Malaysia’s waterski star Aaliyah Yoong Hanifah made history to win three gold medals in a IWWF sanctioned world championship level waterski event in New Zealand.
The 21 year old achieved this feat in the finals of the 2025 IWWF University World Championships held in Auckland, New Zealand this last weekend.
This is also the first ever time that an Asian waterski athlete had won a gold medal in a world championship according to a social media post in Instagram posted by the International Waterski & Wakeboard Federation (IWWF).
Aaliyah won gold in women jump with a 44.7m jump in the final to beat Lili Steiner of Austria who was the favourite to win women jump. Steiner scored 43.5m while New Zealand’s Lily Meade was third with 41.5m.
“That first gold in jump felt awesome” exclaimed Aaliyah after her jump win.
“I knew a world championship win would come one day since 13 years ago when I won the 2011 SEA Games gold in women tricks at 8,” she added.
She won her 2nd gold in women tricks with an outstanding score of 7970 points. This time she had to beat yet another favourite, Hannah Stopnicki, of Canada who had finished ahead of her in preliminaries and was top seed in the finals. Stopnicki scored 5760 point. Layne Moroney of Australia was third with 5050 points.
Aaliyah finished strongly in 6th position in the slalom final with a score of 2.00/55kph/12.00m despite this not being her favourite event.
As a result of these 2 wins in jump and tricks and a sixth placing in slalom, Aaliyah also won her third gold medal in the overall discipline. Her overall score was 2863.64 points. Lili Steiner won overall silver and Lily Meade took the overall bronze.
The Malaysian Waterski & Wakeboard Federation (MWWF) Hon. Secretary Hanifah Yoong said these results are unexpected as the MWWF was only targeting a best case scenario of a gold in overall and podium 2nd in jump and tricks.
“We are very happy for Aaliyah as these results took away huge pressure she had placed on herself in the past year and a half since winning 3rd in jump at the U21 World Championship in Mexico in 2023.” said Hanifah
