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The view from the towers

What the judges are looking for in the Telus World Ski and Snowboard Festival

By Andrew Mitchell

Paul Rak has judged it all ­— World Cup, Gravity Games, X Games, Nor Ams, and too many pro contests to count — but some of his favourite events are part of the Telus World Ski and Snowboard Festival. The reason, he says, is that the format for events is a little different than other competitions, which in turn allows the athletes to be more creative and take more chances. It also gives the judges more leeway to interpret what they see.

His crews will judge skiers and snowboarders in five events over 10 days, including two big air contests, a rail contest, a superpipe and the Stompede, which is like a slopestyle event where athletes session each obstacle individually rather than as part of a run.

What spectators see from the sidelines, and what the judges see from their booths are very different at times. The key is knowing how to look.

Pique Newsmagazine caught up with Mr. Rak to discuss the finer points of judging world class ski and snowboard events.

 

Pique: You’re the head judge. Who else is on the panel this year?

Paul Rak: We have both snowboard judges and ski judges. On the ski side we have Jay Vaughan, Myles Rickett, Chris Turpin, and the fourth is to be announced. On the snowboard side we have Colin Duncan, Jason Fentiman, Carter Smith, and Kraig Kinsman.

 

Pique: A lot of former pros.

PR: For a lot of pros, once their career is done or they’re injured, they want to know where else they can go, and judging is one side of the sport they can stay involved in.

 

Pique: I guess it’s always better that most of the judges can do the tricks they’re judging.

PR: All of them have either done the trick or tried it at some point, and they really understand the trick and respect the athletes. It helps to know what you’re watching. Some things look hard that are really easy, or look easy and are hard, and it’s good to have that perspective.

 

Pique: What’s your own background?

PR: I wanted to be a pro. I did a bunch of competitions in the ’90s, but then I got into judging and really liked it. I’m classified as a Pro Level 2 judge… which means I’ve done everything from World Cups to Gravity Games, to the U.S. Open, to the X Games, to the Grand Prix. That’s just on the snowboarding side.

 

Pique: So take an event like the big air, which is the biggest spectator event at the festival. What are you looking for from the booth?

PR: The format is a little different, different than most big airs. We have a two-run qualifier, which means you get two tricks to get into the finals, and once you’re in the finals it’s a five (540 spin), seven (720 spin), and nine (900 spin) showdown. It’s mandatory to spin those tricks, everybody has to do it.

The main reason is that, having done pretty much all of the ski and snowboard festivals, the big airs were becoming just “spin to win”, with whoever could do the biggest spins over the jump winning. This way there’s nothing over a 900 and they have to land it.

 

Pique: If everyone is doing the same spin, how important is style?

PR: We want to see them styling it and grabbing their tricks. You have to hold the grab for more than a certain rotation to get big points, like on a 540 you should hold it for 360. Slapping the board isn’t going to help you.

 

Pique: Obviously it matters whether riders are going in regular or switch.

PR: That ups the difficulty, definitely. You want to see switch, frontside, backside — some differentiation in the tricks.

 

Pique: All the athletes are hitting the same jump at about the same speed, getting the same amount of air. With the five, seven, nine format they’re doing the same trick — how do you judge between two athletes doing the same thing?

PR: Of all the things we look for one of the most important things is execution, which starts the second you leave the lip of the jump. If you didn’t execute that part of the trick properly then somewhere in the air or in the landing there will be deficiencies, things that are wrong, and that’s how we distinguish it. Two guys doing the same trick are never exactly the same, and that lets us pick them apart, because one will be better than the other. If you execute properly and land properly, it’s going to show up in the marks.

 

Pique: Last year in the finals we had runs where all the athletes would fall or put their hands down. How do you score that, when none of the finalists land cleanly?

PR: Certain mistakes are valued differently, like a full bail would be a full two point deduction. Someone could do the best trick of the day, but if they bailed you could expect a score around a seven — the trick would be worth nine-something, minus the two points. There are all kinds of little deductions for hand touches, hand drags, landing off balance, that we keep in our heads when deciding if one sketch is worse than another sketch, and what it’s worth overall.

 

Pique: How sophisticated is the judging system for measuring those kinds of things? I know some contests measure air, degree of difficulty, where they land, the number of spins, that kind of thing.

PR: (The Festival) is a lot more free because this is a non-FIS (International Skiing Federation) event. You could say the event runs itself in a way, because we, the judges, make the rules, although we do go through the rules we were taught. All the snowboard judges are FIS judges, qualified to judge any event, and FIS is the strictest thing out there. At FIS they do full deductions, and look at everything in detail, and everything you do gets a mark. In the festival we can be more stoked on the runs, and not so picky on small details like sketches. That’s also good for the riders — a lot of the guys we see out there can’t ride FIS because it’s too structured, but they do just fine in pro contests.

 

Pique: Do you discuss the results or confer with the other judges before putting up the scores?

PR: We all give our scores to the tabulator separately, but it’s my job as head judge to look at the scores first. If I’m happy they go into the computer. But I’m the eye over everything, so I make sure the scores are what I like and within bounds. For example, if all the judges marked one run as a seven but someone marked it as a four, I’ll wonder if the judge who gave the four missed something and I’ll talk to them, “are you sure that was a four?” Judges make mistakes sometimes, we’re human. But we’ve got a good panel of judges, and a head judge to watch over them, and the results are usually pretty good.

 

Pique: Do you guys get a lot of heat from the athletes, or do they mostly accept your decisions?

PR: The athletes are good the majority of the time. Very rarely do they say “you suck”. And the judging for the past five or six years has been so tight that it’s hard for athletes to bitch at us. If they do bitch, sometimes it’s because they don’t want to admit their run sucked, or that they screwed up. Some of them aren’t watching the other athletes. But pretty much the judging is right on, and after a lot of events the athletes will shake your hand and say “thanks, that’s exactly how I would have judged the top three,” and that feels pretty good to get that feedback.

 

Pique: What about judging the halfpipe? Are there compulsory tricks like in the World Cup?

PR: It’s not the same criteria as FIS where you have to do a straight air and a spin in every run. This is more open to whatever you want to do.

 

Pique: Some runs seem to build towards one huge trick at the bottom — do you take that into account, if the tricks up top are not as difficult?

PR: Sometimes we’ll give a high mark to a stock run to set up one trick, but it’s when (the athletes) throw a huge trick up top that we know they’re taking a huge risk. That risk is a big thing because if they mess it up, mess up that first hit, it’s going to throw the rest of their run off. They’ll lose their speed, miss their hits, get things all out of sequence. It’s pretty obvious when that happens. But if someone nails a huge trick up top, they come away with a lot of momentum and the rest of the runs are usually pretty tight.

 

Pique: I know the crowds can react pretty loudly after some runs. Do you listen to that?

PR: We are trained not to let the crowd influence us. Or the announcers for that matter, because sometimes they’ll sometimes call a trick wrong and we’ll get to correct them. It makes us feel good that we know exactly what we’re watching, that we’re that focused on the run.

We’re basically in a little bubble, all of the judges. I tell them “for the next three hours you’re mine, you’re here to watch snowboarding and that’s it.”

 

Pique: Getting back to pipe, are there any particular tricks you want to see out there?

PR: One of the things I like are the back-to-back tricks, like a seven to a seven (720 to a 720) which is harder than a straight air into a seven. If you can combine certain tricks together, go big and spin big, that’s going to get you on the podium.

 

Pique: How about inverted tricks?

PR: I like to see inverts. In a good run you’ll see a couple of big straight airs, a couple of spins and a couple of inverted spins. It just show me you can do anything. Some athletes can’t get inverted at all and just do big flat spins, and it can show there’s something missing. The riders that have it all do the best.

 

Pique: So variety is good.

PR: It’s key to a good run. Like in the five, seven and nine format in the big air, some guys can nail the 900 every time but can barely land a 540. That doesn’t show you’re a great snowboarder, to be great you have to have more than just one trick in your bag.

 

Pique: How about the new Stompede format? It seems like it would be fun to judge.

PR: It’s all about hanging out at one section, one hip or rail or whatever, and scoring the riders one at a time. It should be exciting because all the athletes will be dropping in and trying to one-up each other. I can’t wait to see how it goes.

 

Pique: And what about the rail session? What are the judges looking for there?

PR: The best part of that event is that it is a session, and not just one trick. We want to see all your magic tricks, and the person who throws down with the best bag of tricks will be the overall winner. We’re looking for someone who is constantly destroying the rail.

It’s a great contest because the athletes can really push each other. Each run is judged, but if you fall we don’t give a score. The athlete can get right back to the top and do it again without any penalties or anything. It all builds up over the hour.

 

Pique: Was there anything that blew you away last year?

PR: Last year I really liked the five, seven, nine contest. It was good to see (the athletes) throwing down good, clean 540s, and good clean 720s. It’s good for the audience, too, knowing everyone is going to do the 540 and understanding what a 540 is, and seeing all the style that the riders can bring to that trick. They can really style it out and make it look nice. Some guys said wow, they were the best 540s they had ever seen.

The rail jams are always fun. Part of the reason is that it’s really short, it’s one hour just packed with energy and it really builds up to the finish.

In the halfpipe, Crispin (Lipscomb’s) 1440 was really good. The year before Guy Deschenes did this really cool one-footed trick that blew us away. He rigged up the clips on his bindings so he could pop one foot out really easily and just went huge. I’ve been judging for years and, with all the contests I do, I’d never seen that before.

For the skiers, the best thing is just how big they go in everything. They go big and they travel. In the halfpipe a snowboarder can do five or six tricks on the way down, while skiers can only fit in four or five hits because they cover so much ground. All the switch stuff is nice to see.

 

Pique: Both skiing and snowboarding seem to have reached a stage in their progression where it’s difficult to invent new tricks. What’s next?

PR: Right now it’s about warping tricks into different axes. In a pipe run, we can see three different axes on one run. Style is big. Spinning more is not necessarily everything, because you can do a 1440 in the pipe or on the big air and it doesn’t look as good as fewer spins with more style and maybe a nice grab. Everybody is going bigger as well, inching up every year.

It’s about linking tricks, and thinking about your tricks and how they all fit together. Some tricks look better together than if linked apart.

 

Pique: Do the athletes know what you’re looking for out there?

PR: The athletes are always welcome to talk to us about anything, before or after events. Believe it or not, the ones who take this in are usually the better athletes, they’re the ones at the top of their games and winning money. They’re the ones who are keen to know how the judging really works. Some of the athletes have even come to judging clinics to learn how to judge themselves, and you can really see the difference.

 

Pique: That’s a pretty high degree of professionalism.

PR: If snowboarding or skiing is your job and you’re there to make money, why not figure out how judging works and what judges are looking for?



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