For more than a decade, the San Gervasio ProAm has acted as a kind of gravitational centre for European professional slalom skiing — a fixed point on the calendar around which other events quietly arranged themselves.
In 2026, it disappears.
Organizers confirmed this week that the San Gervasio ProAm — Europe’s longest-running active professional tournament — will not take place after the Italian Federation declined to sanction the event on its traditional July 3–5 weekend. That slot has instead been awarded to the inaugural Recetto ProAm, a new tournament at the site of the 2025 World Championships.
The decision abruptly halts one of the sport’s most stable modern traditions.
First held in 2014, San Gervasio has staged 11 editions, distributed more than $200,000 in prize money, and attracted the world’s best slalom skiers each summer. Only the pandemic-disrupted 2020 season broke its run.
In a European landscape where professional tournaments often appear and disappear within a few seasons, its longevity has become unusual. The next closest active events — the Botaski and Fungliss ProAms — have each run just five editions.
For founder and organizer Matteo Luzzeri, the cancellation ultimately came down to a single issue: dates.
“We were informed by the Italian Federation that we could not organize the San Gervasio Pro Am on our traditional weekend of 3–5 July,” he said in a statement released by Jolly Ski. “We evaluated alternative dates, but none would have ensured proper participation from professional and amateur skiers alike.”
The federation offered July 10–12 instead — a solution Luzzeri says was unworkable due to clashes with several European national championships.
“Amateur participation is not an add-on,” he said. “It is a core pillar of the ProAm format — for the atmosphere, and for the financial sustainability of the event.”
A crowded July
Ironically, the dispute emerged during what initially looked like a sign of strength for Italian water skiing.
Early versions of the 2026 calendar showed three professional tournaments scheduled within nine days: San Gervasio on July 3–5, the PKB ProAm in Ivrea shortly after, and the new Recetto ProAm the following weekend.
For traveling athletes, it promised a lucrative European tour block.
“It’s unbelievable,” Luzzeri exclaimed on the TWBC podcast in February, when the sequence still appeared intact. “To have three tournaments in Italy, on top of everything else happening in Europe — it speaks to the quality of organization here.”
But the excitement did not last.
Records show San Gervasio applied for the July 3–5 dates first. Recetto subsequently submitted an application for July 10–12 before later modifying its request to the same early-July weekend.
“We were asked over the phone to renounce our date because of a conflict with a WWS event on July 10–11,” he said. Recetto’s organizers hoped to expand their event beyond slalom to include trick and jump, potentially overlapping with the WWS Overall Tour’s Granite Cup in New Hampshire.
The proposed solution was straightforward in the Federation’s mind: San Gervasio would move.
Luzzeri declined.
“We explained that July 10–12 would not work for us due to conflicts with amateur competitions and chose to stand by our original date.”
Without federation sanction, however, the event could not proceed.
Who really runs the calendar?
The episode highlights the complicated governance structure of professional water skiing.
While San Gervasio was part of the IWWF-affiliated Waterski Pro Tour, which gives priority to existing events, the authority to sanction competitions ultimately rests with national federations.
“The Pro Tour can decide whether to include an event,” Luzzeri said. “But first the tournament must be sanctioned by the national federation.”
In practice, this means the Pro Tour can shape rankings and visibility — but not guarantee that an event takes place.
The situation also raises a more delicate structural question.
The Recetto venue is operated by FISSW Servizi, a non-profit organization wholly owned by the Italian Federation — the same body responsible for approving the national calendar.
In Luzzeri’s view, that dual role created an uneven playing field.
“The main issue revolves around FISSW being the organizer of a Pro Tournament and at the same time the entity that approves events,” he said. “They enacted a power grab by sidelining us and forcefully grabbing our date.”
Tradition versus scale
Not everyone will interpret the decision the same way.
San Gervasio offers history and consistency. Recetto is expected to offer scale — more than doubling the available prize money by matching San Gervasio’s slalom purse and adding roughly $30,000 across trick and jump divisions.
In a crowded calendar, there is a reasonable argument to be made that larger multi-event competitions deserve priority.
Yet the broader context suggests a deeper structural tension.
In 2026, elite tournaments will operate across three separate circuits: the Waterski Pro Tour, the WWS Overall Tour, and the new Nautique Water Ski World Series. Each creates opportunity — and scheduling friction.
At one point this winter, a provisional schedule showed as many as 12 professional events worldwide, nine of them in Europe or Africa, packed into roughly six weeks across June and July.
Fellow organizer Francisco Rodrigues, whose Portugal Pro will also sit out the 2026 season, believes the sport may be reaching a breaking point.
“It makes absolutely no sense to have three professional tours in a shrinking sport,” he wrote online. “Sooner or later the calendar will become a nightmare for organizers — and especially for the athletes.”
It is a striking warning — yet one that feels almost unthinkable when viewed through the lens of where professional skiing was a decade ago.
There is a popular narrative that San Gervasio “brought professional skiing back to Europe.” That is slightly romanticized. When the event debuted in 2014, it was one of four professional tournaments on the continent that year — though notably the only one featuring slalom.
Still, its timing mattered.
The early 2010s were a fragile period for European pro skiing, with limited prize money and only sporadic elite events. San Gervasio did not revive the circuit on its own — but it helped stabilize it. Over the next decade, more competitions filled the calendar around it.
In a sense, the current conflict is a by-product of that very growth.
A pause — not an ending
For Luzzeri, the impact is both logistical and personal.
Much of the preparation for 2026 had already been completed.
“Most of it,” he said. “Sponsors were largely secured. Skiers were already asking about entries. We had even declined ski-school bookings for that period.”
The goal now is recovery.
“Our priority is to create the conditions for a proper return in 2027.”
For an event that became a fixture of the European summer, the hope is that this year’s absence proves temporary.
But the questions raised by its cancellation are likely to linger.
As professional water skiing expands — and fragments — who ultimately decides where, and when, the sport’s biggest stages are built?
For the past 12 months, Martin Labra’s world shrank to rehab rooms, gym sessions, and the distant whine of boats he could hear—but not chase—on the lake outside his home. Next week in Melbourne, the Chilean phenom finally gets it back.
After a knee injury forced him out of competition in early 2025, Labra has quietly rebuilt his form across record tournaments in Chile, posting multiple scores back over 12,000 points, including an equal personal best of 12,590 — the highest trick score recorded anywhere this year. Now the 19-year-old returns to the professional stage at the Moomba Masters, entered in both tricks and slalom and slated to appear earlier in the week in the event’s inaugural Under-21 competition.
It is a compelling return for one of the sport’s most promising young athletes, with the coliseum-like atmosphere of the Yarra River providing a potentially blockbuster backdrop for Labra’s comeback arc.
Labra had been a name to watch for several years — the most decorated skier in the history of the Under-17 World Championships, his four gold medals unmatched on the men’s side. But in 2024 he truly announced himself to the water ski world with a breakout season. Labra captured his first professional title at the U.S. Masters, then added another at the Botaski ProAm later that summer.
It wasn’t just the hardware. It was the composure — the unusual calm of a teenager skiing with the tactical patience of a veteran. Trick specialists took notice when Labra unveiled a new trick live in professional competition and reset benchmarks for the highest-scoring toe pass, pushing himself into the rarefied 12,500-point club and into quiet world-record conversations.
Speaking last July on the Chilean podcast Escala del 1 al 10, Labra described the Masters victory as one of the defining moments of his life.
“The Masters was a very, very beautiful moment and something I’ll never forget, I think, for the rest of my life,” he said.
But Labra is not a one-discipline curiosity. While tricks remain his professional calling card, his rapid rise in jump and overall — where he ranked sixth in the world pre-injury — signaled broader ambitions. He closed his 2024 campaign with two finals appearances on the WWS Overall Tour, the résumé of an athlete expanding faster than most expected.
Then the trajectory snapped.
This time last year, Labra was riding the momentum of his breakout season. The calendar ahead was crowded: multiple professional stops, an Under-21 World Championships where he entered as favorite in both jump and overall, and his first Open World Championships with a credible shot at the title.
What followed was a familiar but still brutal reminder of elite sport’s fragility.
In training the week before the 2025 Moomba Masters, Labra’s season unraveled in an instant.
“It happened on February 27th… I fell jumping… my knee went inwards and I tore my cruciate ligament,” he said. “Definitely one of the hardest moments, I think, in my sporting career.”
The timing made it sting more.
“I think it hit me very hard, coming from such a good year as 2024,” Labra admitted.
Surgery followed. Then the long, quiet work of return.
Physically, the roadmap was straightforward. Mentally, it was not.
“I live by the lake, I hear the boats all day long,” Labra said. “Not being able to go to the lake… was getting me down, because I love being at the lake. I love this world and the lake life.”
In the early weeks after surgery, he relocated north to, in his words, “clear my head a little from all the bad things I was going through.” The reset helped. So did the infrastructure around him.
Few athletes are better resourced for rehabilitation. His father is a physical therapist who guided the early recovery phases. His mother, a Chilean representative and Pan American Games field hockey medalist, understands elite-sport pressure. And his stepfather — trailblazing Chilean professional jumper Rodrigo Miranda — knows exactly what it takes to rebuild a body and a season.
“Paso a paso,” Miranda posted — step by step. A mantra that has quietly defined Labra’s year.
For all the physical rebuilding, the more revealing work has been internal. Labra repeatedly circles back to the influence of his family in keeping his rapid rise in perspective.
“My family… that support I have from them is unconditional,” he said. “That’s what helps me stay grounded… because in the end, I’m just an ordinary person.”
The injury also created something elite athletes rarely get: time to recalibrate. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Labra had already chosen to remain in Chile rather than enter the U.S. collegiate system — a decision that, in hindsight, gave him unusual flexibility during rehabilitation.
“I think… being able to do your sport at high performance and study at a very good university, it was the best decision I could have made,” he said.
With competition temporarily removed, Labra leaned into structure. Gym sessions multiplied. University life became a second arena of focus. The routine, he admits, was not accidental.
“Now I try… to focus on recovery, on the gym, on studying,” he said. “I feel like I’ve also improved outside of it.”
There is a quiet maturity in how he frames the lost season — not as empty time, but as reclaimed margin.
“I’m taking advantage of this injury to do well with university,” Labra said. “If I had been competing, I could have traveled more and had less time… but now I can stay more up to date and get to know my friends and classmates better.”
That perspective was not formed in isolation. Labra points back to 2022 — a season that fell short of his own expectations — as an earlier inflection point.
“I think those were the most difficult moments of my career,” he said of that year’s struggles.
What followed was a deeper investment in the mental side of performance, including ongoing work with a sports psychologist, who remains part of Labra’s inner circle.
“He’s helped me a lot… especially in these difficult times,” Labra said.
If there is a defining thread in Labra’s young career, it may be an unusual comfort with the uncomfortable — the moments where momentum stalls and most athletes tighten.
“I love being under pressure,” he said. “The more pressure, the better for me.”
Melbourne will test that claim immediately.
His comeback event features one of the deepest men’s trick fields assembled: reigning world champion Matias Gonzalez, world record holder and defending Moomba champion Jake Abelson, former world champions Patricio Font and Dorien Llewellyn, plus the ever-dangerous Joel Poland.
There will be no gentle runway back.
Early signs out of Chile have been quietly encouraging — not just flashes of the old Labra, but a slightly more measured version. Training alongside the sport’s elite at the now-informal “trick camp,” he has worked methodically toward peak form.
As recently as November, his public tone was cautious: “Slowly getting back to it…”
Now the scores — and the body language — point toward readiness.
Even so, Labra frames the comeback with characteristic restraint. Asked what advice he would offer athletes facing setbacks, his answer was simple: “That first step is always the hardest. If you can’t do it alone, you look for help… lean on the people who love you.”
Moomba will not fully define Martin Labra’s return. Not yet.
A year on from the injury that stalled his momentum, Labra arrives in Melbourne with something simpler in mind: competing again.
And if his own words are any guide, he is exactly where he wants to be.
“I enjoy the nerves,” he said. “I know how to use them.”
Every few years, someone tries to fix water skiing.
Not with a new fin setting or a better beveled edge, but with an idea that promises something bigger: relevance, engagement, growth. A way to make people care again, or care more, about a sport that for all its beauty and difficulty has never quite figured out how to keep casual fans engaged.
Launched in beta with slick AI-generated promos and a tagline that flirts unapologetically with existential dread (“Imagine a world without waterskiing”), the platform positions itself as a fantasy-style prediction game layered over professional events. Fans sign up, receive tokens, predict outcomes, and, if they’re right often enough, redeem rewards like ski gear, coaching, or experiences. No cash payouts. No betting slips. At least on paper, firmly on the safe side of legality.
The pitch is familiar, even compelling: sports grow when fans don’t just watch, they participate.
It’s hard to argue with that. Fantasy leagues transformed how millions consume football, basketball, and Formula One. Prediction games give meaning to mid-pack finishes, to heats that don’t involve the favorite, to the long, quiet stretches of a tournament day when only diehards usually stay tuned. In a sport like water skiing, where storylines are rich but exposure is thin, that extra layer of attention matters.
But water skiing is not football. And participation is not a neutral word anymore.
Almost immediately, the reaction split along predictable lines. Some laughed. Some cringed. Some signed up. Some recoiled at the whiff of gambling culture drifting into a sport that still prides itself on junior development, family lake days, and hand-me-down skis.
“Gambling will solve all our problems,” former Under-21 world champion Sean Hunter deadpanned on Instagram.
Others pushed back more earnestly. Loving skiing, they argued, should be enough. Turning outcomes into tokens felt unnecessary, even vaguely dystopian, especially when paired with a launch video that framed the app as a savior rather than a supplement.
To Waterski Predictor’s credit, their responses were measured. This isn’t meant for everyone. It’s optional. Think fantasy sports, not gambling.
That distinction matters. Legally, it matters a lot. As John Horton explained on a BallOfSpray forum following the launch, drawing on his own deep dive into the regulatory minefield, once cash enters the equation things get illegal fast. Tokens redeemable for prizes may be the only viable path for something like this to exist at all. In that sense, Waterski Predictor isn’t flirting with gambling so much as carefully stepping around it.
Still, perception lags legality.
The language of tokens, exchanges, and rewards carries cultural baggage now, whether the creators intend it or not. Crypto-bro excess, predatory betting apps, and the broader gamification of everything have left many people understandably wary. Water skiing, a sport already fighting to explain itself to the outside world, doesn’t need another thing that looks confusing or ethically murky at first glance.
And yet.
Scroll past the skepticism and you see something else: people laughing at the promo. Inside jokes landing. Fans debating formats. Old-timers recalling fantasy leagues from 25 years ago that handed out hats and T-shirts and somehow survived without ruining anyone’s soul. Curiosity, not just outrage.
You also see something water skiing rarely gets: conversation.
Not about federations or politics or declining participation numbers, but about pro events themselves. Who will win. Who might surprise. Which pass actually matters. That attention, fragile and fleeting, is the currency the sport has often lacked.
The deeper question, then, isn’t whether Waterski Predictor is good or bad. It’s whether water skiing can afford to be precious.
This is a sport that struggles to monetize viewership, to retain fans between rounds, to offer athletes sustainable careers. Anything that keeps eyes on the screen longer has value, even if it makes us uncomfortable at first. Growth rarely arrives in forms that feel pure.
At the same time, the discomfort shouldn’t be dismissed. Transparency matters. So does tone. Launching with apocalyptic framing that suggests this saves the sport invites backlash in a community that has seen enough silver bullets misfire. Water skiing doesn’t need salvation. It needs infrastructure, trust, and incremental wins.
Waterski Predictor could be one of those wins, if it knows what it is.
Not a replacement for loving the sport. Not a financial engine. Not a moral crusade. Just a thin, optional layer that gives fans another reason to stay through the last round instead of checking results later.
That, more than tokens or AI videos, may be the point.
Water skiing has never suffered from a lack of passion. It has suffered from a lack of experiments. Some fail. Some quietly help. Most sit somewhere in between, nudging the sport forward by inches rather than saving it outright.
Waterski Predictor probably won’t change everything. It might not even last. But it asks a question worth asking in 2026: how do we invite people not just to watch water skiing, but to care what happens next?
The answer, as always in this sport, will be complicated. That much you can bet on.
Water skiing in 2025 was a year of rising performances and expanding possibility. Records fell, ceilings collapsed, and moments that once felt unimaginable became routine. From teenagers rewriting history to veterans redefining resilience, the season delivered a relentless stream of storylines that pushed the sport forward while constantly testing its limits. It was a year where brilliance arrived in waves, controversies lingered, and the level required to win climbed higher with every event.
Across the Waterski Pro Tour, WWS Overall Tour, IWWF world championships at every level, and legacy stages like Moomba and the U.S. Masters, the sport unfolded through breakthroughs, confrontations, and generational shifts. New rivalries ignited. Established orders were challenged. And in disciplines once thought to have plateaued, sudden surges forced a rethink of what elite performance truly means.
As we count down the most memorable moments of the 2025 season, this list captures more than just victories and records. It reflects a sport in full acceleration—deeper, bolder, and more competitive than ever—and the athletes who defined it when expectations were highest and the spotlight brightest.
There’s always a particular optimism baked into the first major tournament of the season. The days grow longer, boats are dewinterized, and spring fever sets in. In recent years, that role has belonged to Moomba. But in 2025, the season’s opening statement came a week earlier—and from an unexpected corner of the calendar.
The University World Championships returned for the first time since 2016, staged in Auckland’s Orakei Basin, salt water shimmering in the heart of the city. The “Collegiate Worlds” brought together student-athletes from five continents, blending future stars, established pros, and wide-eyed newcomers thrilled to wear national colors. There were personal bests everywhere. There was Aaliyah Yoong Hannifah making history. And then there was Austria.
What the four Austrians pulled off bordered on absurd.
Against a Team USA contingent 14 strong—including a stacked six-skier A-team—Austria arrived with just four athletes. One was a single-event skier. Another, their strongest overall threat, withdrew at the last minute. There were no alternates. No safety nets. In tricks and jump, one misstep would have ended everything.
Instead, every skier delivered.
Luca Rauchenwald won jump outright. Lili Steiner claimed silver in jump and overall. Nikolaus Attensam posted the top men’s slalom score of prelims, maximizing team points. And Dominic Kuhn’s bronze in tricks—behind a field loaded with world champions—proved decisive.
In the 80-year history of IWWF world championships, only six nations had ever finished ahead of the United States. Only five had ever won a team title.
Make it six.
Undermanned, unflinching, and utterly fearless, Austria didn’t just win Auckland—they announced themselves. And in doing so, gave the 2025 season its first unforgettable moment.
There was a time when 13,000 points in men’s trick skiing felt like a myth. A ceiling. A number whispered with admiration, then dismissed with realism.
Enter Jake Abelson.
On a hot June weekend at Ski Fluid in central Florida, the 17-year-old American became the first skier in history to cross the barrier, posting 13,020 points. When the IWWF ratified the score, it didn’t just crown a new world record holder—it confirmed that trick skiing had entered a new era.
The milestone was years in the making. For nearly two decades, progress at the elite end of men’s tricks had been incremental, almost stagnant. Then came a surge. Patricio Font reignited the discipline in 2022. Matias Gonzalez raised the ceiling with relentless speed and precision. Suddenly, 12,000-point runs weren’t exceptional—they were the price of admission. In 2025, every men’s professional trick event was won with a score north of 12K.
The race to 13K was on.
Abelson got there first—but only just. Gonzalez and Font were right behind, pushing from different angles: Font with ruthless hand-pass efficiency, Gonzalez with audacious toe speed. And while Abelson claimed the milestone, the season’s most compelling moment came later.
At the World Championships in Recetto, with titles—not records—on the line, Gonzalez edged Abelson by ten points. Ten. The smallest possible margin in trick skiing. A single freeze-frame separating gold from silver.
In that sense, 13,000 wasn’t the finish line. It was proof of how narrow the margins have become.
For decades, 10.25 meters—41 off—stood as men’s slalom’s final frontier. A pass reserved for the extraordinary, spoken about in reverent tones. By the time the sun set on the 2025 Travers Grand Prix, it felt like something else entirely: the new baseline.
At Sunset Lakes in Groveland, four different skiers ran 41 off a combined seven times, obliterating the previous record of four, set just two years earlier. It wasn’t an isolated spike, either. Across the back half of the season—World Championships, MasterCraft Pro, and now Travers—men’s titles have increasingly been decided at 9.75 meters (43 off). The ceiling didn’t just crack in 2025. It caved in.
Nate Smith and Charlie Ross had led the charge, but at the Grand Prix they were joined by Jonathan Travers and Freddie Winter, all four pushing through 41 and into rarified air. Winter went furthest when it mattered most, advancing to 43 and sealing both the event win and his first-ever Waterski Pro Tour season championship.
“This is the first season title I’ve ever won,” Winter said, emotion spilling over. “A year and a half ago I had a really terrible time, I hurt myself, and I worked really hard to come back… This one’s for everyone who helped me come back.”
The women matched the drama stride for stride. Regina Jaquess, Jaimee Bull, and Whitney McClintock Rini produced the first three-way tie at 41 off in waterski history, forcing a cold-start runoff at 10.75 meters. Jaquess prevailed on the water, but Bull walked away with the bigger prize—her fifth consecutive Pro Tour season title.
Seven 41s. Four skiers into 43. One unmistakable message: the sport’s limits are shifting, and fast.
Unfortunately, one of the most memorable moments of the 2025 season earned its place in this countdown for all the wrong reasons. The Under-21 World Championships in Calgary were meant to spotlight the sport’s next generation. Instead, they became a reminder that, at times, judging—not skiing—can define a championship.
Held at Predator Bay, the U21 Worlds delivered much of what the event promises: breakout performances, record scores, and glimpses of future world champions. But during the women’s trick final, the focus shifted abruptly from athletic brilliance to adjudication.
When Colombia’s Daniela Verswyvel had her reverse mobe—an 800-point, title-swinging trick—ruled no-credit, the reaction was immediate and explosive. Live chats lit up. Elite skiers voiced disbelief. Formal protests were filed in the aftermath by Colombia, Canada, and the United States. The call stood, awarding gold to Canada’s Hannah Stopnicki and leaving Verswyvel heartbroken.
To her credit, Stopnicki—a deserving champion who could easily have won the title without controversy on another day—handled the moment with grace, embracing Verswyvel in a tearful scene that captured both the beauty and brutality of elite sport. “I know the judges are looking at everything extra carefully,” Stopnicki said afterward. “I was just trying to be as clean as I could be.”
The controversy didn’t end with the medals. The IWWF World Waterski Council launched a formal review, with Chief Judge Felipe Leal concluding—supported by EyeTrick data—that the panel was “very strict but consistent.” The issue, he stressed, was an unusually high number of non-credit calls that left many athletes dissatisfied.
The fallout reached beyond Calgary. Ahead of the Open Worlds in Italy, the Council committed to judge clinics aimed at improving consistency and restoring trust.
In a week meant to celebrate the future, Calgary instead exposed a fault line the sport can’t ignore. Trick judging, for all its tools and systems, remains far less objective than we’d like to believe.
The 64th Moomba Masters on Melbourne’s Yarra River wasn’t just another stop on the pro circuit—it was the crucible in which a new generation of champions was forged. Across the festival’s six professional events, four were won by first-time champions, setting the stage for breakthrough seasons.
In men’s tricks, 17-year-old Jake Abelson claimed his first professional victory, topping the highest-scoring podium in history. Moomba proved the launchpad for a meteoric season: Abelson went on to win the three largest prize-purse events, break the 13,000-point mark, and finish 2025 as the sport’s most dominant trick skier, despite a narrow World Championships defeat.
Slalom followed a similar trajectory. Nineteen-year-old Charlie Ross secured his first pro title with veteran composure, then rode that momentum to two pro wins, seven top-five finishes, U21 World Championships gold, and a silver at the Open Worlds—emerging as a genuine threat to Nate Smith and Freddie Winter for years to come.
The jump event crowned Joel Poland, returning from his Australian ban, as Moomba champion for the first time, launching an undefeated six-win season in men’s jump—a feat not achieved by any man since Freddy Krueger in 2006. Brittany Greenwood Wharton also claimed her debut professional victory, kicking off a season that included five podiums and a runner-up finish at the World Championships.
By the time the fireworks lit up Monday night’s jump finals, Moomba 2025 had delivered more than victories. Record-breaking performances, first-time champions, and a rising crop of elite athletes signaled a shift in the sport’s competitive landscape, reaffirming why the Moomba Masters remains water skiing’s ultimate proving ground.
The 2025 World Championships delivered countless historic moments, but perhaps none more electrifying than the men’s slalom final in Recetto—a showdown that redefined what elite slalom looks like.
When Nate Smith, one of the most reliable closers in water skiing history, posted one at 9.75m (43 off) skiing fourth off the dock, it seemed the title was settled. But over an hour later, 20-year-old Charlie Ross left the dock and matched him—forcing a sudden-death runoff for the world championship. For the first time in World Championships history, two skiers had to attempt 10.25m (41 off) cold, with gold on the line.
It was a generational collision. Smith, the standard-bearer of modern slalom. Ross, the breakout force of the year. Smith prevailed in the runoff, but the result felt secondary to the message: the gap had closed.
“I’ve never even tried 41 off the dock in practice,” Smith admitted afterward. “A lot goes through your head… but yeah, I’m pretty happy.”
The drama didn’t end in Italy. Weeks later, at the very next pro slalom event, Ross and Smith found themselves locked together again—tied once more at 43 off. Another runoff. Another razor-thin separation. Different venue, same script.
Back-to-back ties at the hardest line length in the sport, across two of the biggest stages of the season, felt less like coincidence and more like a turning point. Smith still claimed the crown, but Ross had firmly announced himself as his equal.
In a season defined by record-breaking depth and shrinking margins, no moment captured water skiing’s new reality quite like this one: the champion tested, the challenger confirmed, and a rivalry forged buoy by buoy at 43 off.
If 2025 has a defining rivalry, it has to be Erika Lang versus Neilly Ross. Lang started the season seemingly untouchable, going undefeated across Moomba, Swiss Pro Tricks, and the Masters, reclaiming the world record from Ross, and setting the tone for a dominant year.
Ross, meanwhile, looked out of sorts early on, traveling the globe and honing her craft in a grueling schedule that included competing in the men’s field in Monaco. It took six pro events, but in Portugal she finally broke through, clinching her first win of the season and nearly matching world record form—a statement that she was back.
The rivalry erupted at Botaski. Lang set a pending world record in the prelims, only for Ross to tie the current record in the finals, forcing Lang to chase a second world record just to win. Every trick, every frame, every point counted. Ross’ victory marked her first major triumph in three years and signaled a shift: Lang’s dominance was no longer assured.
The drama carried into the World Championships in Recetto, where both women arrived in red-hot form. Once again, victory was decided by a hair’s breadth, with Ross’ late-season momentum peaking at the perfect moment. Two athletes, pushing the limits of skill and precision, raised the standard for women’s trick skiing, making every pass a spectacle and every point a headline.
Lang remains one of the most successful women in the modern era, but Ross has proven she can match, and even surpass, the best—turning a personal comeback into one of the sport’s most thrilling storylines and taking women’s trick skiing to an entirely new level.
The men’s overall battle at the 2025 World Championships was the closest since 2009’s legendary three-way standoff, pitting Canada’s Dorien Llewellyn against defending champion Louis Duplan-Fribourg in a clash of precision, power, and pedigree.
The tournament began with a shock: Joel Poland, the sport’s most consistent tricker and early favorite, stumbled in the prelims. One front flip gone awry ended his flawless streak. Poland’s misstep became arguably the defining moment of the Worlds, a reminder that even the greatest can falter on the biggest stage.
From there, the men’s overall title came down to a hair. Duplan-Fribourg dominated tricks, setting the top score, and matched his personal best in slalom—but was penalized after a video gate review nullified his 10.75m pass, leaving him just 13 points behind Llewellyn. Every move counted.
Llewellyn, aiming to secure the title in the trick final, miscued on a landing and sank in disbelief, keeping the championship undecided. It all came down to jump. Duplan-Fribourg needed just 70 centimeters more to snatch the crown but came up short. In a performance echoing his 2021 duel with Joel Poland, Llewellyn soared 69.9 meters (229 feet), his best jump in years.
With that leap, Dorien Llewellyn followed in his father’s footsteps, claiming the World Overall title and cementing his place among water skiing royalty.
The 2025 World Championships proved that in overall competition, margins are measured in centimeters—and legends are defined by their ability to seize—or survive—the smallest of moments.
If Hollywood scripted a comeback, could it have been as dramatic as Freddie Winter’s at the 2025 U.S. Masters? Less than a year after shattering his femur in Monaco and missing most of 2024, the two-time world slalom champion returned to Robin Lake with history, expectations, and personal demons stacked against him. Winter’s fraught relationship with the Masters added another layer: banned in 2023 after an emotionally charged judging dispute, he had unfinished business on the event’s storied waters.
When the dust settled on Saturday’s brutal semifinals, the veterans were gone, leaving Winter as one of the few household names in the final. Last off the dock, chasing a lead set by Nate Smith, he hurled himself outside of three ball with trademark fearlessness. When the spray settled, Winter had done it—his first professional victory since his injury, his third Masters title, and arguably the most satisfying of his career. “Probably the most emotional moment of my life,” he said afterward. “So much self-doubt and fear I wouldn’t get back here over the last 10 months and 29 days.”
The Masters wasn’t just a singular triumph. It set the tone for the rest of Winter’s season: a string of consistent performances that saw him claim the Waterski Pro Tour title, rack up four pro victories (tying Nate Smith), and lead the year-end podium count. Though perhaps not fully back at 100 percent, Winter had reclaimed his place among the sport’s elite, proving that even after a potentially career ending injury, he could still define the men’s slalom narrative.
At Robin Lake, Freddie Winter reminded the water skiing world: the best stories aren’t just about victories—they’re about the journey to get there.
Across the sport, each new year seems to push performances to new and unprecedented heights. At many events, it has become commonplace for skiers to challenge—or even break—world records to clinch victory. It is, by almost any measure, a remarkable era to be a water ski fan.
One discipline, however, has largely resisted that trend. Jumping, with fewer events and shrinking opportunities, has seen its depth thin and top-end performances plateau. The concerning reality is that jump distances have not meaningfully improved this century and, by several metrics, have begun to decline.
All of which made what unfolded in Italy at this year’s World Championships all the more remarkable.
The tone was set in the opening days. Brandon Schipper arrived off a long-haul flight, skipped familiarization, and promptly unleashed the biggest jumps of his career. He wasn’t alone. Across the early rounds, season-bests and lifetime bests fell like dominoes. By week’s end, the cut to make the men’s jump final was the highest in World Championships history.
The finals delivered the crescendo. On the women’s side, personal bests stacked quickly—Maise Jacobsen and Aaliyah Yoong Hannifah both breaking 50 meters for the first time, with the entire top five clearing 170 feet. Brittany Greenwood Wharton, capping a career-best season, produced her longest jump in years to set the target. Hanna Straltsova, unflappable as ever, needed just two jumps to defend her title and complete another golden double.
Then came the men’s final—chaos, courage, and generational turnover wrapped into one shoreline spectacle. Eighteen-year-old Tim Wild, fresh off his first-ever 60-meter jump days earlier, flew 68.1m to announce himself on the sport’s biggest stage. Eight men cracked 220 feet. Schipper, giddy after another personal best, tapped home early, almost disbelieving what he’d just unleashed.
But the crown belonged to Joel Poland. His opening leap—72.1m, a personal best and new European record—froze the crowd. He passed his remaining jumps, gambling it would hold. It did. Ryan Dodd chased, cleared 70, and fell just short. With that, a three-decade lineage of North American jump dominance quietly ended.
In a discipline that had seemed stuck in neutral, Recetto felt like liftoff. Against every recent trend, jump delivered depth, drama, and distances that forced a recalibration of what was possible. Perhaps there is new life in water ski jumping after all.
Honorable Mentions
Aaliyah Yoong Hannifah’s triple-gold performance at the University World Championships, the first world titles ever won by an Asian competitor.
Tim Wild’s historic clean sweep at the Junior Masters—the first by a male skier in the event’s history.
Hanna Straltsova breaking the longest-standing record in the sport, by less than a third of an overall point.
Charlie Ross running 10.25m (41 off) at two different tournaments on the same day, breaking Will Asher’s 22-year-old collegiate record and tying for the lead at a professional event in the process.
Joel Poland setting yet another world record in professional competition to clinch the WWS Overall Tour season title.
Within all the excitement of Nautique’s recent launch of the Water Ski World Series, one of the most consequential changes slipped through almost unnoticed. The new Series isn’t just for the pros—embedded within it are junior and senior competitions, and a quiet but unmistakable message from Nautique: for Correct Craft, the future of the sport is under-21.
Junior competition has been part of water skiing since the sport started categorizing itself. In the United States, the Jr. Boys division debuted at the fourth National Championships in 1946, giving young talent a structured path upward. Hall of Famer Dick Pope Jr. won Jr. Boys overall at 16 in 1947, then jumped straight to the men’s ranks and immediately began piling up national and world titles. Internationally, Europe launched its under-17 Championships in 1964, and the Under-17 Worlds followed in 1986.
For eight decades, under-17 has been synonymous with “junior”—the proving ground where future superstars were minted.
Then Nautique quietly took a sledgehammer to it.
Hidden near the bottom of their Series announcement was the line that changed everything: the Junior Masters would no longer be junior. Under-21 would replace it entirely. And it wasn’t a one-off. Moomba is doing the same in 2026, adding under-21 alongside the pros and the under-17s. The three other World Series stops will follow suit. With a single keystroke, a whole generation was reassigned.
Nautique framed the shift as modernization—a cleaner system, a clearer pathway. But inside the sport, the reaction has been anything but unanimous. For many coaches and families, the change feels less like progress and more like erasing a pillar the sport was built on.
Corey Vaughn is one of them.
“Under-17 skiers are true juniors and can be seen as the future of the sport,” shared Vaughn, a career coach of over 10 years. “By the age of 20–21, some of the top talent has ‘arrived’ and there is too much potential overlap.”
Reflecting on his own pupils, he added that opportunities like the Junior Masters were “empowering experiences at a perfect time of life. Very motivating. I’m sorry to see that change.”
So why make the change?
We asked Nautique for comment. They didn’t respond. Their FAQ stayed polished and corporate, leaning on phrases like “greater access” and “modernization.” The most substantive line was their aim to give juniors “additional time and experience before transitioning to the pro divisions.”
Which points to a deeper tension: nobody agrees on when a young skier should actually turn pro.
Take Tim Wild. At 18, he might already be one of the best overall skiers in the world. In 2025 he swept the Junior Masters, won the under-21 Worlds, and took a podium at the open Worlds—and yet he’s entered only a single pro event in his life, a small backyard trick event. On paper he’s a world-class pro. In practice he’s an overqualified junior. And that makes sense. Juniors give him reps. They give him confidence. They give him hardware.
This is common among Matt Rini’s protégés. Joel Poland didn’t debut as a pro until 20, choosing to dominate juniors until he felt ready to step into a field of grown men. Rini—a Nautique insider—was almost certainly influential in pushing the junior age higher.
But contrast Wild with Jake Abelson. Same age, same generation, completely different trajectory. Abelson earned his first pro podium at 12 and has spent years terrorizing the junior ranks while poaching wins from adults. He’s proof that success is possible while keeping a foot in both worlds.
Water skiing is one of the few sports where you can win a junior title in the morning and beat the pros by dinner. It makes for great stories. It also makes the definition of “pro” feel slightly absurd.
“In broad terms, I really wish we had a stronger boundary between professional and amateur skiing,” Vaughn added. “I’m amazed by the talent of these kids, but I don’t think the likes of Jake Abelson and Charlie Ross should get their chance at winning open—where they clearly belong—and then go clean house in the amateur ranks. You wouldn’t let a 20-year-old drafted into the NBA also play college ball.”
Today, athletes like Abelson can hop divisions freely. Governing bodies, whose marquee events are amateur, have every incentive to keep things blurry.
That freedom is beautiful. But it’s also chaos.
So Nautique responded to the chaos with structure: create a middle zone. Build a bridge for the 18–21-year-old phase, the years when the sport tends to lose more athletes than it develops. Under-21 isn’t a new format—Europe has run Championships since 1990, the PanAm Games debuted it in 1996, and the IWWF launched under-21 Worlds in 2003. America is the outlier. This move brings the sport’s major events in line with a global trend.
A strong under-21 circuit could give young adult skiers something they’ve never truly had: meaningful pressure without inevitable defeat.
But every structural change creates winners and losers.
We asked Matteo Luzzeri—who has coached many of Europe’s top juniors—whether a stronger under-21 focus helps the sport.
“I don’t know,” he said after some thought. “Given the high level of youth skiers—Mati, Jake, Tim, Charlie, Lucas, Axel, Maise, Christhiana—the opposite argument could be made: Under-17 is more necessary now than it used to be.”
This is the paradox of governance: every attempt to help one group seems to hurt another.
Men’s tricks might not need an amateur under-21 division when half the pro podiums are filled by teenagers who can’t yet vote. But in slalom and jump? Different story. Outside of men’s tricks, only Charlie Ross won a pro event this year as an under-21, and only four under-21 athletes made a podium at all. For most young skiers, the pro ranks are a long stretch of non-finals, non-money, and non-momentum. A purgatory measured by rope lengths.
So maybe Nautique is right. Maybe this is the way to build the next generation of stars: give them battles they can win now, not scars they’ll carry later.
But it’s also possible the line between amateur and pro gets even fuzzier. That under-17 athletes lose the stage they once dreamed about. That the next breakout skier arrives later—and to a smaller spotlight.
The thing about format changes is that the impact doesn’t show up immediately. You feel it in three years, or five. When the under-21 podiums are deep—or empty. When pro fields get tougher—or thinner. When a 16-year-old who should’ve skied Robin Lake never gets the chance.
This is the part nobody can model.
Nautique has placed its bet on a vision of the future: a broader bridge, a longer runway, a gentler ascent. The logic is easy enough to understand. The consequences are not.
Change in water skiing rarely arrives with fireworks. It shows up in a rulebook tweak, an age cutoff, a field list. A small shift in gravity.
And suddenly, the next generation stands somewhere slightly different than we expected.
Welcome to the water ski multiverse. We now live in a sport where everything is happening everywhere, all at once.
Many will ask whether a tiny, fractured niche sport really needed a third professional tour. Whether further splitting an already bloated and incoherent global calendar is remotely helpful. Whether everyone couldn’t just sit down, act like adults, and pull in the same direction for once.
But like it or not, the future is here. And for many pro skiers, it’s spelled N-A-U-T-I-Q-U-E.
For years, Nautique has been the lifeblood of elite skiing. They held the IWWF towboat contract for a decade—pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into the federation. They kept the sport’s two crown jewels, the Moomba Masters and the U.S. Masters, alive through recessions, pandemics, and every imaginable governance meltdown. They’ve backed more athletes, more consistently, and more generously than anyone else.
And now, with their World Series of Water Skiing, they are injecting more money into professional skiing than all of the events on the Waterski Pro Tour and the WWS Overall Tour combined. It is the single largest investment in pro skiing in over twenty years.
Some in the sport cheered. Others felt the move like a bottle thrown across a quiet bar.
Because this is happening in a sport already stretched to breaking point. A sport where infighting and turf battles drain whatever oxygen remained. A sport that can’t agree on what its professional product is—let alone how to sell it.
The truth is that pro events have been propped up by private pockets, passion projects, and a politely disguised wealth-redistribution scheme in which the entry fees of lower-ranked skiers become prize money for the best. Everyone knows this. Everyone pretends not to.
In 2025, only ten skiers earned enough prize money to rise above the U.S. food-stamp line. Only five beat a full-time minimum-wage worker in Florida. That’s the economic reality behind the illusion of professionalism.
The Waterski Pro Tour was supposed to fix that. When it launched in 2021, it felt like a correction years overdue: athlete-led, narrative-driven, and structured enough to make sense of a notoriously incoherent landscape. For a moment, it worked. A wave of new events emerged. Those events gained legitimacy simply by being part of something bigger. Fans had a story to follow. Athletes had a season to chase.
But momentum disguised rot. The number of events rose, but prize money didn’t. More events meant less industry engagement, as limited marketing budgets were stretched thin. More weekends meant athletes couldn’t keep up. If you can’t make a living skiing—and you can’t—you need a day job. If you need a day job, you can’t chase tournaments across continents.
What emerged was a fractured field where some of the sport’s biggest names—Nate Smith, Regina Jaquess, Erika Lang—competed sparingly, their absences eroding the Pro Tour’s ability to crown a meaningful champion.
The Pro Tour needed substance, sponsors, and structure. What it had was a veneer: a brand lacquered over twenty-odd independent events, no real control over any of them, and no unified commercial product to sell.
Nautique is a company built on consolidation and control. It was never sold on the Pro Tour. They declined to include their flagship events from the outset and slowly leaned on the other events they sponsored to pull out one by one.
And so the World Series arrived. Without the IWWF towboat contract, Nautique needed a new platform to showcase their product—and suddenly had the budget to build it.
If the launch feels like a declaration of war, maybe it is. But history says progress rarely arrives without stepping on someone’s toes. In 1984, the Coors Light Water Ski Tour was born into a similarly scattered landscape. Over the prior decade, volunteers had pieced together a loose constellation of pro events across the United States. Then MasterCraft’s CEO launched an organized, centralized Tour. The American Water Ski Association fought it. They even tried to create a rival Tour in response. Some existing events joined the new Tour; others stayed outside and slowly faded.
We speak about that era with reverence now, but it was never universally adored. Long-running events went bankrupt under its competitive shadow. The Masters was dragged into professionalism kicking and screaming. Governing bodies resented losing control. And twice in the 1990s, athletes built rival tours out of frustration.
Yet through that conflict, skiing soared. The bull-in-a-china-shop approach taken by Rob Shirley and his successors put the sport on the map.
The parallels to Nautique’s move are almost uncomfortable. A single manufacturer launching a well-funded circuit. Independent events overshadowed. A governing body uneasy about losing control. A sport caught between centralization and chaos.
The significance of Nautique’s new tour isn’t the number of events. It’s the caliber. Five stops with genuinely deep prize pools and the full weight of Nautique’s athlete roster behind them will dominate the season. These will be the strongest fields, the highest stakes, the tournaments with consequences. That’s a new center of mass in a small universe. The kind of gravity that rewrites every orbit.
And for the Waterski Pro Tour, it means being nudged toward the cold edge of the map. Signs of strain have already surfaced: burnout among leadership, stalled content, a shrinking calendar. A schedule that risks becoming a regional slalom series, not a global showcase. Losing the sport’s most important events doesn’t kill the Pro Tour, but it guts its claim to legitimacy.
None of this means Nautique’s series is a revolution. Four of its five events already existed and were already among the sport’s highest-purse stops. The real change is the branding, the consolidation, and the clarity of intent. Nautique has given a name—and a narrative spine—to the shadow circuit they’ve been running for half a decade.
The danger isn’t Nautique doing this. It’s the sport doing nothing else.
Because adding more events with prize purses that barely cover travel isn’t a strategy. It’s noise. Nautique wants fewer, bigger, richer. Quality over quantity.
Well, that’s not exactly true either. Nautique’s goal is simple: sell boats. They believe the best path to that is a closed circuit they control—one built around their pros, aspirational juniors, and even a revived Big Dawg series.
Time will tell how long the sport can survive with three competing tours. Whether the Waterski Pro Tour can stage a comeback. Whether Nautique’s World Series can capture fans’ imagination. Where the WWS Overall Tour fits in any of this.
But this is the part where someone usually promises that competition breeds innovation, that conflict is healthy, that chaos is just the prelude to clarity. Maybe. But it’s just as possible we’re watching the sport split into its separate realities for good—each with its own logic, its own loyalties, its own gravitational pull.
Nautique has drawn its line. The Pro Tour is wobbling on its axis. The rest of the sport is left choosing which version of the future it wants to believe in.
That’s the multiverse we live in now. And like any multiverse, only one timeline survives.
The storm had blown through. The lake flattened. The crowd, swelling with anticipation all week, angled in for a clear view of the skier many consider the greatest of his generation. After seven world records and nine consecutive professional overall titles, a Joel Poland world crown was beginning to feel like a foregone conclusion.
His toe pass was vintage Poland: powerful, explosive, all big tricks and high-octane energy where most competitors rely on precision and speed. Only a slight miscue at the end hinted at vulnerability. Then came his hand pass — his strongest suit. Commentators couldn’t help but bring up the ghosts of two years earlier, when he submarined on his signature super-mobe-five, only to mount one of the most famous comebacks in World Championship history.
But this time, Poland never even got that far. Midway through an otherwise routine sequence — mobe, mobe, half-jack — he stumbled on a front flip, one of the most basic tricks in his arsenal. Suddenly, the man who makes the impossible look effortless was swimming, staring in disbelief as the moment slipped away.
On the shore, images of Poland sitting slumped, head in hands, echoed the heartbreak of 2023. For the swashbuckling superstar who has turned everything he touches to gold, it was another inexplicable collapse on the sport’s biggest stage.
Since claiming his first world title in 2021, Poland has been untouchable on the professional circuit. He has entered 14 pro overall events, winning all but two, and hasn’t lost a WWS Overall Tour event since October 2022. Tricks — the most cutthroat of the three disciplines — have been the foundation of that success.
In 26 rounds of tricking on the Overall Tour, he’s dipped below 10,000 points only twice, both back in 2022. Across 35 pro starts in tricks, he’s failed to hit that mark only once in the last three years. His career average since 2021 sits comfortably above 11,000. Most remarkably, he has never missed a final at a professional overall or trick event.
Measured by consistency, no male tricker can match him. Pato Font and Matias Gonzalez have piled up more outright wins, but neither boasts Poland’s 80-plus percent podium rate. As Joel himself has put it countless times: “Overall’s about not screwing up.” For half a decade, no one has been better at not screwing up.
Except, it seems, at the World Championships.
For the second straight cycle, Poland’s Worlds campaign unraveled in tricks. The contrast couldn’t be sharper: invincible on the Tour, error-prone at the marquee event. It’s hard to reconcile the two Joels — the unstoppable force who has redefined overall skiing, and the athlete undone by the same mistakes at the same tournament.
This wasn’t always the case. Poland burst into public consciousness with a triple-gold performance at the 2019 Under-21 Worlds, nearly breaking the world overall record in the process. Later that year, he shocked pundits by medaling twice at the Open Worlds. His defining moment came in 2021, in a gladiatorial duel with Dorien Llewellyn that ended with Poland setting a new world overall record to clinch gold.
But since then, Worlds has turned from proving ground into stumbling block. Whether it’s the weight of favoritism, overtraining, or just cruel coincidence, no one — perhaps not even Poland himself — can explain why the sport’s most consistent tricker has reserved his only missed finals for its most important event.
Poland’s misstep reopens an old tension in water skiing: is the World Championships truly the measure of the world’s best?
Many argue no. After winning Worlds in 2023, Freddie Winter himself admitted he had spent the year chasing Nate Smith, usually finishing second to him on Tour. By every measure of consistency, Smith was the best slalomer that year — yet Winter walked away with the title that mattered most.
There’s logic in rewarding consistency. Series and season-long circuits, like the Waterski Pro Tour, offer larger sample sizes that cut through the noise of off-days or lucky breaks. By that standard, Poland — undefeated for 11 months in jump and two years in overall, breaking multiple world records, and banking more prize money than anyone else — is indisputably the best skier on Earth. No one, male or female, has been more dominant in 2024 and 2025.
But the counterargument carries weight too. Not every elite skier can travel the Tour. Financial realities mean many of the sport’s best — Nate Smith, Regina Jaquess — skip most pro stops. The Worlds remains the one event where the entire field gathers, each athlete peaking for that week. Its self-fulfilling prestige lies in that convergence.
For Poland, the paradox endures. By almost every metric, he’s the standard-bearer of modern skiing — a generational talent redefining what’s possible. Yet on the one stage that crowns legends, he has twice fallen short.
Maybe it’s fate. Maybe it’s the cruel symmetry of sport. Or maybe it’s just a reminder that no matter how inevitable greatness feels, nothing in the World Championships is ever guaranteed.
The World Championships run from August 26-31 and will be broadcast live on TWBC.
When the conversation turns to innovation in modern trick skiing, it almost always starts with Joel Poland. The multitalented Brit has made “super flips” part of the sport’s everyday vocabulary, turning his signature super-mobe-five into a tournament staple.
But there’s another name worth saying—one rising fast.
Seventeen-year-old Axel Garcia of France has been quietly building a résumé that demands attention. Third at last year’s Under-17 Worlds behind Mati Gonzalez and Jake Abelson. Multiple-time European champion. Top seed into the finals at the recently concluded Under-21 World Championships.
And above all, he’s developed a reputation for one thing: launching himself into frontflips with the kind of style and ease that makes fellow skiers double-take.
Among elite trick skiers, Garcia has been dubbed by some as the “King of the Half Jack.” The half jack—named after American skier Kevin Jack—is a frontflip variation where the skier edges into the wake from an inverted back position before throwing the flip. It’s a close cousin to the wakeboard “tantrum” and has quietly become one of the most common moves in top-level runs. These days, a mobe–reverse–half jack combo is almost as standard as a side slide.
Some, like world record holder Jake Abelson, still favor the more orthodox BFF (frontflip from a regular back position), but that’s becoming rare. The half jack’s speed, consistency, and smooth transition make it the go-to choice.
Garcia hasn’t just mastered it—he’s reinvented it. In 2023, he submitted a clip of himself landing a reverse FFLF, which the IWWF approved as a brand-new trick.
Recently, he posted an Instagram video that made waves: both regular and reverse FFLFs, plus both regular and reverse FFLBBs (frontflip 360s), all starting from the inverted back like a half jack. The reverse FFLBB isn’t even in the rulebook yet—but if Garcia submits it, he could add another flip to the official trick list.
Top names took notice. Pato Font, Mati Gonzalez, and Neilly Ross all jumped into the comments with praise.
Take backflips. Progressing from a basic backflip (BFL) to a backflip 540 (BFL5F) is worth 350 more points—about a 70% increase. But frontflips? A basic FFL is worth 800 points. The 540-degree version (FFL5F) gets just 150 more—less than a 20% bump.
Why? Because of an arbitrary 1,000-point ceiling. Years ago, the double backflip was set at that max value, despite no skier ever landing it. Since then, every trick has had to fit between 500 and that cap, squeezing the spread for higher-difficulty frontflips into a narrow range.
The result: Garcia gains little by throwing his most jaw-dropping tricks. At the Under-21 Worlds, he topped the prelim leaderboard with a run of safe, fast mobes, half-twists, and just two frontflips. Why risk a reverse half jack or a front-full for an extra 100–150 points when a 750-point half-twist is cleaner and safer?
He’s not alone. Abelson regularly posts outrageous frontflips online—no-wake FFLBs, front-fulls from a regular wrap—that never see a start dock in competition. Pato Font has ski-line and spin variations that would make even Cory Pickos jealous. Every top trick skier has an ace or two they leave at home on tournament day.
Part of the reason is difficulty: in trick skiing, you can’t afford an early fall. Speed and consistency win. That’s not a flaw—it’s part of what makes the sport thrilling. But with a different point spread, more of those “party tricks” could become prime-time tricks.
Axel Garcia is exactly the kind of skier trick skiing’s future needs—innovative, fearless, and stylish. His flips are already redefining what’s possible off a ski wake, even if the scorebook hasn’t caught up.
For now, his wildest moves might remain for Instagram. But if the sport wants its brightest stars to keep pushing the limits, it needs to make sure the risk is worth the reward.
Because Garcia may not just be the King of the Half Jack—he might be next in line for the whole trick skiing crown.
The World Championships have always delivered breathtaking competition, but perhaps no discipline captures the drama and intensity quite like overall. From dominant streaks and shocking upsets to clutch, career-defining performances, the race for overall gold has produced some of the most iconic moments in the sport’s history.
As we look ahead to the 2025 World Championships, anticipation is building—and so is nostalgia. We’re counting down the ten closest overall battles ever staged at the Worlds: contests where every buoy, every trick, and every inch mattered.
In this storied event, athletes compete across all three disciplines—slalom, tricks, and jump—with overall scores calculated based on how close they come to the best mark in each. The format rewards versatility and consistency, with the overall champion traditionally recognized as the best water skier in the world.
Join us as we relive some of the most thrilling overall showdowns in World Championship history.
Image: Yvon le Gall
10. Gothenburg, Sweden 1983
Contenders: Deena Brush (USA) vs. Ana Maria Carrasco (VEN)
The drama started before a single buoy was rounded. In a controversial decision, the U.S. Team left out the defending overall champion from 1981—Karin Roberge. Under the rules at the time, only officially selected team members could compete at the World Championships, and the U.S. used a Team Trials event two months prior to select its six-athlete roster. Roberge, having an off day in tricks, narrowly missed the cut.
Out of the preliminary rounds, two young challengers—21-year-old Deena Brush and 20-year-old Ana Maria Carrasco—emerged in a dead heat, with Brush holding a razor-thin 4-point advantage in overall.
In the slalom final, Brush edged ahead slightly, gaining another three-quarters of a buoy. The two would finish silver and bronze in the event. Then came tricks, where Carrasco—who had been trading the world record with the Soviet Union’s Natalia Rumjantseva over the past three years—delivered fireworks. In the final, she laid down a new world record of 7,970 points, putting over 2,000 points between herself and Brush. But in the combined-score format used for individual medals at the time, Carrasco still took silver behind Rumjantseva.
Carrasco’s performance vaulted her just ahead of Brush in the overall standings heading into jump—the weakest of Carrasco’s three events. She didn’t make the jump final and could only watch as Brush chased the title. The American, who would go on to become one of the greatest jumpers of all time, needed just two feet more than her prelim mark to claim gold. But it wasn’t to be. She missed the jump podium, and the title went to Carrasco.
Key Moment: Arguably, the U.S. Team Trials. On form, Karin Roberge was the best overall skier in the world at the time, and her scores from the previous World Championships would have comfortably secured the title.
Winning Margin: 28 points. Equivalent to two feet (70 centimeters) in jump.
Ana Maria Carrasco (2,641 points)
Deena Brush (2,613 points)
Camille Duvall (2,577 points)
Duvall pays an emotional tribute to his late father.
9. London, England 1987
Contenders: Sammy Duvall (USA) vs. Mick Neville (AUS)
It remains one of the most iconic moments in World Championship history—and arguably the most clutch performance waterskiing has ever seen.
Heading into the 1987 Worlds at Thorpe Park, Sammy Duvall had already cemented his legacy with three consecutive world overall titles. He was also one of the sport’s first true professionals—a dominant jumper, a fixture of the Coors Light Pro Tour, and a household name in the U.S. And by ’87, his appetite for amateur competition was waning. This would be his final World Championship appearance.
His chief rival, though lesser known to many today, was a generational talent. Mick Neville, the unpretentious Aussie, had evolved from a world-class tricker into perhaps the most complete skier of his time. To this day, Neville remains the only man to win professional titles in all three events during the modern era. Think of him as a 1980s Joel Poland—funny accent, quiet swagger, and an allegiance to the crown.
Neville, still burning from a narrow defeat to Duvall two years earlier, came out swinging. He shocked pundits by claiming bronze in slalom, outskiing Pro Tour staples like Kris LaPoint and Carl Roberge, even edging Michael Kjellander in a runoff. Duvall, meanwhile, narrowly missed the slalom final—leaving the door open.
In tricks, Neville was unshakable, scoring over 9,000 points in both rounds to claim silver behind Patrice Martin. With two events down, the Australian held a commanding lead in overall.
Duvall, as expected, had the edge in jump. His opening-round 57.4-meter leap led the field—but it wasn’t enough to erase Neville’s advantage, and he sat in third overall heading into the final round, trailing both Neville and Roberge.
What followed was chaos. The men’s jump final became a frenetic game of musical chairs, reshuffling the leaderboard with every skier. First, a 20-year-old Kreg Llewellyn launched three meters farther than in the prelims to bump Duvall off the overall podium. Then Martin posted a huge personal best to leap into second. Neville followed with a nearly two-meter improvement, vaulting into the lead. When Roberge failed to respond, Duvall stood on the dock—last man out—sitting in fifth place.
More than 10,000 spectators lined the banks of Thorpe Park. Tension was thick enough to cut with a ski fin. Security was even required on the dock after another competitor’s belligerent father got into an altercation with Duvall’s sister Camille. The atmosphere was electric.
Duvall’s first jump? A massive 59.1 meters—the farthest ever at a World Championships. It earned him the jump gold, but still left him half a meter shy of Neville in overall. Then came jump number two. And then, history.
On his final jump, everything clicked. You could hear it in the snap of his skis, see it in the compression before the ramp, and feel it in the silence that hung as he took flight. When he landed—200 feet downcourse—everyone knew. Sammy had done it. With one final, flawless leap, he ripped the overall title from Neville’s grasp and closed the curtain on an undefeated career at the World Championships.
Neville, once again the runner-up, walked away with three medals from London. His eight total podiums remain the most of any man never to win gold.
But this was Duvall’s swan song. And he exited the World Championship stage exactly as he had entered it—undefeated, unmatched, and unshakable when it mattered most.
Key Moment: Sometimes pictures speak louder than words.
Winning Margin: 24 points. Equivalent to two buoys in slalom.
Contenders: Kim De Macedo (CAN) vs. Natalia Rumjantseva (RUS)
The 1993 World Championships—the first ever held in Asia—are best remembered for the dramatic team battle between the U.S. and Canada, ultimately decided by a razor-thin margin. But quietly, on the brackish, tidal waters of Singapore, another race was unfolding: a down-to-the-wire overall showdown between a Russian veteran and an unheralded Canadian upstart.
Natalia Rumjantseva, already a three-time world trick champion, dominated the preliminary rounds and looked poised to claim her first overall title. With Karen Bowkett Neville and Deena Brush Mapple both retired, Rumjantseva’s closest challenge was expected to come from Canada’s Judy McClintock Messer—a perennial podium finisher in overall.
In the trick final, Messer closed the gap slightly as top-seeded Rumjantseva slipped to second behind Britt Larsen. But it wasn’t enough to seriously threaten the lead. Then came the jump final—where everything changed.
First off the dock was Olga Pavlova of Belarus, a complete unknown to western audiences. She stunned the field by leapfrogging Messer and moving into second overall. Messer responded with a clutch three-meter improvement of her own, reclaiming second—but still sat a meter and a half shy of Rumjantseva’s mark.
Enter Kim De Macedo.
Just 21 years old and added to Team Canada primarily for depth, the public lake skier from Vancouver Island delivered the jump of her life: 41.9 meters, the longest of the day. The performance vaulted her from a distant fourth into striking range of the title. Rumjantseva, skiing next, watched as the young Canadian came within an infinitesimal 0.7 overall points of overtaking her. As the computers whirred, the Russian veteran responded with a half-meter improvement—to put any doubts to bed.
Rumjantseva took the title. De Macedo settled for silver. But in a performance few saw coming, the Canadian walk-on very nearly rewrote the story.
Key Moment: De Macedo’s breakout jump, which earned her an unexpected gold in the event and nearly the overall title. It also proved decisive in Canada’s historic win in the team competition.
Winning Margin: 24 points. Equivalent to 60 centimeters, or two feet, in jump.
Natalia Rumjantseva (2,678 points)
Kim De Macedo (2,654 points)
Judy McClintock Messer (2,602 points)
The Battle of Bogotá
7. Bogotá, Colombia 1973
Contenders: Sylvia Maurial (FRA) vs. Lisa St. John (USA)
In the thin mountain air of Bogotá, the 13th World Water Ski Championships delivered one of the sport’s purest overall duels. Lisa St. John, the fresh-faced high school grad from Redding, California, faced off against France’s Sylvie Maurial, a seasoned veteran fresh off an Olympic gold medal in jump at the 1972 Games in Munich. The two women were virtually inseparable across all three events—trading leads, medals, and momentum in one of the closest overall contests in tournament history.
St. John struck first, edging Maurial by a single buoy in the slalom preliminary. Maurial responded in the final, running the only 14.25m (28-off) pass of the tournament to claim slalom gold. In tricks, St. John led Maurial by just 80 points in the prelim and extended that margin slightly to 130 in the final. On the jump ramp, Maurial struck back again, out-leaping St. John by just half a meter to take silver behind the USA’s Liz Allan Shetter.
When the dust settled and the points were tallied, St. John came out a hair ahead.
It was a heartbreaking near-miss for Maurial, and a career-defining victory for St. John. But tragically, the triumph in Bogotá would be her last major one. Ten days later, she suffered a back injury at the California Cup that effectively ended her run at the top. Her career had been a meteoric rise—from child prodigy to world champion—all before her 19th birthday.
Key Moment: The slalom preliminary, where St. John edged Maurial by a single buoy. Under the scoring rules of the time, only preliminary scores counted toward the overall race. Maurial’s final-round surge earned her slalom gold, but it came a round too late.
Winning Margin: 17 points. Equivalent to a single buoy in slalom.
Lisa St. John (2,534 points)
Sylvia Maurial (2,516 points)
Barbara Cleveland (2,149 points)
Image: Jaret Llewellyn
6. Calgary, Canada 2009
Contenders: Javier Julio (ARG) vs. Jaret Llewellyn (CAN) vs. Adam Sedlmajer (CZE)
In one of the most open overall fields in World Championships history, the 2009 edition in Calgary felt like a roll of the dice. At least five men had a legitimate shot at the title, and by the end of the prelims, three remained—one a grizzled legend, one a fresh-faced prodigy, and a come-from-behind victory for the ages.
Jimmy Siemers stormed out early with a strong trick score, chased closely by Belarusian teammates Herman Beliakou and Oleg Deviatovski. But the slalom event shuffled the deck. Both Adam Sedlmajer and Javier Julio ran midway through 10.75m (39.5 off), putting themselves a full pass ahead of most of the field and narrowly missing the slalom finals in a stacked eight-way runoff for the last two spots.
Then came jump. And with it, chaos.
Jaret Llewellyn, competing in front of a hometown crowd, launched the farthest leap of the prelims to vault himself into serious contention. Siemers and Beliakou misfired, effectively ending their campaigns. When the dust settled, Sedlmajer—a then-unknown 22-year-old from the Czech Republic—held a narrow overall lead over the 38-year-old Llewellyn heading into the finals.
Enter Javier Julio, the emotive Argentinian, skiing with nothing to lose.
First off the dock in tricks—in a final he had only just scraped into—Julio threw down more than 1,000 points over his prelim total, enough to move within striking distance of Sedlmajer and Llewellyn and put himself firmly in the conversation. Then in jump, again as one of the lowest seeds, he found two extra meters on his earlier score and took the overall lead outright.
From there, it was a waiting game. Sedlmajer couldn’t improve. And then came Llewellyn, last off the dock. He needed 70.3 meters to clinch overall gold. Coincidentally, that was the exact distance needed to steal the jump title from Freddy Krueger as well. The crowd held its breath.
But it wasn’t to be. Llewellyn’s best mark was 68.5 meters. A remarkable performance, but not quite enough. Julio, after three consecutive podium finishes earlier in the decade, had finally secured the one title that had always eluded him—claiming Argentina’s first world title.
In a curious twist, the 2009 World Championships were one of only a handful between 2007 and 2013 that used an overall scoring formula widely criticized for overweighting slalom. Under the system used for the previous five decades—or the one in place today—Llewellyn would have won comfortably. Instead, it was Julio who claimed gold: a deserving champion on the day, but one whose victory came in part thanks to a scoring system that has since been scrapped.
Key Moment: The men’s jump prelims were carnage—an outbreak of crashes ruled multiple skiers out of the finals. Had they advanced, Julio’s 200-foot leap likely wouldn’t have made the cut, leaving him out of the final—and out of the race.
Winning Margin: 15 points. Equivalent to a toe slide.
Javier Julio (2,773 points)
Adam Sedlmajer (2,758 points)
Jaret Llewellyn (2,739 points)
Image: WATERSKI Magazine
5. Toulouse, France 1985
Contenders: Sammy Duvall (USA) vs. Mick Neville (AUS) vs. Carl Roberge (USA)
The 1985 World Championships delivered a classic—a three-way standoff in men’s overall that mirrored the broader team competition, where Australia pushed the undefeated Americans closer than ever to surrendering their grip on the world title. And at the center of it all were three men, each with a distinct style and background: The brash confidence of Duvall, the imposing presence of Roberge, and the suave precision of Neville.
Duvall and Roberge were mainstays on the Coors Light Pro Tour, sharpening their slalom and jump in the crucible of professional competition. Neville, by contrast, was a throwback—a tricker first and foremost, still to this day the most decorated trick skier in Moomba Masters history. A relative unknown to international audiences, he arrived in Toulouse determined to prove he could match the pros at their own game.
Roberge struck first, claiming bronze in slalom behind Bob LaPoint and Andy Mapple, finishing two buoys clear of both Duvall and Neville. But Neville countered in tricks, scoring nearly 9,000 points to take bronze behind Patrice Martin and Cory Pickos, putting daylight between himself and the two Americans.
Heading into the jump final, Duvall had the edge. His prelim jump was over 10 feet farther than either rival—and he held a commanding lead in the overall. But the final was anything but predictable.
Neville, the bottom seed, stunned the crowd with a 54-meter leap—3.5 meters farther than his prelim score—to match Duvall’s earlier mark and snatch the lead. Then Roberge responded with a jump 10 feet farther than his qualifying mark, leapfrogging Duvall into second.
Suddenly, the two-time defending champion was sitting in third. His first two jumps didn’t move the needle. It came down to his final attempt. Duvall needed something special—and delivered. On his third and final jump, he unleashed the patented Duvall kick and soared past 184 feet, just enough to reclaim the lead and secure an unprecedented third consecutive World overall title.
Key Moment: Though overshadowed in the jump final by the aforementioned trio, a 21-year-old former trick specialist from France was in the silver medal position when Neville left the dock—perhaps a quiet foreshadowing of the decade of dominance to come.
Winning Margin: 11 points. Equivalent to one foot, or 30 centimeters, in jump.
Contenders: Aliaksandra Danisheuskaya (BLR) vs. Hanna Straltsova (BLR)
For a country that has quietly produced more elite overall skiers than any other in the past two decades, it was only fitting that the most dramatic battle of recent times came down to two Belarusians: Aliaksandra Danisheuskaya and Hanna Straltsova.
Danisheuskaya struck first, running deep into 11.25m (38 off) in slalom to take the early lead. But Straltsova punched back in jump, claiming a 2.6-meter (9-foot) advantage to finish the prelims with a commanding overall lead. When the dust settled on the elimination round, she held a 100-point lead over Canada’s Paige Rini in second, while Danisheuskaya sat nearly 200 points off the pace in third.
Then came tricks—and with it, a seismic shift.
Danisheuskaya had only just squeaked into the final, grabbing the last qualifying spot by just 20 points. But when the opportunity presented itself, she seized it. Upping her prelim score by nearly 1,000 points, she vaulted into the overall lead, narrowly ahead of Straltsova.
When Rini, Straltsova, and pre-event favorite Giannina Bonnemann all failed to improve in the final, it came down to jump.
Danisheuskaya, skiing from the middle of the pack, tacked on another 1.4 meters (5 feet) to her previous mark, extending her narrow lead. That left Straltsova—silver medalist in both overall and jump two years earlier—with one more chance. She needed 56.2 meters to claim gold.
She came heartbreakingly close. Her best jump, 55.5 meters (182 feet), was good enough for silver—for the fourth time across the 2019 and 2021 World Championships—but not quite enough to catch her teammate.
Danisheuskaya, who had not stood on the podium in any of the individual events, walked away with gold in the one that mattered most.
It would mark the final time either woman would represent Belarus. Four months later, the country was suspended from IWWF competition following its involvement in the invasion of Ukraine. Both Danisheuskaya and Straltsova would continue their careers under the U.S. flag—claiming medals, and in Straltsova’s case, dual golds—at the next World Championships.
Key Moment: Giannina Bonnemann, the world’s top-ranked overall skier entering the tournament, fell early on toes in both rounds of tricks. Had she scored anywhere near her best, she would have cruised to the title.
Winning Margin: 8 points. Only half a buoy in slalom.
Aliaksandra Danisheuskaya (2,574 points)
Hanna Straltsova (2,565 points)
Paige Rini (2,412 points)
Image: WATERSKI Magazine
3. West Palm Beach, United States 1989
Contenders: Patrice Martin (FRA) vs. Carl Roberge (USA)
In 1989, the World Championships returned to U.S. soil for the first time in 28 years, landing at Okeeheelee Park in West Palm Beach for what turned out to be a blockbuster event. The sport was arguably at its peak in American popularity—major sponsors like Pepsi and Coors Light were on board, and more than 15,000 spectators lined the banks for the final day of competition. The headline drama? A gripping men’s overall showdown between established star Carl Roberge and France’s relentless technician, Patrice Martin.
Roberge, 25, had long been the heir apparent—Sammy Duvall’s understudy, a three-time overall bronze medalist, and now the anchor of Team USA. He entered the event ranked number one in the world, with pro tour titles and a season championship already under his belt. Martin, meanwhile, had three world trick titles to his name and was steadily evolving into a true three-event threat. After flirting with the podium in both 1985 and 1987, the Frenchman arrived in Florida looking for more than tricks gold—he wanted the overall.
Roberge opened strong in slalom, his best event, matching Andy Mapple’s championship record of 3 @ 10.75m (39.5 off) to earn silver and establish a full-pass advantage over Martin. But Martin fired back in tricks with a tournament-record 10,780 in the prelims, more than offsetting Roberge’s edge. After the jump prelims, Roberge clung to a razor-thin lead overall—setting the stage for a winner-take-all final.
The jump event, Martin’s weakest, saw him go first. Le Petit Prince barely improved on his prelim mark, landing at 53.5 meters—just enough to inch into the lead and apply pressure. Roberge, one of the top jumpers in the world, needed just 56.7 meters (186 feet)—well short of his personal best and comfortably within his range.
But he never found it.
Three eerily similar jumps, each a little back on the ramp, left him stranded six points short. The crowd watched in stunned silence as the scoreboard confirmed the result: Martin, by the slimmest of margins.
Four years earlier in Toulouse, Martin had declared his intention to win the overall title. Now, on U.S. turf, he finally did—kicking off one of the greatest winning streaks in the history of the sport.
Key Moment: Trick judging at these championships was widely questioned—Cory Pickos called it “nearly incompetent,” and even medalists were surprised by their high scores. Would a stricter panel have swung the overall result the other way?
Winning Margin: 6 points. Less then a foot, a quarter meter, in jump.
Contenders: Jean-Marie Muller (FRA) vs. Bruno Zaccardi (ITA)
The VII World Water Ski Championship at Long Beach was a landmark event for the sport—both in spectacle and competition. It featured the most extensive television coverage water skiing had ever received, broadcast live to homes across the U.S., and drew thousands of spectators. The mile-and-a-quarter Marine Stadium, built for the 1932 Olympics, once again hosted a major international competition. Banners from 19 nations rippled in the breeze as ski parades, chorus lines, and a battery of television cameras surrounded an event marked by style, tension, and a shifting global balance of power.
Tournament skiing in 1961 bore little resemblance to today’s format. Men ran the slalom course at 60 kph (37.3 mph), ramp tricks were still common, and jumpers were judged not just on distance, but on style. In this hybrid of sport and performance, it was 18-year-old Italian Bruno Zaccardi who emerged victorious in the overall standings—though only just.
Zaccardi’s path to the title was a study in consistency. A middling slalom performance saw him qualify for the final but finish only seventh. But he bounced back in the trick and jump events, collecting bronze medals in both. Muller, the French standout, struck gold in tricks—France’s signature event even then—and matched Zaccardi closely in slalom, finishing just one buoy short. But the Italian’s advantage on the ramp proved decisive.
American hopes rested on defending champion Chuck Stearns, but an ankle injury sustained at the Nationals limited his impact. Though U.S. athletes won three of the eight gold medals and claimed the team title, Zaccardi’s triumph marked a turning point—the rise of Europe on the world stage. Coming off three consecutive European overall titles, his win in Long Beach confirmed his global credentials and hinted at a more competitive, international era ahead.
Key Moment: With a fierce cut and a forward-leaning air form, Zaccardi launched a personal best 42.6-meter (140-foot) leap that brought the crowd to its feet and sent his countrymen into hysterics before the distance was even announced. Though not the longest jump of the event—American Larry Penacho flew 45.7 meters—it was enough to secure Zaccardi’s historic overall win.
Winning Margin: 4 points—equivalent to a two-ski side-slide, something you would actually have seen at the ’61 Worlds.
Bruno Zaccardi (2,667 points)
Jean-Marie Muller (2,663 points)
A.J. Orsi, Jr. (2,547 points)
The tightest overall battle in World Championships history
1. Villach, Austria 1991
Contenders: Jaret Llewellyn (CAN) vs. Kreg Llewellyn (CAN) vs. Patrice Martin (FRA)
Patrice Martin entered the 1991 World Championships as the reigning overall champion, fresh off a dramatic victory over Carl Roberge two years earlier. Now 27, the French trick prodigy turned three-event star was at the peak of his powers. But with the 1980s titans fading, a new generation was knocking—including two brothers from rural Alberta, of all places.
The prelims set the tone. Martin emerged with a narrow lead, just 30 points ahead of 21-year-old Jaret Llewellyn, who had thrown himself into contention with a massive jump score. In the slalom finals, Martin—qualifying as the bottom seed—picked up two extra buoys to widen the gap. Then came tricks, where he claimed yet another world title—his fourth in the event—and solidified his lead.
But the biggest mover was Australia’s Mick Neville. The last of the old guard in overall, Neville delivered a huge final-round score to climb within striking distance of the title. Martin, having failed to make the jump final, could only sit and watch.
The numbers were clear. Martin led by 60 points over Jaret, and 90 over Neville. But it was the elder Llewellyn—Kreg—who turned the event on its head.
Skiing third off the dock, Kreg was known primarily for his tricks, where he’d picked up bronze earlier in the tournament—jumping was the weakest of his three events. But on this day, he uncorked the performance of his life, adding nearly four meters to his prelim mark and launching himself from fourth place to the cusp of an improbable world title. The result was so tight that when the spray settled, no one was sure who had won.
When the computers finished their work, it was Martin clinging to the lead by 0.2 overall points.
Neville, needing just two more meters, couldn’t find it. And Jaret, requiring the first 60-meter jump of his career, came up short. Martin, unshakable once again, had done just enough to defend his title. It would go down as the closest overall finish in the history of the World Championships.
Key Moment: Kreg’s massive leap—it earned him the jump bronze medal, and along with compatriot Jim Clunie’s finals performance, helped Team Canada secure its historic first-ever team victory. But it was 10 centimeters shy of the mark he needed for overall gold.
Winning Margin: 0.2 points. Equivalent to, well, nothing. Just enough for heartbreak.
As the World Championships approach, a quiet but consequential debate is coming to a head: how much is a trick really worth?
At stake is the very structure of trick skiing’s scoring system—a rigid points table that hasn’t fundamentally changed in more than two decades. For athletes like world record holder Joel Poland, that’s no longer acceptable.
“The point values for high-difficulty flips are crippling trick skiing,” Poland told the IWWF Water Ski Council. “It’s limiting what athletes can do.”
Poland should know. Two of his most innovative tricks—the 900-point “UFO” and the 950-point “Matrix”—were recently approved for competition but, in his own words, are “tricks you’ll never see in a tournament” unless something changes. He’s not alone in that sentiment.
A Broken Balance
Trick skiing is unique among board sports: every maneuver has a fixed value, from 40-point surface turns to 950-point flips. The goal is objective scoring. The result? Homogeny.
“Right now the trick point values reward doing more tricks versus doing harder tricks,” said Brooks Wilson on the GrabMatters podcast. “You can get more tricks in because you’re going fast. It’s a speed game.”
That tradeoff—efficiency over difficulty—has shaped elite competition. Instead of variety, most skiers now converge on the same sequence of reliable, high-value tricks.
“We want to see variation,” added Freddie Winter. “Instead, everyone’s forced to do the same kind of runs.”
The Repetition Problem
An analysis of over 100 score sheets at the 2023 World Championships shows just how narrow the tricking landscape has become.
Among hand tricks, backflips dominate. The half twist (BFLB), worth 750 points, appeared in every finalist’s run—typically paired with its reverse. In contrast, the only other trick worth 750, the ski-line seven back, was attempted just once.
The mobe (BFLBB), worth 800 points, was nearly as common, performed by three-quarters of the finalists—far outpacing other tricks in its point range. The basic backflip remains a staple, especially among intermediate-level skiers, tricks worth comparable points, such as W7B, SLBB, and SL5s, were attempted much less often and with much lower success.
Toe tricks show a similar pattern. Toe back-to-backs (TBB) are ubiquitous, appearing in 112 of 117 toe runs (the exceptions were early falls). Toe wake back-to-backs were also incredibly common; the regular and its reverse featured in every single finalist’s toe run. Toe wake tricks worth comparable points, such as TWO or TWLB, were less common, although some of this stems from them not having an easy reverse.
Misaligned Incentives
Not all frequently performed tricks are necessarily overvalued—some, like backflips, may be common because they serve as foundational building blocks for higher-scoring flips. And in toe runs, the inherent physical limitations naturally result in a narrower pool of viable tricks and sequences.
But some mismatches are hard to ignore. Why does the toe wake back-to-back (TWBB) score more than the toe wake 360 (TWO), despite similar difficulty? Why is the mobe front-to-front, attempted only three times at the tournament, valued the same as the standard mobe, which was performed over 100 times?
Take the half cab (BFLF) as another example. Worth 550 points, it was performed just once for every three half twists (BFLB), valued at 750. While it may be true that landing in the back is more difficult than taking off in the back, does that justify a 200-point gap? If so, why are half twists so common—and half cabs so rare?
Innovation Without Reward
In early 2024, the IWWF approved four new flips, including Clarens Lavau’s “Super Half Twist” and Poland’s “UFO.” But even with official approval, no one expects them to appear in major tournaments.
Poland’s “Matrix”—a frontflip with a ski-line 540 from the back position—was awarded 950 points. That’s just 150 more than a basic frontflip, and identical in value to the established super-mobe-five.
“There’s a point where you go, well, the slam it takes to learn this trick is just not going to be worth the extra 50 points,” said Poland. “I was trying to do a super-mobe-seven—a backflip 720 over the rope—but there’s not much point because they’ve made it very clear no trick can be worth more than 1,000 points.”
The scoring ceiling isn’t just discouraging; it’s actively stifling innovation.
“I tried three of them,” Poland added, “and they were the worst crashes of my life. I was like, ‘I’m never gonna try that again.’”
Without a meaningful scoring incentive, tricks like the Matrix may never make it into competition. Even Poland, one of the sport’s most creative skiers, is reconsidering the cost.
“You’re limiting creativity and progression,” said Winter. “Do we want to see the same runs forever—just a bit faster?”
A System Stuck in Neutral
The IWWF knows the problem exists. In a memo last year, Council Chair Candido Moz urged the Tricks Working Group to bring forward point values that better reflect “true difficulty levels.”
But attempts at reform have stalled for years.
“The skiers could never agree on point values,” Moz has explained. “So IWWF never received a proposal.”
That may change this September. A restructured Tricks Working Group, which includes Poland as a member, is expected to present formal recommendations during the World Championships in Recetto.
Time for a Reset?
Poland is done waiting. “In my opinion, [the current system] is crippling trick and limiting the athletes,” he said. He plans to stay vocal in the lead-up to Recetto.
Winter sees trick skiing as the discipline with the most untapped potential. “Right now, it’s just not reaching it,” he said. “But it could.”
The current system rewards repetition and safety. A modernized score table—one that truly values difficulty and risk—could transform the sport overnight.
“You’ve got to blow it up to build it up,” said Wilson.
The World Championships run August 27–31 in Recetto, Italy. A formal review of trick point proposals is expected to take place at the IWWF Water Ski Council meeting during the event.
Independent perspectives on tournament water skiing
