. In 2017 she crashed in training at the FIS World Championships and still chose to compete. In 2018 she returned to the Olympics in PyeongChang and finished 22nd in slopestyle. That same season she added a sixth-place finish in the inaugural Quebec City World Cup big air. For 2018-19, Freestyle Canada announced that she would compete as an independent, and FIS now lists her as not active.
The technical case for Lamarre was never only about spin count. Women’s slopestyle in Lamarre’s era was evolving quickly, but it had not yet become the fully double-heavy landscape that defined the later Olympic cycle. That made execution even more visible. Lamarre’s skiing fit that window well. She carried the board-sport looseness of someone who had spent time snowboarding, but she still had the structure needed to survive top-level slopestyle. Her runs depended on calm upper body movement, clean takeoffs, and enough edge control to stay balanced through rails and off the final lip. The language around that kind of skiing includes 270-ons, lip slides, switch entries, mute grabs, safety grabs and booter speed control. Lamarre’s appeal came from making those elements look connected instead of stitched together.
There was more history in the family than a single medal could show. Team Canada notes that Lamarre grew up inspired by her grandmother, Ginette Seguin, who had represented Canada in alpine skiing at Cortina d’Ampezzo 1956 and still wore her Olympic outfits around the house. That detail could sound sentimental if it did not fit so well. Lamarre’s career sits at an interesting junction in Canadian ski history. Her grandmother’s world was alpine racing in the 1950s. Lamarre’s was park skiing, rails, switch hits and a discipline that only became Olympic in 2014. Yet both arcs pass through the same idea: a Quebec skier carrying Olympic ambition in a sport that looked different by the generation. That lineage gives her page more depth than a simple list of slopestyle results.
The 2017 to 2019 chapter was less glamorous, but it matters. The easiest version of Kim Lamarre’s story ends on the Sochi podium. The more useful version keeps going. The 2017 world-championship training crash and decision to compete anyway shows the same stubbornness that marked the ACL comebacks. PyeongChang 2018 showed how much the women’s field had progressed in four years; she was still there, still representing Canada, but the discipline had become denser and less forgiving. Quebec City in March 2018 then gave her a different kind of public stage, with a home World Cup big air appearance and a top-six result in front of a Canadian crowd. The following season, competing independently, she was no longer the center of the program. She was still very much inside the culture of the sport.
Why Kim Lamarre still matters in women’s freeskiing. She matters because the record is both historical and human. Historical, because she owns a place in Olympic firsts: bronze in the debut of women’s ski slopestyle, on the same podium as another Canadian. Human, because the result was built through repeated knee injuries, a stretch outside the national team, and a winter where she paid her own way and still broke through. She was also part of the first wave of women who gave Canadian slopestyle real international structure before the event’s later boom in difficulty and depth. The medal count alone does not tell that story. The better image is still Sochi: a skier from Lac-Beauport, after years of torn ligaments and resets, landing the run that held when the course finally mattered most.
