The final stop of the Rock A Rail tour went down in The Hague in The Netherlands in front of an excited crowd of freeski fans.
Following stops in Thun, Switzerland and Innsbruck, Austria the tour returned to its birthplace, crowning Tucker Fitzsimons and Tereza Korabova as overall champions.
Rock A Rail is exactly what the European freeski scene needed – it certainly feels like a celebration of the culture with DJs thumping tunes and the MCs hyping the crowd up. Running the ski and snowboard event on consecutive days means the crowd is a who’s who of the snow-sliding scene.
The Innsbruck stop was only a couple of Jagerbombs short of a full-blown party. The crowd was bouncing to drum and bass tracks and the riders were certainly feeding off that energy – throwing down heavy tricks and jogging back up the scaffold to get as many laps in as possible. At one point a parched Ryan Stevenson – the eventual winner – chugged a can of beer before dropping in, stomped his trick and the crowd erupted with enough noise to silence the nearby football stadium.
This final stop of the tour was also the first FIS sanctioned ‘Rail Event’ and was also the first European Cup contest of its kind. The idea is to create a contest circuit and a pathway that is separate from the usual FIS contests of slopestyle, big air and halfpipe. The hope is that this will attract a completely separate group of riders – giving opportunities to riders that do not have access, either financially or geographically (or both), to the means to train for the other disciplines. The current plan is to create a pathway of events that will lead all the way to World Cup level events in the winter of 2027.
The beauty of a rail jam is that it’s not only accessible to a range of riders but also to the public. They can be held in areas or countries that would not normally be exposed to skiing and therefore reach new audiences, who can get up close to the action. Spectators don’t need a lift ticket to watch or need to even live near a mountain. This will hopefully expose the sport to a wider audience and in turn drive participation. Dryslopes and indoor snowdomes can produce high level riders miles from the nearest glitzy ski resort, so showing people that it does not take an expensive lift ticket to be involved is nothing but a good thing. The more inclusive our sport is, the bigger it can be and, in this case, bigger does mean better.
Despite these events being organised by FIS, the people involved truly have the best interest of the sport and culture at heart. Hopefully these events are here to stay.