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"Thoughts on style and its royal family"
November 23, 2010
The annual big air competition King of Style is for the 5th time in Stockholm, finished, and some of the riders have moved on to Trysil, Norway for the Sweet Rumble, some back home their respective winter homes. Although the competition is over and the scaffolding has been taken down, the internet communities are still debating over who was the worthy winner, if the contest format was flawed and whether or not the competition lived up to its name. A common complaint one finds is “I'm sick of seeing these double flips, I'd much rather see a gangstah/illin/stylish 540“.
The never-ending problem with judged big air events is its proneness to conformity. A few years back spinning switch was all the hype, and the more you could spin, the better. If you took off forward you weren't rewarded as much because this was regarded easier than taking off switch. Somewhere around three and a half rotations the progression came to a halt, so this became a physical boundary for how much one can spin off a big air jump that was built on scaffolding and covered in man-made snow. A few 1440s were thrown, and the more you had to spin, the more the tricks looked alike. There's really only one way to spin that much, and that is upright, with a mute grab, very standard.
Understandably, this got boring after a while. In Vail, Colorado, at the US Open big air competition in 2006, 37 out of 40 runs in the qualifying round were switch 1080s. Something had to happen, and I'm going to blame and thank Mike Wilson for taking the first step towards a new age of big air competitions. After landing two Wilson flips, or better described as “underflip to switch rodeo 540“, he didn't make it into finals because the judges didn't know what to make of it, but he left a few questions hanging in the air. Was this the way forward? Can we make this cool? Is this aerials?
Watching Wilson doing his thing while all of us were stuck in a rut of just spinning like tops, Jon Olsson and I said to each other – this is what we have to do. I remember Jon ranting about how this was the future and we better get on it now before everyone else. The rest is history. Jon went off to Australia to invent the Kangaroo Flip on the water ramps, I worked on double backflips in Åre (on the jump Jon built to learn Kangaroo on snow, all props to him for pioneering, yes, he should get the credit for doing the first “new school doubles"), and at the Jon Olsson Invitational in 2006, on the first perfect big air jump to try double corks/flats on, we unleashed the new tricks to the rest of the world, Jon stomping Kangaroos and I figuring out double cork 1080s and 1260s. All of a sudden these tricks were accepted by the judges, and we had something new and fun to play with.
Just a year later we had learnt about 5 new doubles, with different grabs, and pretty much the top 20 of the world's skiers seemed to have caught on. You would see online edits every day with some new kid learning something that no one would have thought of two years ago. This was what big air skiing needed. Now you had people spinning, flipping and corking, going forward and backwards, going upside down once, twice, or just staying on a strange, un-defined wobbling axis. We had variety.
As with all things, this too had to end somewhere. 2010 is now coming to an end, it's been almost 5 years since we started doing the first “new school" doubles, and conformity is once again taking over. Every competition skier in the game can do a few different doubles and anyone can win a competition on a 50 foot jump because everyone looks the same. Contest organizers can't build the jumps bigger because of money and safety reasons, and the athletes can't progress any further without sacrificing style. The internet communities are enraged over the path the progression has taken.
It's funny how fast we lose our memory. Just 3 years ago doubles were still new and fresh and a given podium at any big air competition. Today they already feel outdated. The big problem is – where do we go from here?
We can't really invent more ways to spin 2-4 rotations than we already have, except grabbing differently. Unfortunately, the recent competitions have shown that multiple grab changes are rewarded by the judges, not because it looks any better, but because it adds technicality to the trick. This is an example of sacrificing style and fluidity in order to make a trick more difficult. Should 4 different grabs in one trick be scored higher than 2? This can't be the way to go.
We can't do triple flips/corks off jumps the size they are today. And, making the jumps any bigger would be unsafe, not to mention too expensive.
We can't judge a competition solely based on style. Why, you might ask? This seems to be one of the hottest topics of discussion right now, and if everyone is tired of double flips, why not have a true style competition, where the difficulty of the trick would not matter, but only one thing; Style. Here's the problem – What is style?
This question has about as many answers as there are skiers. Technicality is easy to break down – anyone, even someone who does not ski, would agree that spinning 3 full rotations while going inverted twice is a lot harder than spinning two rotations while going inverted once. This is simple math. But how do you quantify style? How do you convert something so subjective into scores? We can all agree on putting a limit to the amount of rotations one is allowed to do would only hurt the sport, since freedom was the only reason for us to give FIS the middle finger and start our own thing so many years ago. Are we then going to go full circle and introduce mandatory tricks and put limits to them? This seems uncomfortably familiar for those of us who belong to the older generation.
The next problem is that style doesn't only happen in the air. Are the judges going to pay attention to how the skier rides into the jump, and the way he/she rides out of the landing? Is attitude a judged category? How about bagginess of apparel? Some argue that style is something you have and that you can't really learn. Wouldn't this give a lot of riders a huge disadvantage? How does a short man win a tallness competition?
The last problem that I would like to address is that judging a competition based on style and not difficulty of the trick + execution, is that it makes the whole idea of being a professional athlete pointless. How many people in the world can do a good looking double corked 1260 on a city big air jump, with a solid grab? 15? maybe 30? Let's change the question a bit. How many people in the world can do a flawless, motionless switch cork 720 tail grab on a city big air jump? I would not be surprised if the answer to that question is in the thousands. Besides, if the competition was based solely on style, then you wouldn't even have to do such a difficult trick. A simple 360 would be enough, making my point even clearer. If everyone tried to do the best looking 360, how would you decide a winner?
I'm not saying I have the answer to these questions, but after reading countless arguments against the kind of judging systems we have in the sport right now, I just wanted to point these things out. Because to me it seems like a lot of people just don't understand how their ideal system would work out in reality. It sounds like a good concept, but in a sport where 90% of the skiers copy 10% of the pros, said system would just take something already uniform and turn it into something even more uninspiring.
I do believe however, that I have an idea that could change this. The idea is not mine, but it's like most things in our world, stolen from skateboarding. Check out Rob Dyrdek's Street League, and take notes. Imagine a skiing big air final with 7 athletes, all having to land 7 different tricks, constant scoring updates for the crowd, and with no room for error. This is what we have to do to keep things interesting!
Jacob
@https://www.freeride.se/jacobwester/.
Starta gärna en diskussion och tyck till.
"Thoughts on style and its royal family"
November 23, 2010
The annual big air competition King of Style is for the 5th time in Stockholm, finished, and some of the riders have moved on to Trysil, Norway for the Sweet Rumble, some back home their respective winter homes. Although the competition is over and the scaffolding has been taken down, the internet communities are still debating over who was the worthy winner, if the contest format was flawed and whether or not the competition lived up to its name. A common complaint one finds is “I'm sick of seeing these double flips, I'd much rather see a gangstah/illin/stylish 540“.
The never-ending problem with judged big air events is its proneness to conformity. A few years back spinning switch was all the hype, and the more you could spin, the better. If you took off forward you weren't rewarded as much because this was regarded easier than taking off switch. Somewhere around three and a half rotations the progression came to a halt, so this became a physical boundary for how much one can spin off a big air jump that was built on scaffolding and covered in man-made snow. A few 1440s were thrown, and the more you had to spin, the more the tricks looked alike. There's really only one way to spin that much, and that is upright, with a mute grab, very standard.
Understandably, this got boring after a while. In Vail, Colorado, at the US Open big air competition in 2006, 37 out of 40 runs in the qualifying round were switch 1080s. Something had to happen, and I'm going to blame and thank Mike Wilson for taking the first step towards a new age of big air competitions. After landing two Wilson flips, or better described as “underflip to switch rodeo 540“, he didn't make it into finals because the judges didn't know what to make of it, but he left a few questions hanging in the air. Was this the way forward? Can we make this cool? Is this aerials?
Watching Wilson doing his thing while all of us were stuck in a rut of just spinning like tops, Jon Olsson and I said to each other – this is what we have to do. I remember Jon ranting about how this was the future and we better get on it now before everyone else. The rest is history. Jon went off to Australia to invent the Kangaroo Flip on the water ramps, I worked on double backflips in Åre (on the jump Jon built to learn Kangaroo on snow, all props to him for pioneering, yes, he should get the credit for doing the first “new school doubles"), and at the Jon Olsson Invitational in 2006, on the first perfect big air jump to try double corks/flats on, we unleashed the new tricks to the rest of the world, Jon stomping Kangaroos and I figuring out double cork 1080s and 1260s. All of a sudden these tricks were accepted by the judges, and we had something new and fun to play with.
Just a year later we had learnt about 5 new doubles, with different grabs, and pretty much the top 20 of the world's skiers seemed to have caught on. You would see online edits every day with some new kid learning something that no one would have thought of two years ago. This was what big air skiing needed. Now you had people spinning, flipping and corking, going forward and backwards, going upside down once, twice, or just staying on a strange, un-defined wobbling axis. We had variety.
As with all things, this too had to end somewhere. 2010 is now coming to an end, it's been almost 5 years since we started doing the first “new school" doubles, and conformity is once again taking over. Every competition skier in the game can do a few different doubles and anyone can win a competition on a 50 foot jump because everyone looks the same. Contest organizers can't build the jumps bigger because of money and safety reasons, and the athletes can't progress any further without sacrificing style. The internet communities are enraged over the path the progression has taken.
It's funny how fast we lose our memory. Just 3 years ago doubles were still new and fresh and a given podium at any big air competition. Today they already feel outdated. The big problem is – where do we go from here?
We can't really invent more ways to spin 2-4 rotations than we already have, except grabbing differently. Unfortunately, the recent competitions have shown that multiple grab changes are rewarded by the judges, not because it looks any better, but because it adds technicality to the trick. This is an example of sacrificing style and fluidity in order to make a trick more difficult. Should 4 different grabs in one trick be scored higher than 2? This can't be the way to go.
We can't do triple flips/corks off jumps the size they are today. And, making the jumps any bigger would be unsafe, not to mention too expensive.
We can't judge a competition solely based on style. Why, you might ask? This seems to be one of the hottest topics of discussion right now, and if everyone is tired of double flips, why not have a true style competition, where the difficulty of the trick would not matter, but only one thing; Style. Here's the problem – What is style?
This question has about as many answers as there are skiers. Technicality is easy to break down – anyone, even someone who does not ski, would agree that spinning 3 full rotations while going inverted twice is a lot harder than spinning two rotations while going inverted once. This is simple math. But how do you quantify style? How do you convert something so subjective into scores? We can all agree on putting a limit to the amount of rotations one is allowed to do would only hurt the sport, since freedom was the only reason for us to give FIS the middle finger and start our own thing so many years ago. Are we then going to go full circle and introduce mandatory tricks and put limits to them? This seems uncomfortably familiar for those of us who belong to the older generation.
The next problem is that style doesn't only happen in the air. Are the judges going to pay attention to how the skier rides into the jump, and the way he/she rides out of the landing? Is attitude a judged category? How about bagginess of apparel? Some argue that style is something you have and that you can't really learn. Wouldn't this give a lot of riders a huge disadvantage? How does a short man win a tallness competition?
The last problem that I would like to address is that judging a competition based on style and not difficulty of the trick + execution, is that it makes the whole idea of being a professional athlete pointless. How many people in the world can do a good looking double corked 1260 on a city big air jump, with a solid grab? 15? maybe 30? Let's change the question a bit. How many people in the world can do a flawless, motionless switch cork 720 tail grab on a city big air jump? I would not be surprised if the answer to that question is in the thousands. Besides, if the competition was based solely on style, then you wouldn't even have to do such a difficult trick. A simple 360 would be enough, making my point even clearer. If everyone tried to do the best looking 360, how would you decide a winner?
I'm not saying I have the answer to these questions, but after reading countless arguments against the kind of judging systems we have in the sport right now, I just wanted to point these things out. Because to me it seems like a lot of people just don't understand how their ideal system would work out in reality. It sounds like a good concept, but in a sport where 90% of the skiers copy 10% of the pros, said system would just take something already uniform and turn it into something even more uninspiring.
I do believe however, that I have an idea that could change this. The idea is not mine, but it's like most things in our world, stolen from skateboarding. Check out Rob Dyrdek's Street League, and take notes. Imagine a skiing big air final with 7 athletes, all having to land 7 different tricks, constant scoring updates for the crowd, and with no room for error. This is what we have to do to keep things interesting!
Jacob
@https://www.freeride.se/jacobwester/.
.
