Sixteen-year-old snowboarder lands history-making trick at world championships
Written by ABC Audio All Rights Reserved on March 2, 2023
(NEW YORK) — It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Mia Brookes making history at the Snowboarding Freestyle World Championships!
The 16-year-old freestyle snowboarder became the youngest ever snowboarding world champion in Bakuriani on Monday.
But that’s not all. In order to clinch the gold medal spot, Brookes, who is British, delivered a history-making second run and executed the first-ever cab 1440 double grab — four full frontside rotations while grabbing the board — completed in a women’s snowboarding competition.
“I’m just really, really happy — like, I’ve never been so happy in my life. I feel like I’m going to cry!” Brookes said after completing the highly difficult slopestyle trick. “I actually can’t believe [I did the cab 1440]. When I did it, I wasn’t sure I’d managed it, but I thought about it and was like … yep, I’ve done a 14!”
Brookes earned a winning score of 91.38 on her final run, beating New Zealand’s Zoi Sadowski-Synnott, who won the gold medal in women’s slopestyle and the silver in big air at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.
Brookes, who was too young to compete in Beijing, has only participated in three World Cup events prior to winning this year’s world championships.
GB Snowsport head coach Pat Sharples praised the young boarder’s immense talent.
“What Mia’s done out here today is just next level,” Sharples told the press after the competition. “We all know Mia’s got the talent, but this is her first season on the WC circuit and her first World championships so to land a run like that with all the pressure of a World Championships tells you everything you need to know about her.”
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