Aaliyah third in preliminaries
Published on: Wednesday, August 14, 2019
PUTRAJAYA: Malaysia’s top waterski athlete Aaliyah Yoong Hanifah finished third in the opening campaign of the 2019 IWWF World Waterski Open Championships held at the Putrajaya Lake on Tuesday.
The 16-year-old, who suffered an eardrum injury two weeks ago, flew a distance of 37.2 metres in the Jump event, behind world junior champion Sade Ferguson of Australia who jumped 46.5m and Stanislava Prosvetova of Ukraine with 42.1m in the third series of the preliminary rounds.
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Aaliyah was satisfied with her performance despite having difficulties with the wind conditions, timing and the venue which she was not very familiar with.
“I don’t usually ski here as this is the place where we only have competitions because the grand stand is here and (this place) is accessible to the public.
“I kept passing on every jump and for each set, I only managed to do one jump (three jumps for each set) hence, it was tough for me at the start, but the fact that I did three jumps in a row (today) is good,” she told reporters.
Meanwhile, two of her brothers who were also competing in the championship, Aiden, 13, and Adam, 11, failed to do well in the Tricks event after finishing their rounds with an accumulated 2,840 and 3,320 points to finish 14th and 12th respectively.
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Malaysia’s French-born coach Marian Malaquin admitted that both siblings rushed performing, hence resulted to their fall.
“I am just personally disappointed with the boys because they could have done better but the thing is, they do not have so much experience in such tournaments so they probably felt a little bit nervous. (Nevertheless) this is part of their learning process so I am sure they are going to do better in the next tournament,” he said.
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Malaquin added that Adam and Aiden would also be competing in the 2019 IWWF Singha Asian Waterski & Wakesports Championship to be held in Thailand from Sept 23 to 29.
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The preliminary round of the tournament starts from today until Aug 16, followed by the finals on Aug 17 and 18.
A total of 168 participants from 39 countries are taking part in the tournament which features six events. – Bernama