Just when you think that the sport of freeskiing has hit the roof in terms of what the skiers can do with a 70-foot table, along came the 2009 World Skiing Invitational Big Air.
For a few years it looked like the sport hit a plateau with the switch 1080 - taking off and landing backwards with three full rotations in the middle. This year the switch 1080 was the minimum on display, with athletes throwing all kinds of inverted or near-inverted doubles - double switch backflips, double corked 1260 spins, double switch flat spin 900s. The announcers were at a loss sometimes to describe what they had just witnessed.
But it was Japanese skier Shinji Osada who raised the bar the most this year, landing the first switch 1440 in a competition - taking off backwards and spinning four full rotations before landing backwards again.
Speaking through an interpreter, Osada said it was the first time he tried the trick in a competition and he was excited to land it. When asked when he decided to throw a 1440 he said he made the decision in training when he tried it and landed it successfully. While the landing was a little soft for some tricks - there were no shortage of crashes this year and a few athletes were injured - the softer landing gave him confidence.
Osada was all smiles heading to the podium to collect his $10,000 first prize, then shed a few tears of joy when the realization hit home that he won one of the premier events in new school skiing.
The format was the same as last year, with 30 men and five women getting two jumps each during the qualifier. The top-10 moved on to the super final, with each athlete getting four jumps - a 540, 720, 900 and best trick. With the clock ticking the judges decided to pull the 720 contest.
Not that the crowd minded waiting around. This year the jam band Lotus provided the background music from start to finish, playing for more than two hours while people danced and watched the world's largest puppet play with human acrobats spinning on silks and bouncing on bungee chords.
In second place, winning $5,000, was Swedish jumper Jacob Webster. Webster was the top qualifier and was flawless through a competition where even the top names were having difficulty landing their tricks. His final tricks was a smooth, double corked 1260 where he held his grab and crossed his skis almost to the point where he landed. Without Osada's switch 1440 it would have been the winning jump.
With five time WSI winner Jon Olsson of Sweden not making an appearance this year, Pique asked Webster how Swedes always seemed to find the Big Air podium.
"I personally always do better in big air, in slopestyle my nerves don't seem to work to put a whole run together. I always seem to do my best when there is a lot of pressure on one jump, for some reason," he said. "Here it's one hit that's really fun, and really crowd-pleasing. It was also the Swedish skiers that started putting double flips in their jumps... and a lot of the new skiers and tricks are coming out of Scandinavia."
Webster says the level of competition has come a long way in a short time.
"The switch 1080 thing went on for a couple of years, and it's only been the last couple of months really where the doubles thing has caught on - literally a few months. Now it's caught on like crazy and everyone and their mom is doing double flips.
"I feel out of ideas, to be honest."
Webster can't see triple flips or quintuple spins as the next big thing, and thinks big air contests will eventually have to bow out for slopestyle events "because it's becoming impossible to tell people apart any more."
Third place went to L.J. Strenio who crashed on his first jump of the day, and then proceeded to get bigger and better as the day went on. He also landed a double corked 1260.
Also in the finals were Colby West, Ian Cosco, Kris Atkinson, Mike Mertion and Erik Hughes. Pemberton's Austin Ross was having a good day until he separated his shoulder. He had it popped in on the side of the landing hill by ski patrollers. T.J. Schiller also bumped his head on one switch landing after double ejecting from his skis on impact.
The women's contest was decided early when Rosalind Groenewoud landed a big, clean 1080. Maiko Hara was second and 16-year-old Megan Gunning placed third.
Groenewoud, who competes on Canada's ski halfpipe team, credited coach Trennon Paynter for her skiing, but she's looking forward to getting some time on a beach.
"It's been a long season and I'm definitely starting to get a little bit worn out, but I had so much fun tonight skiing," she said. "It was a beautiful jump. The landing was soft, you could definitely feel yourself sinking into the snow when you landed, but I think that hurt the guys a little more than the girls because they're a little heavier."
It didn't have much to do with airtime - with a step-up style of jump the female competitors got as much vertical as most of the men, and landed almost as far down the transition.
Groenewoud also competes in the WSI halfpipe this week, which is her best event. She's confident that ski halfpipe will be added to the Olympics in 2014, but she's not banking on the Games.
"I think we're all just stoked to ski, and that's what keeps us motivated," she said. "A lot of us would like to go to the Olympics in 2014 but we have other things to look forward to other than events that are five years away. We're got the X Games and the Dew Tour, which are huge events, and the whole World Cup tour is really good. As long as we're skiing and having fun it doesn't matter where we go."
