Big air a lofty ideal
When Olympic organizers last July deemed snowboard big air worthy of the 2018 Winter Games in South Korea, the circus- like event of frenzied flipping suddenly found international legitimacy.
But don’t tell that to the athletes competing at the Aspen X Games, the annual winter festival that created the big air movement 20 years ago.
Big air is an XGames event more than an Olympic discipline. “It’s not like Korea is going to change the level here right now because the level is already almost too much. It’s almost physically impossible,” Norwegian slopestyle and big air specialist Stale Sandbech said. “No one is thinking about Korea. X Games is as big as Korea.”
And on Friday, Canadian Max Parrot bested Mark McMorris to steal snowboard big air gold, his second since 2014, when hewon both snowboard slopestyle and big air. McMorris, who won both big air and slopestyle last year, won silver, his fourthWinter X silver medal.
But there’s no ignoring the pending changes as the big air discipline evolves into an Olympic sport. Big air, like most X Games events, is athlete- driven. They elevate the jam format — which has athletes leaping as much as possible off an 80- foot jump in a set time, trying to impress judges. They develop their own tricks and work with jump builders.
There’s a concern that delivering big air over to the venerable skiers who run the International Ski Federation ( FIS), which governs all skiing and snowboarding, could change the event and hinder athlete input. And more changes could come if countries vying to bolster their Olympic medal count start training athletes specifically for big air instead of harvesting from lifelong riders.
“Maybe for the future, big air is going to be like a gymnastic discipline and not enough of the real snowboarders will do it,” Sandbech said. “Itmight happen. It might not happen. Forme, I see big air as a show event while slopestyle is the real sport. It’s the real deal.”
Meanwhile, skierswho have competed just as long as snowboarders in big air contests can only watch their singleplanked colleagues doubledip in the Olympics.
Ski big airwas not tapped for the 2018 Olympics, even though youthful skiers electrified the 2014 Sochi Games in the Olympic debut of ski halfpipe and slopestyle disciplines.
Excluding ski big airwas upsetting, said Michael Jaquet, the chief marketing officer of the U. S. Ski and Snowboard Association, which lobbied hard to include ski big air in the 2018 Games.
“Butwehaveonlyonevote,” said Jaquet, who published the first youth- oriented freeskiing magazine, “Freeze,” in 1996. “There was a compromise done outside of our hands and outside of our vote to get snowboarding in and not freeskiing. It’s a bummer.”
That compromise had to do with the removal of one sport to make room for another. Snowboarding lost parallel slalom for 2018, but the options for cutting a skiing event raised hackles.
“It was politics with other sports that don’t really have anything to do with big air,” said Michael Spencer, the cofounder of the Association of Freeskiing Professionals which has worked with the FIS to include ski big air in the Olympics. “There are just all these weird dynamics.”
While Jaquet said skiers will not compete in big air in South Korea, it’s “inevitable” that jumping freeskiers will be included in the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. His association andU. S. Freeskiing are molding a team that could be as dominant as its slopestyle ski team was in Russia, where U. S. athletes swept the podium in the sport’s Olympic debut.
TheU. S. Ski and Snowboard Association is hosting a massive big air contest next month in Boston’s Fenway Park, featuring a 140- foot ramp for freeskiers and snowboarders.
Not all skierswere bummed to be skipped for the Olympics. Sure, it was disappointing just in the sense of fairness. The jump is already there. Slopestyle skiers could easily compete, just like their snowboarding peers, without adding to team rosters.
“I didn’t really want it in there anyway, so I really didn’t care,” said Telluride’s Gus Kenworthy, who competes in ski halfpipe, slopestyle and big air contests but calls himself a slopestyle skier. “With slopestyle there are so many elements, so many components. There’s a level of creativity and there’s technicality and fluidity. But with big air it’s just one jump.
“It makes for an amazing showat theXGames, but now with Olympic backing, I think you could see people from sports like aerials and gymnastics. Really, I could see that happening.”