AS SEEN IN THE NOVEMBER 2011 ISSUE OF FREESKIER
WORDS BY NICOLE BIRKHOLD
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"H" KAYA TURSKI YELLS WHEN ASHLEY BATTERSBY misses her frontside switch up. It’s a late-May afternoon at Mammoth Mountain, and the two slopestyle skiers are playing a game of horse through the Forest Trail Park. Kaya’s long brown ponytail hangs over her shoulder, barely escaping from the oversized gray hood she has pulled over her head. Hair, hat and headphones are held in place by her goggles, the strap adorned with home-stitched beads and feathers.
Kaya has called Mammoth home for the past six months, though for her, like any other professional skier, naming a home is futile when faced with numerous contests and filming ventures. She has been on the road nearly 24/7 this past season and every year previous since she began her ski career by moving to Whistler in 2005.
To say she had a successful 2011 season is an understatement. Kaya was victorious in slopestyle at the X Games, Euro X, AFP World Championships at the World Skiing Invitational and Winter Dew Tour at Snowbasin, Utah, putting her at the top of the AFP women’s slopestyle rankings for the third year in a row. Perhaps only mentioning 2011 is just another way of understating Kaya’s history of success. She has been a champion since her first competition as an inline skater at age 14.
Kaya has this innate ability to compete,” says her Skullcandy team manager, Jimbo Morgan. "It's just in her. Some people have to develop it, but Kaya has always had it."
Turski dreamed of being a professional athlete from a young age. “My dad still has a picture I drew when I was really young, up on the fridge, of me with a snowboard and a gold medal that says 2008 Olympics,” she recalls. “That was the only thing I could think of at the time that was an Olympic sport that I would want to compete in. Now, I’m stoked to be able to look forward to Sochi and 2014.”
Her father and grandmother were serious skiers and put her on skis when she was just three. She played around on two planks for a few years but rented her first snowboard when she was eight and found a new way to love being on snow. “I loved snowboarding. I wanted to do it all the time. But it was just for fun. I never really got serious about it.” When she started inline skating around town with her dad at the age of nine, her sport of focus, and her sentiments, changed.
Kaya spent the next few years honing her skating skills. “My school friends were starting to get pissed because I was always [at the skate park] and kind of anti-social. But I put so much time and effort into it, and I progressed. I would just keep trying and trying until I got the trick.”
When she was about 13, Kaya left the indoor park she frequented and took her skating to the streets with a few local guys, Nicki Adams and Matt Donalds. They were sponsored by the shop D-Structure and were competing in Aggressive Skaters Association (ASA) competitions. At 14, Kaya entered her first competition, an ASA qualifier in Vermont.
“I won and got a spot to go to the world finals in L.A.,” Kaya says. “My parents—we’re not poor, you know, but we’re not rich. But they really wanted me to compete.”
So Kaya’s mom, with help from friends in Montréal, put together $1,000 to send her to L.A. She won. She competed on a professional level for two years and made a name for herself in the inline world.
As that scene died down, and Kaya attained the goals she had set, she returned to skiing as a logical outlet for her driven nature.
After a semester of college, she dropped out and moved to Squamish, outside of Whistler. “I would catch a ride or get on the bus every morning up to Whistler and just ski by myself. I was a soul shredder. I had no idea what I was doing. I would hit jumps with tons of fresh snow on them, and I was just throwing shit. I learned my first threes on a little lip that formed coming out of the trees onto the trail. I tried a zillion times and finally landed it.”
Things progressed rapidly for Kaya, who used her inline skating skills to master tricks on snow. “It’s really similar,” she says. “It’s all about air sense. Things just made sense, and I caught on really quick.”
That is yet another understatement. After two months at Whistler she entered her first contest, the Vermont Open, and did her first cab seven in competition. She landed it. And she won. She went on to win the rail jam and slopestyle at the season finale World Skiing Invitational event as well.
“When I first met Kaya at Whistler, I knew she was going to do big things,” says Mike Douglas, a friend and mentor to Kaya. “It was fun being around her because her eyes were wide and she was always stoked. She also has this supersmooth style and is always in complete control of her body. She makes it look easy.”
Her immediate rise to contest podiums made Kaya ripe for the sponsorship picking, as ski companies, hoping to capitalize on the success of ladies like Sarah Burke and Kristi Leskinen, were looking to invest in a competitive female park athlete. Salomon swooped her up, put her on the international team and quickly sent her around the globe. She spent the North American summer on the road from Hood to New Zealand (where she again topped the podium in the NZ Open). Her last stop was in San Francisco for a big air event, Icer Air, which put the brakes on her rapid rise.
I went to San Francisco and died,” says Kaya, joking. “I was exploding. Then I exploded—literally. My pancreas blew up.”
After stomping a 540, Kaya drifted sideways and slid down a set of wooden steps that ran the length of the man-made landing, bouncing off each wood-slab step until coming to a rest on the flat bottom. The infamous crash killed her contest momentum and kept her off snow for nine months.
As soon as she returned, she blew a knee, ending her competition hopes for yet another season. As quickly as she had come on the ski scene, she was in danger of disappearing from it altogether.
But Kaya came back in 2009 with a renewed dedication to slopestyle competition and expectations to match her pre-injury level. “I put a lot of pressure on myself,” she says. “I don’t really know why. I just get really worked up in my head about what I’m going to do and how I want to perform.”
“Kaya and I have been roommates at a lot of the major competitions over the past three years, so I’ve seen what she’s like at contests,” adds Keri Herman, who has unique knowledge of Kaya based on her four straight runner-up finishes next to Kaya in X Games slopestyle events. “She freaks out for a day or two, gets nervous, sometimes even right up until the start time. But she never fails to pull it together and stomp a clean run, even if she hasn’t spun a single jump until the first run of the contest.”
Kaya has pushed through her challenges and has, in many ways, been stronger since her return from injury. After two years away from the podium, a third place in the 2008 New Zealand Open showed her skills remained and since that contest she has no less than nine first place finishes in major contests, including an undefeated record in Dew Tour slopestyle events and four consecutive X Games victories in the U.S. and Europe. Her achievements carried her to the number one spot in the AFP world slopestyle ranking for 2009, 2010 and 2011.
“Coming back after her Icer Air injury just proves her toughness,” says Morgan. “Just look at how she persevered. There is no quit in her."
Even with her record, something about Kaya still keeps the world at a distance. From the outside it appears nothing can stop her winning ways—not fear, not nerves, not other competitors, not even the death of the sport she originally chose. Now with just over two years before the debut of Olympic slopestyle, she has grown beyond that teenager sequestered at the skate park perfecting her tricks. She is much more than a detached competition-winning robot, even if few see that side.
“There’s no better feeling than ripping laps with Kaya, side by side, pushing each other, but not in a competitive manner,” says friend and fellow competitor Ashley Battersby, after they finish their game of horse at Mammoth.
While Kaya is friendly, fun and goofy when out skiing with her close friends, it can take time to get past her initial cool demeanor. It’s part of her mystique in some ways. She’s quiet, serious and focused when it comes to competing because, for Kaya, competing comes first. Being social comes second.
Her father, George Turski, doesn’t think she has an inherent serious nature. He says, “If you aim to succeed at what she does, you need plenty of determination, discipline and focus that may isolate you from others. In that context she is very intense and serious, and may mistakenly come across perhaps as aloof—especially as she is quite reflective and puts an enormous amount of thinking into what she does on skis.”
That part of her life does come out, whether in a late night session giving the dance floor hell or when she comes home from skiing and makes full use of the DVR to catch up her friends on their favorite reality TV show. “Teresa’s brother Joe, not her husband Joe, is married to Melissa, the skinny one, and Teresa thinks Melissa has come between her and her brother. Watch this bitch fight,” she explains about the drama of the most recent episode of The Real Housewives of New Jersey with a faux serious demeanor, then bursts into laughter.
Still, even the fun times away from snow echo with what makes Kaya, Kaya. A collective dare of $70 between two friends to walk together across a semifrozen lake near her home turns into another place for the unbeatable Kaya Turski to taste victory.
“I’ll go if you go!” Kaya says as she walks gingerly onto the slushy ice on Mammoth Lake. Her companion chickens out, but Kaya continues to walk with only herself spurring her to another success.
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