The British Barefoot waterski team travelled out to Wisconsin USA to compete in the 2016 World Championships.

The Team consisted of 5 time world champion Dave Small "Smallz", and yes that's 5 consecutive world overalls in the open. Tom Heaps a promising Junior, Rick Moyes a great skier just back from a year training in Florida for this competition, and two Senior division Skiers Dave Field and Paul Turner.

It was a great competition and the standards this year were extremely tough with world records falling in almost every round and event. Young Tom heaps set a pending world Record in Junior Jump of 26.3m equalling a record that has stood for 10 years. And then, went out and set a 26.7m World record to take the Junior boys Jump Gold medal. Tom also made it to the Open Jump final as the number 2 seed to David Small who had set an impressive 28.1m jump to move to the final.

Finals day was a late event, scheduled to complete with a night jump final. Dave Small claimed a silver medal in slalom with a 20 score, that's 10 wake crossings in 15 seconds in each direction with the second pass skiing backwards and all on 1 foot. He was piped by Keith StOnge of the USA who had 20.5. Moving into the tricks final, Keith set a pending world record of 12650 points with an outstanding run, so Dave needed to pull out something special. He did just that, setting a massive 12850 point pending world record, and in that run he had a line step 360 turn and 1 foot turn knocked, making the score even more impressive.

The blue ribbon event is the Jump, and in this years final the cut was just short of 26m. The flood lights were a touch shorter than in day time, but Ben Groen set the leading Jump with a New Zealand record, Tom just could not match in the dark, but was good enough to beat the current Jump champion Keith StOnge to sit in the silver medal position with just Dave to Jump. As usual Dave gave  a master class in Jumping and took the Gold with his first Jump. What a result, both Dave Small and Tom Heaps on the podium, master and apprentice together.

A huge well done to the Barefoot Team!