Right in the first jump of the final, Julia Rick gave the competition a brain teaser. 82 out of a possible 100 points meant the best result in the first knockout round of the wakeboard final, which secured her bronze at the Munich Mash. And the eleven-time world champion was already in the minds of her competitors. The day before she had already won second place in the team competition together with compatriot Felix Georgii and John Dreiling (USA), had driven well, but the Italian Claudia Pagnini won the competition with the Frenchman Loic Deschaux and the Austrian Timo Kapl. In the final on Sunday afternoon, things didn’t go as planned. After a strong first round, she made a careless mistake at the first obstacle, and the resulting fall caused the defending champion to drop back to third place. “I would have liked to go one better, but I’m still very happy. It was a great weekend.” This cleared the way for Anna Nikstad, the 2018 winner, ahead of Pagnini.
Nevertheless, one can say that the Cologne native, who celebrated her 29th birthday on Friday, is currently the world’s best athlete on the small board. This is not only due to her many titles and the fact that she was voted wakeboarder of the decade by the world association. Rick also holds two Guinness Records, she did the longest jump and most inverts (head under the board, meaning a roll) in one minute. And she’s done a number of tricks as a woman first, including the KGB 540. A jump best seen in slow motion. “It stands for Killer Green Butt,” she explains, because all too often you land hard on your butt, which tends to turn green. She catapults herself out of the water by tilting the board, does a backflip with one and a half turns and changes hands twice.
Julia Rick used to be a footballer and played with 1. FC Köln in the second Bundesliga
Despite all the success, Rick must be considered a late starter: Until she decided to try it as a professional wakeboarder, she played football for 1. FC Köln in the second Bundesliga. Her first attempts at wakeboarding ended up in the water, but her ambition was piqued. Two years later she won her first junior competitions, “I was already infected by then”. The decision to switch from a football pro to wakeboarding was made – that was ten years ago. She also liked individual sports, and she sees her strengths in her irrepressible will, in addition to all her talent, body awareness and athleticism: “I have a lot of ambition and have learned to assert myself.” In addition, she has respect for the sport, which can be quite dangerous, “but never afraid”.
The same can of course be said for the male colleagues, who fought an exciting battle in the final mash competition. Crowd favorite Nico von Lerchenfeld won with the very last run, as per the script. The Frenchman Loic Deschaux came second ahead of the only 16-year-old wildcard winner Gavin Stuckey from the USA. “It’s getting harder and harder with these kids,” said the 29-year-old von Lerchenfeld. That gives him something to think about.
