Australia's Best Day Yet as Cox and Graham Secure Calgary World Cup Gold

For the first time, Australian athletes have won the women’s and men’s World Cup in skiing at the same event.

Two-time Winter Olympian Britteny Cox and 2016 world number 2 Matt Graham beat a strong field at the Canada Olympic Park to finish on top of their respective podiums.

Cox is the current world number 1 and it marks her third win out of four events held in the 2016/17 season. With the strongest turns and jumps across three runs on the day, Cox was unstoppable, managing to hold the Canadian sisters, Justine and Chloe Dufour-Lapointe, to the minor places.

The Dufour-Lapointe sisters, the 2014 Winter Olympic gold and silver medallists had to settle for second and third as Cox continued her near-unstoppable march through the North American World Cup events.

Performing a textbook 360 jump on the first jump and a straight-over backflip on the steep bottom jump, Cox displayed the finesse and form that has landed her in the yellow leader’s bib for the entire season.

"I was really happy with my skiing today and glad to execute in all three rounds,” Cox said. “Especially as the conditions changed throughout the day.”

The course at the Calgary Olympic Park is notorious for its difficulty. The World Cup was held on the site of the 1988 Olympics ski jumping hill. A 25-degree pitch greets the competitors through the top half of the course, before a sudden pitch change to over 35 degrees which catches even the best in the world off-guard.

The course did not stop Matt Graham from winning his second World Cup event, after his breakthrough victory last season. Gradually building over the course of the day, Graham saved his best run for last, with the judges awarding him a score of 85.34 in his final run out of a possible 100. It was too good for the most successful World Cup freestyle mogul skier of all time, five-time World Cup Champion Mikael Kingsbury of Canada. He could only manage second place on home soil.

“I skied really well today in a challenging course,” said Graham after his top 6 super final run. “My goal was the execute my runs and lay down two clean jumps and tidy turns each run, so to do that makes the win more satisfying. I really felt like I won today, so this gives me a lot of confidence going into the rest of the season.”

Graham, seventh place at the 2014 Olympic Winter Games in Sochi, has been building towards consistent podium finishes, something that secured him the world number two ranking at the end of last season. His commitment and determination is noticed throughout the ski world and beyond, but most particularly by his teammate Cox.

"It feels unreal to share the top spot on the podium with Matt. We train together all year round and I'm stoked to see his hard work paying off,” said Cox.

This was a sentiment that was echoed in kind by her teammate, Graham.

'Today was an amazing day for Australian mogul skiing,” said Graham. “To share the top step of the podium with my teammate Britt was really special. She is having a great season so I am super stoked for her.

It was a day for the history books for Australian mogul skiing, with four Australian female athletes qualifying for the top 16 finals, something that has not occurred before.

It is a strong start the build-up to the Olympic Winter Games in PyeongChang, South Korea in 2018, where Cox and Graham plan to be skiing for gold.

Courtesy Joshua Himbury The Mogul Skiing Academy