“It’s Going to Go on Forever”: The 14-Month Grind Facing Skiers
Image: @tiaremirandaphotography
By Jack Burden
For decades, professional water skiing followed a singular, repeatable rhythm.
There was the season. And there was the offseason.
The season was airports and jet lag and sunburn and adrenaline. The offseason was recovery. Time to let the body heal. Time to step away from the course. Time to remember, briefly, that life existed outside start docks, line lengths, and Zero Off settings.
That rhythm is gone now.
The 2027 World Championships in Mulwala, scheduled for February, have effectively turned the calendar into a never ending loop. Instead of a reset after the 2026 season, elite skiers are now staring down what Freddie Winter bluntly described as “two world years back to back.”
A competitive cycle stretched across continents and hemispheres has quietly produced something the sport has never really dealt with before at the elite level: a 14-month season.
The old model — peak in summer, recover in winter, rebuild in spring — no longer fits. Instead, skiers are being asked to maintain near-peak performance across an extended, continuous arc that runs through North America, Europe, and deep into the Southern Hemisphere summer, without ever fully shutting down.
Winter put it plainly on the TWBC podcast.
“The IWWF in their infinite wisdom has put the tournament in February less than 18 months after the previous one,” he said. “So we do have basically two world years back to back.”
Then, more tactically: “The season’s going to go on forever. We’re going to have to pull this year’s season into the following year because the last tour stop will be sometime in October or November and then two months later we’re going to be back at the World Championships on the other side of the world.”
On its own, a World Championships in an off-cycle year would be manageable. But the 2027 edition coincides with one of the busiest professional calendars in over two decades, with more titles up for grabs than in any season since 2000. The sheer density of events removes the clean psychological break that has always defined elite training cycles in the sport.
Winter’s framing keeps returning to the same place: not physical overload, but mental erosion.
“It’s going to be an absolute slog,” he said. “Mentally challenging.”
Across the elite field the physical demands are familiar. What changes here is duration. The ability to stay sharp, motivated, and emotionally engaged for more than a year without the usual offseason reset.
Which is why athletes are no longer talking about training and competing in the traditional sense. They are talking about serializing it.
“My goal is to be overall world champion in 2027,” said Louis Duplan-Fribourg. “So I’m like, okay, let’s go all in. Let’s make it happen.”
But even that “all in” is not a declaration of volume. It is a measured approach.
“We were just saying that yeah, I’m getting ready to ski for 14 months and not for 10 months as I’m usually doing,” he explained.
Then the practical reality: “You have to make choices. What tournament you’re doing, when you’re taking your days off, when you’re resting.”
That idea — making choices — has become the theme of this new era. Not every event can be treated as essential. Not every entry is worth the cost. The calendar no longer allows full participation without consequence.
Kennedy Hansen, one of 2025’s breakout stars, learnt this lesson the hard way after a marathon season.
“I didn’t really stop skiing,” she said, reflecting on her buildup to the 2026 season.
After choosing to compete at the 2026 Moomba Masters, she was forced into the same recalibration many athletes now face. It speaks to a sport where “offseason” has already begun to blur into continuity.
So her response has been to break the year apart deliberately, not as a single training block but as a series of managed pauses.
“I’m going to ski through the overall tournaments and all the Water Ski Pro Tour tournaments,” Hansen explained. “Then I think after that I’ll take a few weeks off, ski a little bit and then maybe take a few weeks off again.”
“But just try to spread it out so I’m not skiing the full year.”
Serialized training has become the new modus operandi. The offseason is no longer a season — it is something distributed across the calendar, inserted between events that are now too closely packed to allow for traditional recovery windows.
Winter himself plans to spend significant time training in Australia during the northern winter, hoping to avoid the traditional January reset where he admits he often returns needing to “lose a lot of weight,” rebuild strength, and rediscover timing on the water.
“What I don’t want to do,” he explained, “is start from zero.”
All of this is being shaped by a Southern Hemisphere stretch that, for younger athletes in particular, leaves almost no room for pause. January brings Under-21 Worlds in Peru. February brings the Open World Championships in Australia. March brings Moomba Masters. Three major events. Three countries. Two continents. One continuous competitive block.
For northern hemisphere athletes, this creates a challenge that has never really existed before: preparing for peak summer performance while physically located in winter, and then carrying that form across multiple continents without the usual reset.
It is also expensive. Winter has been open about the fact that Australian trips often become “money-losing” exercises once travel and accommodation are accounted for. Which, in a sport without deep prize purses, feeds back into decision-making about which events are even viable to attend.
“I’m probably not going to go to Moomba next year,” he admitted. “I’ll be so exhausted and mentally drained having gone through Christmas and not had any sort of an offseason.”
“I’m probably going to get Worlds done and then fly home and forget about water skiing for a few weeks.”
And there is an uncomfortable asymmetry running through all of this.
The 2027 Worlds will be only the third Open World Championships ever held in the Southern Hemisphere. The previous two — 1965 in Surfers Paradise and 2013 in Santiago — both still sat within late-autumn schedules, October and November respectively, that largely favored northern hemisphere preparation cycles. Even when hosted in the south, timing and structure meant northern calendars still defined the peak.
The hemisphere imbalance is not just theoretical. Only 2 World Championships (out of 39) have been held south of the Equator. Yet Southern Hemisphere athletes have won 22 world titles and over 10% of all medals — consistently competing at events timed more comfortably for their northern counterparts. Australia, despite hosting only once, sits fourth on the all-time Worlds medal table, ahead of countries like Italy and Great Britain, who have hosted far more frequently.
It is a quiet pattern in the sport: when the calendar bends, it usually bends toward the north.
There is a broader irony here. The sport is arguably healthier than it has been in years. More events, more depth, more visibility, more professional opportunity than at almost any point in its modern history.
“That’s also the beauty of it,” Duplan-Fribourg said. “Battles are going to be fierce every weekend.”
He is right.
But beauty in sport often comes with cost. And in this case, the cost is time — stretched, compressed, and redistributed until the idea of an offseason begins to dissolve entirely.
What remains is not a season in the traditional sense.
It is something longer, flatter, and more demanding. A calendar that does not reset so much as continue.
And for the first time at the elite level of water skiing, that continuity is not an advantage or an ambition.
It is the problem everyone is trying to solve.
