Murky day at Waterville Valley can’t take the shine off freestyle skiing’s big-time return
WATERVILLE VALLEY, N.H. — The inaugural edition of the Waterville Valley Freestyle Cup tested competitors with classic New England conditions — a steady mix of snow and freezing rain — but still managed to be a strong showcase of the best mogul skiing in the world.
Both the men’s and women’s overall FIS World Cup points leaders ended the day atop the podium. Ikuma Horishima of Japan won the men’s competition, while Australian Jakara Anthony emerged as the clear champion in the women’s.
It was a great day for the US women, who grabbed five of the six spots in the super final, the last round of competition. Though Anthony won her sixth consecutive World Cup freestyle event and clinched the overall season title in moguls, Americans Jaelin Kauf and Hannah Soar finished second and third, respectively.
On the men’s side, Australian Cooper Woods skied his best run of the day in the super final to finish second, while Canadian 10-time moguls World Cup champion Mikaël Kingsbury had to settle for third. The best placed American was Cole McDonald, who drew a roar from the crowd with an electrifying final run and finished fifth.
The event was held on one of Waterville Valley’s classic mogul trails, Lower Bobby’s Run, which proved challenging for the world’s best. The inclement weather was a major factor.
“Today was definitely a fight throughout the day,” said Kauf, who won a silver medal at the 2022 Beijing Olympics. “It started off being just so firm. That first run was honestly so challenging, just trying to put a top-to-bottom [run] together, which I hadn’t done in training.”
Yet Kauf and her teammates navigated the tricky conditions better than their international competitors. Part of it was experience: Soar and fellow US skier Olivia Giaccio are New England natives, and the New Hampshire ski area has hosted several recent editions of US Nationals.
“Normally when I ski in the rain on the East Coast — which is all the time — I’m wearing a rubber suit, I have my dish gloves on, and I’m prepared for it,” joked Soar. “I’m a New Englander, I know how to prepare for the rain, but when we’re competing it’s obviously different. I can’t be prepared with my dish gloves to ski down the course, so this was actually one of my first times competing in this weather.”
“In the super final, when everybody was crashing in front of me, I was just thinking, ‘If there’s one thing I know how to do, it’s how to ski a top-to-bottom [run] in the rain, and just get it down,” she explained. “Nothing special, and that’s kind of what was needed today in the weather.”
Conditions are expected to be better for Saturday’s dual moguls event, set to be held on the same course. Yet even with occasional bouts of intense freezing rain, a loyal crowd of mogul skiing enthusiasts gathered at the finish line to cheer. Waterville Valley, which claims to be “the birthplace of freestyle skiing,” managed to make an impression.
“It’s so cool to be competing here,” Kauf said. “Waterville has so much freestyle history. Wayne Wong’s out here, Donna Weinbrecht [and] Hannah Kearney were commentating it. It’s cool to be a part of that history, with that old freestyle community all coming together. It’s special. It really shows the family community that freestyle skiing is.”
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