In her 10th year on the World Cup moguls circuit, Jaelin Kauf finally became a champion. Now, she’s riding a wave of momentum into the upcoming season and toward the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympics.
Since debuting on the circuit in January 2016, Kauf has been remarkably consistent — other than her rookie year, she’s never finished lower than 7th in the overall standings. Entering last season, she’d also won eight individual World Cup events.
But the sport’s biggest titles had eluded her. On the World Cup circuit, her best-overall finish was 2nd (three times). At major global competitions, she’d earned three silver medals at various world championships and a silver medal at the 2022 Beijing Olympics.
Thanks to a dominant campaign last season, that’s all changed for the 29-year-old American.
Flipping the script
Kauf’s competitive advantage has always been her elite speed. It’s served her well in moguls, but even more so in dual moguls, an event that will make its Olympic debut at the Milan Cortina Games.
“I've never set out to be, like, I need to be the fastest, I’ve got to get to the bottom before the other girls or anything like that,” Kauf said. “But I do think that my skiing does excel when I kind of push it to that edge. There's definitely a pretty fine line between pushing it too far and just right on the edge there, where it's in control, and I feel like that's where the best stuff comes out.”
But speed is only part of the equation in both moguls and dual moguls. Beating your opponents to the finish line gives you an edge, but judges are also evaluating the turns that skiers make throughout the moguls sections and the two aerial tricks that skiers perform in between those sections.
Last season featured a change to Kauf’s usual air package. She’d been doing a backflip with a mute grab on the top jump for several years, but had been working toward improving her degree of difficulty on the bottom jump by adding a cork 720 to her run. For the first time, she began doing the cork 720 consistently in her competition runs, therefore stepping up the foverall degree of difficulty. But she also decided to reverse her jumps, doing the cork 720 up top and the backflip mute at the bottom. The switch allowed her to go even faster in the middle section of the course.
“I could really just let things run and let the skiing take it away in the middle section and not have to worry about that bottom air,” she explained.
With her runs improved, Kauf skied her best season yet. She won eight of 16 World Cup events, doubling her career win total in the process. She also swept all three Cystal Globes (moguls, dual moguls and overall) and earned her first gold medal in dual moguls at the 2025 World Championships.
“I've always thought that the overall title is the most impressive thing you can accomplish in the sport,” Kauf said, citing the consistency it takes over an entire season. “I've been second a lot. I've gotten some thirds in the overall. I've been chipping away and working my way up to that for a long time, and for it to all just really come together, this year was amazing.”
A looming showdown
While Kauf was enjoying her breakthrough season, there was one key name missing from the start gate: Australia’s Jakara Anthony.
Anthony, the reigning Olympic champion in moguls, missed most of the season due to a broken collarbone. The year before, her World Cup campaign was even more dominant than Kauf’s: 14 victories out of 16 starts.
With Anthony about to reenter the mix, this has become arguably the sport’s biggest storyline ahead of the Winter Olympics. The World Cup season should provide a window into whether Kauf or Anthony can establish themselves as the gold-medal favorite for Milan Cortina. France’s Perrine Laffont, a six-time world champion and 2018 Olympic champion, is in the mix as well.
Kauf says she’s “excited” for Anthony’s return. Like many skiers in this small community, the two women are friendly with each other despite being competitors.
“We'll see how things play out,” Kauf said about Anthony’s impending return. “I'm feeling really good and confident with my skiing this year. Whether she was on the tour or not last year, I was still able to put down my runs consistently and do my thing, and that's the same focus this year, no matter who's competing.”
For the first time in Olympic history, the Milan Cortina Games will provide a second medal opportunity for mogul skiers, thanks to the addition of dual moguls.
In dual moguls, two skiers compete simultaneously on side-by-side courses, and judges evaluate the two runs against each other. Because of the format, speed sometimes ends up being the decisive factor in a head-to-head matchup, which suits Kauf well.
“I've always loved duals,” Kauf said. “That was definitely my favorite event growing up, because that was the event where I could just let it go and try to hang on. It's a little bit less about perfecting the run.”
Although the U.S. women’s moguls team is very deep and highly-competitive, Kauf enters the season with her spot on the Olympic roster already secure. Her goal is straightforward: She hopes to add to her burgeoning collection of titles by winning not just one, but two, gold medals in Livigno.
As for the silver medal she secured four years ago, Kauf has no regrets about her performance. After missing out on the six-skier superfinal during her Olympic debut in 2018, she was determined to at least give herself the opportunity to compete for a medal in Beijing.
“I just wanted to to do everything I could to make it to the [final] round, to be able to just go for it and leave it all out there,” she said. “And so, finishing second — I mean, yeah, gold would be amazing — but I got an Olympic medal, and that's more than I could have ever dreamed of growing up.”
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