A few days ago the FIS Freestyle World Championship Slopestyle went down and very few people within the freeski world cared. The biggest event in the competition calender started today in Aspen with the world's best slopestyle skiers hitting in to the typically massive course.
Alex Bellemare dropped first, as he always seems to for some reason, and started things off with three different dub 12s for a score of 86.0, not the most exciting run but super solid. The first real 'what the fuck' trick came from Antti Olilla with a backside surface swap to switch on one of the handrails, but he and all of the next 9 guys had some imperfections in their runs. It took until a solid run for James Woods and his trademark switch dub 10 octo to push scores back in to the 80s. Whether you agree or not, it became clear throughout run 1 that any kind of stumble was going to be heavily punished as with the last couple of year. It took the gold medal boy himself, Joss Christensen to change the leader board with an 88. Amazingly after round 1, we'd only seen 3 scores in the 80s and Tom Wallisch was sat on the 'bubble' with a 72.0.
In the second run ABM went down pretty hard and hobbled off the course so hopefully he's ok. Oystein Braaten, who pulled his ski off in run 1, held it together second time around and I have no idea why he didn't score fairly highly. Antti Olilla nailed the ridiculous bs surface swap again but sadly couldn't put down a whole run. Oscar Wester put down a solid run and... for some reason only scored a 66. At this point I don't think anyone had a clue what was going on with the scoring, possibly some kind of dartboard was involved. Bobby Brown then scored an 83 despite coming off a rail early, pushing T-Wall out... until he stomped a typically perfect Wallisch run to go first with an 89.66. Henrik then went ridiculously huge for his whole run, including a sw dub 9 to gucci to scrape in to 5th. Down to the last 3 and Gus K is in 8th with Goepper in 9th looking to qualify. Gus goes down on the first rail leaving the door wide open, cue typical X-Games tension... a TV Gold nail-biter moment. Goepper is perfect until the last trick but amazingly goes down on a dub 12, leaving the results as follows:
Videos:
T-Wall First Place Run
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0SAPlRiZrI#t=20Joss Christensen 2nd Place Run
https://www.newschoolers.com/videos/watch/750422/Joss-Christensen-qualifies-second-in-Men--39-s-Ski-Slopestyle-X-Games-2015-AspenAlex Bellemare 3rd Place Run
Comments