Jonny Moseley

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Jonny Moseley (born August 27, 1975) is the first Puerto Rican to belong to the U.S. Ski Team.

Olympic medal record
Men’s Freestyle Skiing
Gold	1998	Moguls

Jonny Moseley

Moseley was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. In 1978, Moseley saw snow for the first time when his family went on a trip to California. Eventually, his family moved to Tiburon, California, a suburb north of San Francisco. For high school he attended The Branson School in Ross, California, approx. a 20 minute commute. His family would go to the Sierra Nevadas every weekend. This plus this fact that he was better than his brothers in skiing, inspired 9 year old Moseley to take skiing lessons. In 1982, he joined the Squaw Valley Freestyle Ski Team and began training in the sport he grew to love. Soon after he won his first Junior National title in Freestyle Skiing. Moseley always made time for both his school work and his training. He graduated from high school in 1993 and that same year was selected and became a member of the U.S. Ski Team.

Moseley tried but did not qualify for the 1994 Winter Olympics held at Lillehammer, Norway. He was determined to qualify for the 1998 Olympics and continued his training. In 1995, Moseley enrolled in the University of California, Davis but, his education was interrupted by his intense training and it wouldn't be until the year 2000 that he would resume his studies. The following year, he won his first World Cup Mogul.

In 1998, Moseley participated and won the first two World Cup events of the year; this led to his participation in the 1998 Winter Olympics held in Nagano, Japan where he won a gold medal. Later that year he secured the 1998 World Cup Mogul Skiing title with nine wins that season. He also won the U.S. National title.

In 1999, Moseley challenged the International Skiing federation to change their policy and to allow their athletes to participate in professional events, such as ESPN's X Games.

In 2000, Moseley won the U.S. Freeskiing Open and in 2001 regained a spot in the U.S. Ski Team at the World Cup qualifications held at Sunday River, Maine. In 2002, Moseley competed but came in fourth place in the Olympic Games.

In 2002, Moseley gave the commencement convocation address at UC Berkeley. The choice by the senior class committee was controversial at the time because Moseley had dropped out of college.

Among the honors and recognitions which Jonny Moseley has received are a parade in his honor where San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown declared a "Jonny Moseley Day" and handed him the "Key" to the city. He was named "Sportsman of the Year" (1998) by the U.S. Olympic Committee and has been featured on the cover of Freeskier and Rolling Stone magazines.

Moseley launched a web site which sells products with his logo on them and has appeared on Ads for McDonalds, Sprint and Budweiser. PlayStation 2 has a game in the market called Jonny Moseley Mad Trix.

Moseley, who currently lives in California, was the host of the MTV reality show "The Battle of the Sexes".

He is part of the celebrity panel of judges (along with Steve Garvey and Oksana Baiul) on the ABC show "Master of Champions".

He also currently attends the University of California, Berkeley.

On the G4 Network's show X-Play, Mosely has become a running gag during reviews, due mostly to the ridiculousness of his dialogue in the cut scenes for his video game, "Jonny Moseley's Mad Trix". The most infamous line: "What if it snowed in San Fransisco?".

Moseley is famous for an aerial ski move called "The Dinner Roll". Moseley talked about it during a 2002 speech at UC Berkeley:

"The Dinner Roll is a trick I developed for the ’99 X-Games. It’s a 720 degree off axis rotation, wherein you ski off the jump, do two full rotations, one on the horizontal plane and the other on the vertical plane. At the X-Games where everything is "extreme" and "rad" the jumps are big, and you have lots of time in the air. The Olympic moguls course is a whole different ball game. It’s steep, with tight turns, and a small narrow technical jump, with an unforgiving landing. The trick was so new that we had to appeal to the Olympic Skiing Federation in order just to do it. We had to show them that it fell within their rule stating "no inverted tricks in the moguls" and also prove that it was not dangerous. After lobbying and video explanation we pushed it through by one vote, much to the chagrin of the European countries."

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