Jamie Anderson wins women’s slopestyle championship at Burton US Open in Vail

VAIL — The most classic 1-2 combination in women’s slopestyle snowboarding, Jamie Anderson and Anna Gasser, topped the podium Friday at the Burton US Open Snowboarding Championships in Vail.

Anderson, 29, said in a sport where podium competitors are getting younger, she was happy to see a couple of veteran competitors make a statement Friday.

“We hold each other up because we’re a couple of 90’s kids, everybody else was born in the 2000s and up,” Anderson said of Gasser and their competition these days.

Anderson, who was born in 1990, started competing at the Burton US Open 13 years ago. Defending champion Zoi Sadowski-Synnott was 6 years old at the time, and Anna Gasser was a teenager just learning to snowboard.

“When I started, Jamie was already winning,” Gasser said Friday. “I always looked up to Jamie.”

Gasser’s learning curve looked a bit like the quarterpipe-style transition features the competitors were hitting on Friday. Within a few years, she was herself a top-tier competitor.

“I, obviously, so admire Anna and how far she has come,” Anderson said.

Anderson and Gasser also shared a podium at the Burton US Open five years ago. Since then, they have pushed the progression of women’s slopestyle snowboarding into the realm of double flips, double corks and all other varieties of tricks that involved getting inverted twice.

Then, Gasser and Anderson started doing those double inverts in the switch stance. Gasser landed the first-ever women’s cab doublecork 1080 in a big competition at the 2018 Olympics, taking off and landing switch on the final jump. After locking in her victory Friday, Anderson tried a cab doublecork 1080 in her final “victory lap” run, but couldn’t ride away clean.

When asked why she would attempt such a difficult trick after she has already locked in the victory, Anderson said she did it for the cameras.

“I know how many great video angles there are, and I really wanted to get that cab 10,” she said with a laugh. “For me, I thought it would show good strength to ride through strong at the end, with the run that I wanted to do for myself.”

She didn’t quite land the cab double 10, so Gasser can still claim exclusivity on that trick in competition. Gasser also is the only woman who has landed a triple flip, but after trying it several times at X Games Aspen in January and taking some hard falls, she decided not to try it again in Vail this week.

In an attempt to catch Anderson Friday, Gasser, on her final run, took a hard fall attempting a double cork 900. She said she knocked the wind out of herself, but other than that, she was OK.

“My poor mom, she’s been watching three major events where I took hard crashes,” Gasser said. “But today looked worse than it was.”

jlaconte@vaildaily.com