Cardrona Half Pipe World Cup
September 3, 2007 on 12:07 pm | In Snowboarding |
For the first time ever, the FIS World Cup half pipe tour came to New Zealand, to the resort of Cardrona. The FIS World Cup Tour runs from September to March, taking the athletes all over the world from the Southern Hemisphere and back to the Northern Hemisphere and usually kicks off in Chile in September. This year the boarder X riders all head to Chile for their kick off at the end of September, while the half pipe riders came down to New Zealand for their first competition. Many of the competitors came down to New Zealand early to train in the Snowpark pipe with only a few of them arriving just for the World Cup so there has been a competition atmosphere here for a few weeks now. The riders who compete on the half pipe tour travel the world together so we all know one another pretty well and are on the whole good friends. That does not stop us pushing one another when it comes to competition day though as there are valuable World Cup points up for grabs as well as a heafty prize purse.
Cardrona had done a great job of building their half pipe, especially as the snow conditions fot the last few weeks have been challenging to say the least. The competition had drawn some of the big names from the snowboard world including in the female section, World Champion Manuela Pesko, X Games winner and Olympic Silver Medalist Gretchen Bleiler, Lindsay Jacobellis, Tricia Burns, Soko Yamaoka and many more as well as, in the mens’ section, local ripper and NZ Open 07 winner Mitchell Brown, Swiss ripper Rolph Feldman, Finnish flyers Annti Auti and Risto Matilla, and many more. The standard of the riding in the training was very, very high indeed and the pressure towards competition day soon began to rise.
The qualification day brought some pretty heavy winds with it and it looked like we were going to face a day of delays. After a few time postponements the event went off roughly to plan and both the girls and guys got two qualification runs each. I was very happy to make the ladies final, which was to be the next day, in 7th place along with Manuela, Lindsay, Soko, amongst others. The next day the winds were even stronger and had swung round so that they were now blowing accross the pipe instead to straight down it. This caused some major problems for us pipe riders as we got blown off of one wall and on to the deck of the other. There were some very strong runs being put down in the ladies final with Manuela and Lindsay landing back to back 540s and back to back 720s in the same run. I was happy to land a run with a back to back 540 combination and a 720 to cab 3 as well but I felt I could make it all higher so the next run I charged as hard as I could and got some great amplitute. Things were going very well until a gust of wind blew me into the flat bottom off of the back side wall, causing me to catch an edge and hit the ground backwards faster than you could say backwards. That was my run over so I would have to keep the score from the first run as my final score. In the end Manuela won with Lindsay in second and US ripper Claire Bidez in third. I had to settle with 8th place which is a great World Cup result but a little frustrating for me as I feel my second run was definitely going better than my first. That is just the way of snowboarding though and often you crash in at least one of your runs. The mens’ competition was taken by Japanese rider Ryo Aono, with Russian ripper Iouri Podladchikov second and Rolf Feldmann in third. All boys were throwing down 900s and 1080s and Ryo even tried a backside 1260!
All in all it was a great strat to the 07/08 season and a great debut for Cardrona on the World Cup scene. The next World Cup half pipe will be in Saas Fee in November.
Lesley McKenna
http://www.chunkyknit.com
Professional snowboarder, film maker and ambassador for Visitscotland. All sorts of outdoor sports from skiing to mountain biking and now mixes her time on the Snowboard World Cup Tour with time in Scotland doing these sports.
