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Freestyle to broaden horizons

New school events on FIS calendar sparking controversy While the winter is still months away for most of us, the season is already in full swing south of the equator.

New school events on FIS calendar sparking controversy

While the winter is still months away for most of us, the season is already in full swing south of the equator. The first event on the Federation Internationale de Ski (FIS) Freestyle calendar, back-to-back aerial events at Australia’s Mount Buller on Sept. 7 and 8, is just around the corner.

With this being a World Championship season for the FIS freestylers, an event that takes place every two years, the organizers are looking into new ways to bring more excitement and exposure to the sport.

At the World Championships in Whistler in 2001, FIS added a new demonstration skier big air event to the calendar to liven things up a bit.

While nobody owns the big air format, that decision drew harsh criticism and a boycott from new school freeskiers who felt that their most creative event was being hijacked by a sports organization that is notorious for its strict rules and regulations. In fact, a lot of the new school athletes are former FIS freestyle competitors who fled the circuit because of all the rules and joined the new school skiing movement.

They had already watched the FIS take control of snowboarding, and all of the changes and controversies that arose in trying to hammer all sizes and shapes of athletes into uniformly square holes. In the end, the snowboarders have won a lot of concessions from the FIS, but they had to make a lot of concession themselves.

As a result of the boycott, the first FIS skier big air event only brought out a handful of teenagers, and freestylers on the provincial and development teams. Some of the professional new schoolers watched from the sidelines, heckling the judges and the announcer.

The FIS has since held big air and quarterpipe ski events, but so far these events have been exhibition. There were no official new school events on the FIS Freestyle World Cup calendar, although the FIS Snowboard World Cup has started to award medals and FIS points for their own big air contests, and has been running its own snowboard cross circuit for years.

All of that will change this season. At the 43 rd annual FIS Congress in Portoroz, Slovenia, in June, the FIS Freestyle body announced one important change: Skier cross and halfpipe would be recognized as new disciplines, and will be included in the Freestyle World Championships. Likely they will be demonstration sports at the upcoming 2003 World Championships at Deer Valley, but they will be recognized as full medal sports by the next championships in 2005.

Skier cross events are on this winter’s World Cup freestyle calendar. There is also some suggestion that the halfpipe event could even be included in future winter Olympics.

Shane Szocs, the director of the High North Ski Camp and a new school ski pioneer on the now international circuit, headed the first boycott of the FIS Freestyle Big Air. Dozens of new schoolers signed a petition, including some of the biggest names in the sport – Vincent Dorion, Philou Poirier, JP Auclair, Evan Raps, Skogan Sprang, Shane McConkey, and Anthony Boronowski, to name just a few.

With FIS Freestyle branching out into more new school and freeski events, Szocs says he and other pros will be watching the situation carefully.

"The people I talk to are definitely opposed to it," he said. "I don’t think as much on the skier cross side, except for the organizers that are running the events right now. I think it’s really in the halfpipe that people have issues."

Most of the freeskiers Szocs knows have avoided the FIS skier big air events, and as a result those events have not had a huge audience. But it may not be as easy to avoid the FIS in the future.

"Now we’re looking at it and saying if they actually do want to make (the halfpipe) an Olympic event, and it actually happens – not that we want to get into bed with the FIS – at the same time we want to at least be able to dictate some of the direction. It’s a big venue in terms of how people are going to see the sport, and that’s our biggest worry," said Szocs.

"To get to an Olympic level, they have to categorize the tricks and the exact degree of difficulty for all of the tricks you can do. And with a sport that’s been progressing as fast as skiing has been progressing, it’s possible that you can just stifle that growth. You don’t want to see skiers come out and do the same run every time because it’s working for them."

Another concern for the freeskiers is the qualification process. In snowboarding, the athletes were forced to compete in at least a few FIS World Cup events, rather than more popular and lucrative independent and International Snowboard Federation (ISF) events, if they wanted to qualify for the Olympics.

Some of the top snowboarders in the world who were loyal to the ISF didn’t even bother trying to qualify, choosing to stay closer to home and attend the events that would give more exposure to them and their sponsors – even if it meant missing the Olympics.

Less than two months ago, the ISF announced it was bankrupt. The FIS has been blamed for essentially putting the ISF – the original snowboard event sanctioning body – out of business.

While there will always be independent events in snowboarding, there is no longer a global snowboard circuit that operates independently of the FIS.

Skiers don’t want to see their sport go down the same road.

"You don’t want to see people doing runs exactly the same every time they go because they happen to score well," said Szocs. "We’re trying to encourage jam formats, because it seems to work best for the fans and the skiers. You get a lot of people in the pipe at the same time, and judges get more of an overall view of who’s killing it that day instead of who put down the most technical run."

According to Szocs, Mike Jaquet, the editor of Freeze Magazine, is in the process of organizing a meeting for freeskiers to discuss the FIS issue.

"If it gets into the Olympics, we have to have a way of keeping it cool and keeping the fun in it," he said.

"The key to that is maintaining control over qualifier events. How people qualify is really important. Are they going to make people run around and compete on the FIS tour, and make it so people can’t compete at the X Games or U.S. Open? That’s the last thing we want to see happen," added Szocs.

The freeski community has not organized or defined the sports, said Szocs, because the organizers are doing a good job of keep events fresh and are continually changing the formats to keep things interesting.

If the freeskiers are going to work out any kind of future arrangement with the FIS, however, they are going to have to agree on some basics and allow the sport and the judging of events to be regulated to some degree.

So far there are just four skier cross events on the World Cup circuit this season. Big air and halfpipe events will likely be exhibition sports until a format for events and judging can be formalized.

Freestyle is not the only FIS event to get a shot of adrenaline at this year’s Congress. In alpine skiing, they changed the downhill format whereby the top 30 races will start in reverse order to give the lower ranked skiers a better chance of making the podium. They will also hold a KO slalom event in Italy this year, where pairs race parallel courses at the same time and the loser is eliminated after each round.