Kelly Sildaru Photo: ESPN
Estonia’s Kelly Sildaru is barely older than your kid. Or maybe your little sister. Whichever, she’s young. And at 13 she just became the youngest athlete ever to medal at the X Games–which she did in women’s slopestyle skiing. The kid definitely looks like she’s on the doorstep of dominance. She pulled a pretty sick K-Fed on the rail right out of the gate. And it looked super smooth. And then a switch nine that looked even easier. For her.
On her last jump of her winning run she hucked a gigantic 900–and got a little wobbly in the air but recovered–to cap off an incredible turn through the course. And that’s what’s so cool about the X Games: Athletes work their asses off in little known corners of the world to become superstars.
And Sildaru is definitely a certified phenom. She gave everyone a glimpse of where she was at when she won the Dew Tour in December. Estonia is to the south of Finland, across the Baltic Sea, north of Latvia and shares its eastern border with Russia. There isn’t much in the way of mountains in Estonia. So the 5-foot-1, 88-pound athlete has to travel all over Europe to train and compete.
Norwegian Tiril Sjåstad Christiansen recovered from a serious knee injury that kept her out of the Olympics to earn silver and fellow Norwegian Johanne Killi took bronze. “I’ve been watching her since she was even younger than this,” Christiansen said. “She just makes me a better skier and I want to push myself even harder when I see her ski.”
High praise for someone who, in the U.S., would have just finished grade school. Ironically, or perhaps not, Sildaru’s peeps dropped an edit this week of her and 8-year-old brother Henry.
