Alexandre Bilodeau of Quebec celebrates winning the gold medal in Freestyle Skiing Men's Moguls while silver medalist Dale Begg-Smith of Australia looks on dejected.Streeter Lecka/Getty Images
What's your favourite hill?
I really, really like Deer Valley in Utah for the quality of the snow. Utah snow is just so dry, so nice to ski in. And Deer Valley is such a nice resort, and it's only for skiers. There's a couple mountains in Utah that are snowboard-forbidden. It might seem bad to say, but snowboarders put the snow in piles, so it doesn't make a really nice ski hill.
What's the most daring run?
For moguls skiing, the most exciting World Cup would be Deer Valley or Inawashiro, Japan. Deer Valley is a super-long course, pretty steep, and in altitude. So it makes it really physical and really hard for the athletes. So You need to be really in shape to ski there. But Inawashiro is like a classic. It's the toughest race that we have.
What hill scares you the most?
For moguls, it would definitely be Inawashiro. From the top, moguls look like stairs. Oh yeah, it's really, really steep. It's 37 degrees. Deer Valley is 28 degrees, so Inawashiro is in a category of its own. Every time you go there, first time on top of that course, you're always, like, what am I doing here?
Where do you avoid?
When it's rainy and super-icy the next day, I try to avoid those conditions. I ski enough in a year that I don't need to go out rough in conditions like that just for fun. But when it's training we need to ski on every type of condition. We need to be good in everything.
Where's your favourite back country?
We don't really have time to go into the back country, but Apex in the Okanagan Valley in B.C. has pretty wicked backcountry. We had a lot of races there when I was younger. But I didn't do much backcountry in my life. I'm a kid from Quebec so I'm used to ice.
Your favourite après ski?
Definitely Le P'tit Caribou in Mont Tremblant is pretty hard to beat. It's one of the best après ski in the world, that's for sure. There's a really cool guy that that runs it. I think the atmosphere there is amazing. It's a bar in the village and it's known internationally for its après ski.
Where was your a-ha moment, when you realized, "This is my dream, I want to be an Olympian."
I never really looked forward to the end of the stairs. I was always looking to the next step. One day I woke up and I was there, and I had the medal around my neck, but definitely a year or two before the 2006 Olympics, I started to think about it. It was starting to be realistic. It was in my bulls eye.
Final word
When we're outside we don't ski much just for fun, mainly because we need to rent skis. Moguls skis are not meant to ski powder. They're pretty narrow, so we call them submarines. They don't float. We want to keep our energy for training and competing. My best advice for everyone is to have fun, that's the most important thing.
This interview has been edited and condensed.