This was published 8 months ago
It’s the greatest season ever by any moguls skier ... and she’s an Australian
By Ian Chadband
Jakara Anthony’s extraordinary record-breaking mogul skiing season has reached new peaks with the Australian freestyle skiing superstar annexing her 13th gold medal of an unsurpassed World Cup season.
The Olympic champion edged to victory in the Big Final of the dual moguls in Almaty on Saturday to extend the record number of World Cup victories in a season that she’d established at the Kazakhstan winter resort 24 hours earlier.
Yet another victory ensured Anthony will take home all three crystal globes as overall moguls champion, as well as discipline winner in both the singles format and dual moguls.
The greatest season ever by any moguls skier still has one more race that the 25-year-old from Barwon Heads could win when she competes in the season-ending dual moguls in Valmalenco, Italy, next weekend.
But it is already a landmark season for the Australian, who reckoned she could hardly believe her success over the campaign, having won 13 of the 15 World Cup competitions she’s entered.
“Yeah, it’s pretty crazy,” she smiled after the 21st World Cup win of her glittering career on the ‘Yuka G” course at Almaty’s Shymbulak Mountain Resort.
“We were joking last night - well, my coach Pete (McNeil) was - that we’ve still got to come out here today and break another record ... my one from yesterday (when she went past American Hannah Kearney’s best-ever season of 12 wins).
“But in all seriousness, we were just going out there today and working on the things that I was kind of missing yesterday, and getting used to switching between lines, that’s always a hard thing to adjust to on duals day.”
For once, though, Anthony wasn’t completely dominant in Saturday’s duals, as she only pipped her American rival Jaelin Kauf by just one point, 18-17, in the head-to-head Big Final.
Kauf actually beat the champion for speed down the bumpy slope, by 0.19sec, but Anthony’s superior execution of higher-tariff aerial tricks won her the judges’ vote narrowly.
Jakara Anthony with her gold medal at the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022.Credit: Getty
It was her sixth dual moguls win of the season to go with seven singles.
A measure of her superiority was that she now leads Kauf in the season’s standings in the duals by a massive 176 points.
Anthony’s compatriot Matt Graham, who had won bronze in the singles on Friday, this time couldn’t get past the quarter-finals in the men’s dual moguls as Canadian great Mikael Kingsbury went on to make it 89 World Cup wins.
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