When the all-women's Nine Queens freeski competition was announced last December, there were some strong reactions from the forum on Newschoolers.com. "What a waste of money," one user wrote. "Just go topless and we got ourselves an event."
There were comments better and worse than that, but Kaya Turski didn't read any of them. "There's a lot of ignorant kids on there that don't really think about what they're saying," Turski told ESPN. "You try to develop a thicker skin and do your thing and try not to be bothered by it."
So that's what Turski did -- she went to Austria in late March for the Nine Queens big air, where she took second place and became the first female skier to land a switch 1080. Maria Bagge won the event and became the second skier to land a switch 1080.
Those four digits were a magic number for women's skiing and snowboarding this winter. At Winter X 15, Kelly Clark won women's snowboard Superpipe with the first-ever 1080 landed by a female in competition, and skier Jen Hudak nearly landed one, but lost her footing at the last second. "I landed that 10 and was telling myself, 'Just make sure you ride away,'" Hudak said about her Winter X 15 run. "Just when I thought I had, something took me out."
With women's slopestyle and halfpipe skiing under review for Olympic inclusion, the bar has officially been raised. "I think the progression rate is going to go sky high," Turski said. "Especially with the ... possibility of being in the Olympics, people are going to go all out."
Turski attempted the cab 10 several years ago, but never had the right opportunity to work on it, until now. At Nine Queens, instead of having a small window of time to dial in a slopestyle run under pressure -- a situation where she relies on proven tricks -- she had five days to become comfortable with the feature. Next up? "I want to work on [the cab 10] and get it dialed in and comfortable and looking good," she said. "Spinning unnaturally is really important for competition. Going inverted is another major thing going on in women's skiing."
And as for the naysayers who bash women's freeskiing? "We showed the world with enough support and a good feature, we can pull out a lot of cool tricks," Turski said. "We showed everyone that we're worthy of having the presence we do in the industry. It was a major step for us to have an event like this."




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