Vail skier Jenna Meyers wins Freeride Junior World Championships

Vail skier Jenna Meyers was as excited she could be to compete in Austria at the Freeride Junior World Championships this week.

But that didn’t mean she wanted to go first of the 16 competitors in the field.

Her coach at Ski & Snowboard Club Vail, Matt Luczkow, said being first to drop isn’t usually a good thing in the sport of big mountain skiing, in which judges score skiers on how well they take on a steep, cliff-laden face of a mountain.

“It’s usually a disadvantage, because the judges don’t have anything to base their scores on,” Luczkow said.

But in Meyers’ case, the opening position suited her well, and she cruised handily to victory in the top juniors event in big mountain skiing.

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Meyers qualified for the Freeride Junior World Championships last season and has been looking forward to it for months. She pulled No. 1 in the Jan. 24 bib draw, locking in her opening spot in the starting order, and the nerves began to come.

“I was dropping first out of the girls, and I was little nervous there,” she said.

Skiers were permitted an inspection of the course, but it looks a lot different in inspection than in actually skiing the face. Meyers caught a glimpse of something that would help her start her run.

“I saw these snowboarders hitting this cliff and thought, ‘I think I should hit that from the top,'” she said.

The first cliff went well; she maintained a lot of speed and held on after getting loose through a field of avalanche debris, but a problem emerged.

“I was like this looks so different,” she said, recalling her inspection of the course.

But that’s when her training kicked in.

Leading up to the competition, Meyers said she had spent a lot of time taking fast laps through the Prima Cornice area of Vail Mountain with Luczkow.

“There was one day when we lapped it 15 times in a row, just dropping in anywhere,” she said. “I feel like it’s some of the best training you can get on Vail Mountain for something like this; we just kept going without stopping. It was so fun.”

Luczkow said there’s more than just the fun factor in a training regiment like that. It also helps big mountain skiers get over their tendency to want to plan out every turn ahead of their run.

“We’ll start above (Prima Cornice), before you can’t see anything, and we’ll have to ski into it and go over these blind spots without hesitation, skiing more instinctively and reflectively,” Luczkow said. “Rather than having a set plan and executing the plan, we’re more making decisions in real time.”

Meyers made a few good decisions in real time and cruised the rest of the Austrian face fast and flawless.

In watching the run, Luczkow said he wasn’t surprised to see Meyers ski it so well, “but I was a little surprised on just how dominant of a run it turned out to be,” he said.

Meyers ended the competition with a score of 1300 points, while second place Sonja Taudien of Switzerland scored 1020 points and Alizée Grivel, also of Switzerland, scored 840 points.