October 2005 will be a month to remember for Littleton wakeboarding wonder Emily Copeland Durham.
In three weeks last month the 21-year-old won three wakeboard world championships in Australia and Singapore, marking the pinnacle of her six-year career as a professional wakeboarder.
“I ended up with a really good year,” she said. “It was so cool to win all that.”
Her dominating streak started at the invite-only 2005 Gravity Games H2O in Perth, Australia, where she edged out longtime rivals Lauren Loe from Texas and Florida’s Dallas Friday for the world wakeboarding crown, her fourth Gravity Games medal. A week later, across the Australian continent on the Sunshine Coast, Copeland Durham aced the World Wakeboard Association world championship. The following week, in Singapore, the former gymnast completed her wakeboarding hat trick with a gold medal at the International Water Ski Federation’s Wakeboard World Cup.
Copeland Durham grew up wakeboarding on Chatfield Reservoir. In her early teens, she spent every day of her summers mastering the sport’s aerial maneuvers on Sloan’s Lake. Since turning pro in 1999 – the year after winning the national amateur crown as a 14-year-old – she has spent her winters in Texas and Florida, where her training water doesn’t freeze. But she still calls Colorado home.
This winter, Copeland Durham plans to work hard to carry the momentum she found Down Under into next season. She is renowned in wakeboarding circles as the first woman to land the tricky “KGB Wrap,” a backflip with a blind 360-degree rotation without passing the handle between hands. While the pro men in Singapore unsuccessfully battled for a $10,800 prize to be the first to land a 1080 – a triple rotation requiring a staggering six handle-passes in the air – Copeland Durham hopes to be the first woman to land a 720.
She’s not alone in her quest for the complex maneuver, which is a half-rotation more than anything done on the pro women’s circuit today.
“The girls are really stepping up. They are doing tricks the guys are doing. That’s what we need to see in women’s wakeboarding: pushing the sport with new faces and new tricks,” she says. “I love the whole competing aspect and I’m continuing to push myself. I’m pretty close to the 720. I’ll get there.”
