Mathilde Gremaud and Birk Ruud top heavy World Championship slopestyle finals

The Women

With the Foehn blowing warm dusty air from the south, some of the women struggled to find the speed for the jumps. Kirsty Muir held the lead for a while with a relatively low score, having fumbled a grab and knuckled the sharkfin. The first rider to break into the seventies was the returning Lara Wolf who landed both feet front 450s and a K-Fed on the rails. 

The pressure was on for Mathilde Gremaud who had taken much of the season off in order to prepare for these home World Championships. Looking fresh and as though she was enjoying her skiing, the Swiss rider put herself into the mid eighties, well beyond the rest of the pack. She started with a flawless left lip 270 continuing 270, to switch on front 630 on the top two rails. Her jumps were equally as clean, highlighted by a switch double cork 900 safety and a left double cork 1080 safety – the only female rider to do back-to-back doubles on the day. The run was punctuated by a super technical switch right tails over 270 onto the quad kink rail to switch.

Megan Oldhan was on a heater but was let down by a backseat landing on her stylish rodeo 720 japan out of the sharkfin, meaning her run was only good enough for third place.

First place qualifier, Flora Tabanelli was a victim of the wind and knuckled all three jumps leaving it all up to her second run.

Trying to improve her run, Kirsty added a double cork 1260 but she had too many bobbles and mistakes throughout to better her first pull. She was overtaken by Ruby Star Andrews who landed a fairly basic but very clean run. She was clearly extremely relieved to have put one down as her exhale of breath in the finish area was almost as strong as the remnants of the Saharan storm that was battering the course.

Lara then improved her run, adding in a double cork 1080 on the second jump and grabbing tail on the second of her front 450s. The run lacked the technicality of Mathlide’s and despite improving on her first run, she did not come close to troubling for the top spot.

The Men

According to the judges – and anyone else who tuned in to watch with geek level understanding – this was one of the heaviest slopestyle contests ever seen. Normally, the scores produced by the SBS system tend to be lower than in overall impression judging but, as Buzz Lightyear would say – not today. All of the top seven finishers posted scores of above 80 points and it was a triumph of the SBS system to be able to separate the top runs – a task that would have been a nightmare in the old money judging.

Axel Burmansson has come up through the ranks having been successful on the Europa Cup tour and he set the tone on the first feature of the final – he greased a right foot back 360 swap transfer backslide to switch. This was no tap of the back foot on the end of the rail, Axel locked that one foot in properly and popped off the end of the rail. Devastatingly though, he came off the final rail slightly early, ruining his chance of posting a really high score straight off the bat.

What followed were many insanely high level runs with one or two small errors. Despite landing a triple cork 1800 mute in the middle of his run, Troy Podmilsak’s last rail got hammered for lacking difficulty and would only score in the high seventies. Sebastian Schjerve overtook him but only slightly with a very cool double cork 720 indy truck out of the sharkfin – again the judges were wisely leaving themselves lots of room at the top end of their ranges for more technical tricks. Fabian Boesch would then narrowly overtake both of them by mirroring both ways triple cork 1620s – he fumbled the grab on his switch double misty so still could not break into the eighties. 

The first to do so was defending champion Birk Ruud, who was only a wristed grab on a switch 1800 away from a flawless run. Luca Harrington and Alex Hall’s runs followed and were both anything but flawless – multiple bobbles meant they were both throw-away runs.

Andri Ragettli would finish the first run in the top spot on home snow. He has the precision and consistency of a Swiss watch and seems to be able to mass produce his slopestyle run in any condition, on any course. If you have seen one of Andri’s slopestyle runs this year, you have basically seen them all but to reiterate, he links a switch blender double misty 1260 guitar to left double cork 1620 stale to switch left double bio 1620 buick grab – pretty hard to argue with.

The highlight of the day came in run two from Capeesh rider Tormod Frostad. He has been out of the game for the last few World Cups because of a broken wrist sustained at X Games knuckle huck but it was not his wrist that let him down. As he landed his first rail, his trousers fell down to his knees and it was clear he had forgotten to do up his belt. Torm had to pull up his trousers between each feature as they creeped further down with each stomp. He rode out of the last rail with them completely down around his ankles, throwing minds back to another Scandinavian rider’s wardrobe malfunction at Sochi 2014. Miraculously undeterred, Torm stomped the whole run and apparently – unlike most others watching – the judges also resisted distraction putting him in second place. 

Mac Forehand put himself into first place with a run full of bangers. His first rail was rewarded for its difficulty as the whole trick is almost blind – a right foot back swap transfer to pretzel back 270 out. He backed that up with a 270 on continuing bio 810 and a switch triple 1620 mute on the final jump. A score of over 85 was going to be hard to beat.

That is unless you are Birk Ruud of course. He came out and laced one of the most insane slopestyle runs ever put down – left 270 front swap transfer pretzel front 270, switch left 270 continuing bio 810 safety, switch left double cork 1800 blunt, switch right double cork 1620 safety, left bio 1800 mute, right double cork 1080 safety and finishing with a right 180 to switch blender tails 270 pretzel 270 out. Watching those two runs go down back-to-back was mindblowing. 

Luca kept the ball rolling, landing two big air winning tricks in the middle of his slopestyle run. He landed his first ever switch left double cork 1800 japan in contest and rolled straight into his signature switch triple cork 1620 esco. He had a bobble on his first rail which let him down and his run would only be good enough for fifth – the level has become insane.

AHall continued the madness with some of the most outrageous rail tricks seen in a slopestyle contest – his switch right foot tails over transfer back 450 out of the first rail pad was so impressive and the final left foot front 360 swap pretzel 270 had announcer Max Moffat exclaiming that it would take him 100 tries to land that trick – let alone being able to stick it onto the end of a slope run. In true AHall style he was the only rider using the sharkfin in a unique way – he was airing into the skiers’ left transition doing a switch 540 mute, and then airing out of the other wall with a left cork 720 lead safety. The judges loved it and he slid into third place with one rider remaining. 

Having just been bumped into fourth place, Andri proved that he is in fact human and like a bar of Swiss chocolate, melted in the March heat under the pressure, dropping his final run.

This gave a relieved Birk his second World Championship title on the bounce – an astonishing achievement for a snowboarder. 

“I’ve really just been focused on my skiing and don’t get too emotional on my results, and I think that’s been a good key for me, and a key that I want to continue to do, to just focus on my skiing so I can keep going for a long career and enjoy every day of it. I’m proud of myself today,” said Ruud.

Final Men’s Podium: Birk Ruud in first place, Mac Forehand in second place and Alex Hall in third.