Kaya Turski doesn’t have a problem launching off an 80-foot jump in a slopestyle terrain park and putting her body through a complex series of gravity-defying flips and twists while grabbing her skis at the same time.
But don’t ask her to go bungee jumping.
“You know, I’ve wondered about that and I think it’s a control thing,” Turski said. “When I go off an 80-foot jump, or whatever size it is, I’m in full control of the speed I’m taking and I trust in what I’m doing.
“When you bungee jump, you’ve got to trust in the cord not breaking. That’s not really something in your control. I think that’s what freaks me out about it.”
Turski is very good at what she does, dominating a freestyle skiing discipline that will debut as a medal event at the 2014 winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.
Last week, the 23-year-old Montreal native won gold in the last of three stops on the 2012 Dew Tour in Ogden, Utah, and shared athlete-of-the-year honours with American Devin Logan. Two weeks earlier, in Aspen, Colo., she was crowned X Games female athlete of the year after completing a perfect season, winning every event she entered. Turski highlighted her performance at the Winter X Games as the first woman to land a “switch 1080,” taking off backward before doing three full rotations and then landing backward.
“I’ve had a few good seasons, but this one I’m really feeling good about it. Definitely was my best win yet at the X Games,” Turski, who was back home last week for a short break before returning to her winter residence in Mammoth, Calif., told The Gazette.
Turski also won the 2011 Winter X Games and Euro X, and was first overall in the 2011 Association of Freeskiing Professionals slopestyle ranking. She also took silver at last year’s inaugural FIS world championships for the discipline.
Turski credits her success to “a lot of things,” but specifically training hard. She works with a strong support team that includes Jaime Livingston, a certified athletic therapist and strength and conditioning coach at Montreal’s High Performance Sports. She also is with the privately funded B2ten, which provides additional training and preparation services to a stable of elite Canadian athletes, including diver Alexandre Despatie, cyclist Clara Hughes and swimmer Brent Hayden, all Olympians.
Turski also has help from Red Bull, one of several corporate sponsors backing her and, because slopestyle is now part of the Canadian Freestyle Ski Association, she now has full-time coaching.
“I do have a great team around me. That’s so important,” Turski said. “On top of that, I’m trying to stay as healthy as I can so I can keep doing what I’m doing.”
Turski was a toddler when she first put on skis, but turned to in-line skating before age 10 because of the thrill of what skate parks and street skating offered. She competed professionally in in-line skating as a teenager, but made the switch back to skis after attending an event staged by D-Structure, an in-line skate and ski shop in the Montreal area and Quebec City that sponsored her then and still does now.
“I just fell in love as soon as I put skis on,” said Turski, who has competed in slopestyle since 2006. “It just felt really good being on snow.”
Turski’s rise to top of her discipline hasn’t come without hard knocks along the way. In 2006, “I split my pancreas in half” in a fall, and the following year she tore the ACL in her right knee. In 2010, she tore the ACL in her left knee.
“But I think I’m stronger than I’ve even been,” she said. “If anything came out of that it’s that I learned to work hard, learned the value of training in the gym, eating and sleeping well and taking care of my body.
“It’s a grind, but the positive outweighs the negative,” she added. “It’s an amazing life. I do what I love to do year round, and I have support for it. It couldn’t be any better.”
All signs point to Turski being a top Olympic medal hope for Canada in 2014 after the decision by the International Olympic Committee last July to include ski slopestyle for men and women as medal events, as well as snowboard slopestyle and snowboard parallel special slalom.
Turski was a close friend of fellow freeskier Sarah Burke, the 29-year-old from Barrie, Ont., who died Jan. 19 in Salt Lake City from a serious injury suffered while training on a superpipe in Park City, Utah, nine days earlier.
Burke, a six-time X Games gold medallist in superpipe, was an icon in the sport and spearheaded the lobbying to get freeskiing into the Olympics.
“For as long as I’ve known her, and even longer, she’s been pushing our sport,” Turski said in an interview with MacLeans.ca published Jan. 27, the day after she won at the X Games. “Even when she didn’t need to, she was learning new tricks, she was landing new tricks and always testing her limits. I wanted to do the same. I want to follow in her footsteps and make her proud.
“It’s very clear how many people she touched,” Turski told The Gazette. “She fought for our sport for as long as she could.”
The season is far from over for Turski, who will be in Mammoth on Feb. 27 for the U.S. Grand Prix, then it’s off to Tignes, France, for the Euro X Games March 12-18, then back to Canada for the AFP World Championships April 13-23 in Whistler, B.C.
And each day that passes is another day closer to Sochi.
“Yeah, I’m definitely thinking about the Olympics,” Turski said. “The X Games have always been the biggest event in the industry, and now with the Olympics, it’s a major opportunity for all of us to showcase our sport.
“I think it’s the sport of the future. Kids, people in general, I think are going to be really excited to see it. So, yeah, the ultimate goal is to win a gold medal at the Olympics.
“I would love nothing more than to go to Sochi and win for Canada. All this hard work hopefully is going to get me there.”