With its spectacular tricks, creative snow features and fearless athletes, slopestyle is sure to enthrall TV viewers during the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia.

And given the popularity of halfpipe with spectators—more than 30 million TV viewers watched the men’s halfpipe final in Vancouver—few in the industry dispute the notion that further exposure for freestyle snow sports is a good thing for freestyle, and therefore the business of mountain resorts.

Some grumbling was expected from athletes—freestyle is, after all, a DIY-driven sport—but in the past year, SAM started to hear another, more serious, concern from park builders and industry stakeholders. To be specific: If the FIS were to define rigid parameters around the design and build of slopestyle courses, which mimic traditional terrain parks in their combination of rails, jibs and jumps, could that be interpreted as the standard by which all parks should be built?

SAM spoke to the FIS, builders and industry stakeholders to find out what’s happening at the international level and how it’s been interpreted on the ground.


INDUSTRY CONCERNS
High profile builder Chris “Gunny” Gunnarson, president of Snow Park Technologies and former NSAA Terrain Park Committee chairman, said when he heard slopestyle would be included in the Games, he was immediately concerned about the legal ramifications Olympic-sanctioned course standards might have.

“Typically in the course of any terrain park accident that occurs, plaintiff attorneys are always looking for very tangible physical data that the resort should have followed. And I think we have decided as an industry, at least at this point, it’s impossible to have a cookie-cutter jump design that works for everyone in every situation in every configuration in every condition. It’s virtually impossible. And so that’s why there aren’t standards. But if the Olympics or FIS do something that becomes the standard for all their competitions, that would be the nearest thing that a plaintiff’s attorney could point to.”

It is a concern shared by many in the U.S. But as World Cup qualifiers got underway this year, worries started to dissipate as word trickled down that although there would be FIS standards, they would be loose and more in line with what is currently in place for Olympic boardercross and skiercross.


THE FIS RESPONSE
“We do have some specifications, but they have a range, quite a big plus or minus: so [for example] there’s X-length, plus or minus 25 percent,” confirms Joseph Fitzgerald, freestyle skiing coordinator, International Ski Federation (FIS). “And then inside of that space, the features get placed inside of that in a certain order.”

“I think [guidelines] are a natural progression,” he continues. “Whether it’s what’s happened with mogul skiing, or what’s happened with skicross or snowboardcross or what’s happened with halfpipe: when people—coaches and teams—sit down, if you want to win, you have to know what you have to train on. At the same time, we have to keep [slopestyle] innovative and creative enough that it’s not a template/cookie-cutter situation, [and that] comes from designers.”

And at the same time, he says, “there’s a safety overlay that certainly needs to be done if you have a jump and you want to be able to land on the landing.”

Fitzgerald says that the FIS has been researching slopestyle and terrain park building extensively, looking at what the US Terrain Park Council (USTPC) is doing, following developments in the industry and examining what different countries, such as Finland, Sweden, Norway and Russia, are doing in terms of building best practices.

Would it be fair, then, to say that the outcome could be a set of best practices?

“It would be fair to say that we build, review, understand, codify, look at it historically from all the different things that have been built, and then come up with a set of rules of thumb of how things work,” Fitzgerald responds.

“Much like there’s rules of skiing—[such as] if you fall, you should get off to the side of the hill—those are all FIS regulations. And if you’ve followed what’s been going on with the Terrain Park Council or with Burton [Smart Style]—we’re looking to bring those concepts into an international set of guidelines on what to do globally, because if it’s not safe and it doesn’t work then it’s not sustainable.“


WILL IT BE STANDARDIZED?
So: should park designers be concerned?

To find out, SAM caught up with Steve Petrie, owner of Arena Snowpark Construction Ltd (which built the 2010 Olympic Games halfpipe at Cypress Mountain in Vancouver) in the fall as he was in the midst of planning the build for the World Cup qualifier slopestyle course in Quebec this January.

From his point of view and experience thus far, the concern regarding standardization is negligible.

“I definitely don’t see FIS standardizing the course so that it’s the same course anywhere you go,” he says, affirming Fitzgerald’s statement regarding creativity.

“If I was to build a course for anybody, I would look at the terrain that we’re given, recommend what terrain I think we should use, and then design a course on what I see should go in there. FIS wouldn’t tell me what elements I should put into a track. They might say, ‘it’s nice to have as many as you can get, but we’d rather have less features done well than more not done well.’ But as far as design goes, they really look to the builders to design a course and recommend what elements go in there.”

Eric Webster, Grand Prix tour director at the United States Ski and Snowboard Association, echoes the sentiment.

“Every slopestyle is different, and it’s dictated by the terrain, ultimately. … You can equate it to NASCAR: the tracks are similar, but every track has its own nuances. It’s very similar in slopestyle. Everybody seems concerned that FIS is going to put specifications on the Olympic slopestyle course and resorts and other organizations like ours are going to have to fall in line but—this is my personal opinion—you really can’t. You can’t put specifications on a slopestyle course.”

The reason, Webster says, is in the very nature of the sport itself. The ending of each feature transforms into the beginning of the feature after it—and every degree of change affects the degrees by which the next feature is built.

“If you tried to put degrees on a slopestyle build, it just doesn’t work. And that’s the cool thing about slopestyle. And that’s why I think resorts shouldn’t get hung up on what FIS is going to build. Every resort caters to a different clientele. Smaller resorts don’t need elite-level jumps, they just need small jumps that cater to their customers, and they need to make sure that all five of those elements [in-run, the jump/kicker/gap-on, the carry, landing and the outrun] are in that jump.”

Robert Joncas, high performance director, Canada Snowboard (USSA’s Canadian snowboard counterpart) agrees that strictly standardizing slopestyle is nearly impossible given the sport’s parameters.

“It’s not about regulation, it’s a matter of physics,” he says. “No matter how big the jumps will be—the movement of the snowboarder or the skier is physics. The higher they go, the better they can do their trick, but then they have to find the snow again.

But, he points out, the size of the builds will become a concern as the difficulty of tricks continues to increase and the speed, and size of jump, needed to execute them becomes financially prohibitive.

It’s a point Fitzgerald says the FIS is taking into consideration.

“I think that everyone has to be careful from a business model point of view that something doesn’t grow so huge that it’s not sustainable. We struggle, well not struggle, but we go back and forth to understand what costs are to organizers and how they can finance the event versus the revenue they generate with the television exposure or whatever coming back out. So, there’s a balance that has to be struck or the system doesn’t work.”


CONFIRMED FOR SOCHI
What do we know about Sochi thus far?

The space for the slopestyle course will be between 500 and 700 meters long (1,650 to 2,300 feet) with a vertical drop of 150 to 200 meters (500 to 650 feet). Inside that space, there will be five to six sections, featuring two rail sections and three jumps, the groundwork for which is being shaped right now.

The non-jump features, Fitzgerald says, will be where “a little bit of the creativity” comes in, with the organizers currently examining ways in which a Russian theme can be incorporated into the rail/jib features.

The space and groundwork is being designed by Roberto Moresi, assistant race director, snowboarding, FIS, and the consulting builder is frequent FIS World Championship course collaborator Anders Forsell of Sweden. And the FIS has also proposed to the Games organizing committee the addition of sport-specific specialists, not yet named, for the different course builds.


WILL POPULARITY FALTER?
Most of the people we spoke to for this article expressed hope that showcasing freestyle skiing and snowboarding in slopestyle via the Olympic Games would be beneficial for the sport, increasing interest and boosting terrain park riding and participation. At the same time, most noted this has not been the case for halfpipe riding, thanks in part to the rarity of competition-grade pipes.

It’s this writer’s opinion that, unlike halfpipe, a slopestyle course can be created simply by linking three rails and three jumps in any terrain park line. As such, showcasing it on an Olympic level will at a minimum give little park groms (and their parents) a new goal to shoot for and, in the best scenario, result in a boost in interest for freestyle snow sports. Which is all the more reason to keep investing in high-quality terrain parks where Olympic dreams can be made.