Elodie’s grand end of season

16 Year old Elodie Wallace had a very strong end to her season. Clearly her week training with the Swiss Junior Team in Airolo in the February half-term paid off as she felt very comfortable for the Europa Cup at the same resort on 15th March where she finished 6th place, a very respectable top 50% result in the first senior aerial competition in Europe in 2014. Her score of 58.22 was her personal best and Elodie’s raw judges marks of 9.5 9.4 9.5 were the highest of the day, men and women.

Moving onto Valmalenco, Italy saw probably the highest level Europa Cup ever with 16 of the 19 women jumping doubles and teams from USA, Canada and Kazakhstan joining the usual European and Russian nations. Elodie jumped a good back layout and back pike, scored just over 100 and finished a credible 13th, highest of the girls on the single kicker.

Day 2 in Valmalenco Elodie moved her DD up a notch and did 4 back fulls in training and gained snow qualification for it and performed it in competition for the first time. Unfortunately the weather turned into a snowstorm making conditions more tricky. Elodie was too fast for her full and went by a bit, then the contest was stopped after one jump. But the feeling of achievement of moving onto a harder trick in contest was reward enough.

The last contest of the season was the Junior World Championships. Again the standard was the highest ever with all the major aerial nations represented: China, USA, Canada, Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan. 16 of the 18 girls on the startlist were jumping doubles so Elodie was not expecting to make finals, top 12, with only singles. However again there was a snowstorm causing problems for some and Elodie did her simpler jump, back lay and scored 54. It was a pleasant surprise for her to place 12 and have nothing to lose in the final. Her last jump of the season was a cleanly landed layout, scoring 51 and moving her up into 9th place ahead of the entire Chinese team and just one point off the leading Belarussian. If the best Olympic nations can’t produce juniors to beat Elodie then GBR certainly have good prospects!

The last piece of good news is that Elodie scored 96 FIS Points in Airolo and 104.4 at the juniors, so between them they will keep her FIS points average over 100 for 12 months, thus eligible for World Cup!