The Freeride World Tour just confirmed the date for the next competition of their main tour. It is scheduled for an early start this Wednesday in the French mega-resort of Les Trois Vallées at 8:15 local time and should go down on a venue called “Lac Noir.” The iconic starting gate will be at a height of 2500 m and the finish area is just above 2000 m, giving the athletes plenty of terrain to play with.
There are still sub-par snow conditions for freeriding across the Alps, but it seems that a window of opportunity just opened for a good contest this week. The latest weather forecasts promise a substantial amount of new snow for Tuesday and sunshine for Wednesday. After Wednesday, the weather outlook is rather mixed, so the window for the competition is short. Hence the early announced starting time. Whether that starting time will hold is to be seen, but the organizers will try everything to make the event happen that day—and giving them a time window that is as big as possible seems like a good idea.
Contrary to the first event in Spain, this second tour stop should be ideal for on-location watching. The contest face is in the western-most corner of the huge Trois Vallées ski area just north of the peak of La Masse, which sits between Val Thorens and the next village down the Belleville valley, Les Menuires. Ski touring up along a piste called “Les Enverses” should get you just opposite of the competition face in less than one hour, in case you want to save the ski ticket. Other options are to take the gondola up La Masse and ski down to a good outlook, to watch the livestream online, of course, or to watch the replay in the evening in case you’d prefer some pow turns yourself.
The contest face for this edition of the Val Thorens Pro is not the first choice of the FWT organization, which eyes the whole area as a possible site for an eventual Olympic debut of freeriding in 2030. However, given the conditions the Lac Noir site is probably a good choice as it is more protected against wind and a little less steep than higher options around the Cime Caron. The terrain seems to offer lots of features to play with and should particularly suit freestyle-oriented riders. There are some previews of the face on the official event page. In any way, it proves that the huge Trois Vallées resort offers an abundance of freeride possibilities.
Competition among riders will be fierce, once again. Top finishers from Baqueira Beret will seek to strengthen their positions in the overall, while others like former world champions Maxime Chabloz and Elisabeth Gerritzen, who had a rather disappointing first event, need to improve in order to make the cut for the tour finals. After Val Thorens, already half of the regular tour events will be in the books. In case you want to make your own predictions for the results, head over to the Peak Performance Funbet.
