🇺🇸 Jake Abelson

Jake Abelson grew up in Holderness, New Hampshire, in a family already deep in the sport: his mother skied for the Mexican national team, his father for Canada. He was put on water skis at two and a half. By four he was learning to trick ski, starting with spins; by eight he had mastered air flips off the wake.

His first international results came as a junior. In 2021 he finished third in men's tricks at the World Championships, sixth at the Under-21 Worlds and fourth at the Under-17 Worlds in the same season — a spread of results that showed he was already competing well above his age group.

The trajectory was interrupted in October 2023 by an elbow injury sustained just before the world championships. It took roughly six months before skiing felt normal again. He came back training six days a week.

The records began in April 2024. First a pending national record of 12,230 at the Swiss Pro Tricks event in Clermont, Florida. Then, on 28 April, a world record of 12,720 at the Ski Fluid Classic on Lake Grew in Polk City — the first time an American man had held the world trick record since Cory Pickos, twenty-four years earlier. Twelve days later, at Lake Ledbetter in Winter Garden, he pushed it to 12,970, a mark subsequently ratified by the International Waterski and Wakeboard Federation. He had lifted his personal best by a thousand points in three weeks. He was sixteen.

In January 2025 USA Water Ski gave him its inaugural Move of the Year award for the 2024 season, citing a world record set 'at only 16 years old.'

The 13,000 barrier fell on 14 June 2025 at the Bill Wenner Memorial record tournament, back on Lake Grew. Abelson scored 13,020 — the first time any skier had crossed the line. He went higher in the next round, 13,270, but an International Waterski and Wakeboard Federation review panel disallowed one wake-seven-front trick, reducing it to 13,010; the first-round 13,020 stood, and was ratified on 23 July 2025.

The difficulty of what he built into the run is easy to miss. His closing sequence — a ski-line seven back-to-back into a wake-seven-front — is worth 1,550 points on its own, and it comes at the very end of the pass, when a skier has already spent nearly twenty seconds rotating at maximum speed. 'Really the only place for it is at the end of the run,' Abelson told USA Water Ski's podcast. 'But at that time, I'm pretty tired, pretty gassed. So learning to do that while tired was a real challenge.'

His account of the record itself was matter-of-fact: 'It's always been my goal to trick 13,000, if it was even possible. After my 12,970, I realized that it could be done if I had the best round — and I was able to put the hand run and the toe run together.' Asked whether 14,000 was next, he declined to speculate: 'People keep asking me that. I'm not brainstorming that point yet.'

Between 31 July and 3 August 2025 he won the men's trick title at the IWWF World Under-21 Championships at Predator Bay in Calgary, setting an Under-21 world championship record of 12,100 in the process. In June 2026, at the Royal Nautique Pro in Morocco, skiing on the tidal Bou Regreg River, he posted 13,040 — a pending world record — after winning the US Masters earlier in the season with 12,820.

Guinness World Records named him a Young Achiever in its 2026 edition. What he says about the sport is unusually free of the language of sacrifice. 'I love that waterskiing is a sport that can be practised with friends and family,' he told Guinness. 'I love the freedom behind the boat and the ability to perform tricks on the wake. I also love that the three events are thrilling in their own ways, and the fact that practice is never boring and there are always ways to improve.'

Trick skiing is the least televised and most technical of the three classic water ski events. A competitor gets two twenty-second passes behind the boat, one holding the handle and one with the rope attached to the foot, and accumulates points for each completed trick — surface turns, wake flips, line steps in which the skier passes the rope around a leg mid-rotation. Every trick has a fixed value, no trick can be repeated for credit, and a fall ends the pass. Scoring high means chaining the highest-value elements without a single error, at speed, twice.

That structure explains why records in the discipline traditionally moved slowly. The world mark had sat in American hands only once in a quarter of a century before Abelson took it, and progress had generally come in increments of a couple of hundred points. Abelson added roughly eight hundred points in fourteen months and then crossed a psychological line the sport had talked about for years.

It also explains the review that trimmed his 13,270. Trick scores are adjudicated from video by international panels, trick by trick, and a single element ruled incomplete can cost hundreds of points. Abelson's 13,020 survived that scrutiny; the higher score did not. He has been consistently untroubled by the distinction in public, which for a seventeen-year-old watching a world record get audited on tape is a form of composure worth noting.