On the Stubai Glacier, above the treeline in the Austrian Tyrol, Anna Gasser turned onto the kicker switch, left the lip backwards, and folded into three off-axis flips. She landed forwards, clean, on the first attempt. With that, Gasser became the first woman to put down a cab triple underflip 1260 — three flips and 1260 degrees of rotation, taking off on the wrong foot and reading the landing over her shoulder.
The day was not promised. Wind had been forecast for the session, and the window looked uncertain. Then the air settled and the glacier gave her the surface she needed on the Prime Park Sessions jump line. Gasser, then twenty-seven, had carried the trick on her list for some time and rehearsed the shape of it into an airbag before committing to snow. When the moment came, she needed only one go.
The underflip is a downward, off-axis motion, entered switch, and stacking three of them with a full seven half-rotations leaves almost no margin. Speed, pop and the count of rotations all have to arrive together, then release in time to spot the snow. She trusted the count and rode it out.
"It turned out to be the perfect day up here at the Stubai Glacier," she said afterwards, describing her first hits on the big kicker line.
A first among firsts
Gasser has spent a career opening doors for the women behind her. In 2013 she landed the first women's cab double cork 900 on a kicker, and in 2015 she became the first woman to put a cab double underflip down in competition. Earlier in 2018 she stood on top of the podium at the PyeongChang Games as the first Olympic women's big air champion. The triple underflip belonged to that lineage, one step further out.
The scale of it reads best against the men's timeline. Katie Ormerod had landed the first female double cork only four years earlier. Among the men, eight years separated the first double cork from the first triple. Gasser was compressing that arc on her own terms, and doing it away from any judging panel, for the record rather than the score.
What came after
The winter that followed was not smooth. A hairline crack in her ankle cost her the Winter X Games and the World Championships. She returned to land the first women's cab double cork 1260 in Obergurgl the following spring, then defended her Olympic title in Beijing in 2022, took a second world crown in Bakuriani in 2023, and by January 2025 had become the most decorated woman in X Games big air history.
Each of those results traces back to a still, clear morning on the Stubai, and a single jump that no woman had ridden away from before.
