Graham and Anthony make small finals in final pre-Olympic hit out

Courtesy: olympics.com.au

Matt Graham and Jakara Anthony have finished the pre-Olympic season with a finals run at the Tremblant Moguls World Cup this morning.

Unfortunately both missed out on advancing to the 6-man Super Final, with current world number three Graham finishing in 11th place and Anthony finishing in 13th.

22-year-old Graham qualified 11th with a score of 83.36, and held his position with a score of 83.92 in the first final.

Although he was pleased with the way he skied, the Sochi Olympian prefers a more technical course and said the Canadian mountain didn’t play to his strengths.

“I thought I skied quite well today, I thought I jumped well and executed the plan, but the judges didn’t really agree with that, so not much I can do about that,” Graham said.

“The course here is quite interesting, it’s not much of a standard course like the one we’ll see in Korea.

“The course is really flat and quite short, which makes it easy and when it’s easy everyone skis well, so it condenses the field quite a lot and everyone was scoring really high so you couldn’t really make any mistakes.

“Today was a different story to most events but none the less it was still a fun day skiing and now on to the next day.”

In the 6-man Super Final, Japanese skier Ikuma Horishima, brought an end to Canadian Mikael Kingsbury’s streak of 13 World Cup wins.

Horishima, currently ranked sixth, pipped Kingsbury for the gold medal by 0.51 points, taking the top spot on the podium with a score of 93.88, above the world number one’s silver-medal score of 93.27.

“[Horishima’s] put down runs which were really hard to beat,” Graham said. “I don’t think anyone would have beaten him today, his final run was quite amazing.”

Kazakhstan’s Dmitriy Reikherd rounded out the podium with bronze, keeping his spot as second in the world, while Graham remains comfortably in third.

Things didn’t go to plan for Graham’s fellow Aussie teammates, Cooper Woods-Tapolovic, James Matheson and Rohan- Chapman-Davies, who finished 47th, 49th and 50th respectively.

In the women’s event 19-year-old Anthony qualified 15th for the small final, and boosted her final position up two places with score of 75.54 in the 16-women first final.

At the end of the Olympic qualification period she sits in 14th place on the world rankings.

Sochi 2014 gold medallist, Canadian Justine Dufour-Lapointe, won gold with 87.43, followed by her teammate Andi Laude in second on 85.35 and Kazakhstan’s Yulie Galysheva won bronze with 84.61.

Krystle Yin was the next best placed Australian female (29th) followed in quick succession be Madii Himbury (30th), Sophie Ash (31st), Claudia Gueli (34th) and Taylah O’Neill (35th).

The Aussie Mogul Team now head to Colorado for a final training camp before the PyeongChang Winter Olympics, which kick off in three weeks’ time.

“From here we go down to Steamboat for five or six days of training before we head to Korea at the end of the month.

“So now it’s about putting the final touches together and trying to get the most out of the final days of preparation as possible,” Graham said.

Full results from the Tremblant World Cup are available HERE. The Australian Winter Olympian Team will be selected at the end of the week.

Georgia Thompson
olympics.com.au