The Burton New Zealand Open 2007
August 14, 2007 on 9:29 am | In Snowboarding |
The 2007/2008 snowboard competition season kicked off last week with the Burton New Zealand Open competition at Snowpark. The NZ Open is the first in a global series of Snowboarding Open events sponsored by the snowboard company Burton. There are six in all, one in NZ, one in Australia, one in Canada, one in Switzerland, one in Japan and the final one in the home of Burton Snowboards, Stratton Mountain resort in the USA. At each event there are two disciplines, half pipe and slopestyle and each competitor can score points depending on where they place in each competition. Most riders specialise in slopestyle or half pipe but there are a few who do both or at least occasionally do both. The male and female with the most points at the end of the season win the large cash prize of 100 000$ so there is a lot to ride for. The launch of the Burton Global tour brought world class riders from all over the world. The half pipe field was especially strong with Olympic gold medal winner Kelly Clark, TTR Womans Champion 2007 Torah Bright and World Champion Manuela Pesko all competing for the top spot in a field of over 50 women. Torah Bright came out on top in the end, with Kelly Clark and Manuela Pesko taking second and third place. The mens pipe was dominated by local ripper Mitch Brown who took the win easily over Scott Lago forom the US and Ryo Aono from Japan. Torah Bright also took 4th in the Slopestyle the previous day but the main news of the slopestyle day was the first ever Burton Tour win by GB slopestyle ripper Jenny Jones. Jenny rode stron all throught the practice days and clearly won the semi finals. Unfortunatley the weather, which had been temperamental all week, took a turn for the worst and the final had to be cancelled meaning Jenny took the win on the semi final result with Austrian Claudia Fliri in second and Hana Beaman, US, in third. Mason Aguirre took the mens slopestyle first place, with Alessandro Boyens and Dan Brisse in third.
I had a pretty successful first comp of the season, making it into the semi finals then placing 10th, just missing the final of 8 by a few points. It is always hard to step it up in the first comp of the season but I managed to land a brand new run with trick cominations I had never tried in a comp. This is always a great feeling and is a kind of sign post that you are on a progression.
The Burton Open series is part of the TTR snowboarding series which is a global snowboarding tour. The TTR tour gives the world ranking of thousands of riders and crowns the world number one man and woman snowboarders at the end of each season. The tour is made up of half pipe and slopestyle events so is very much an all round tour. As well as the TTR tour there is the FIS World Cup tour. This is made up of the Olympic disciplines of half pipe, boarder X and alpine. At the end of each season there is a World Cup overall winner fro each discipline. Pretty complicated!!
The next competition on the Burton global tour is the Australian Open which is at the end of August and the next competition for me will be the FIS half pipe World Cup at the beginning of September. There are a lot of National Teams here training in the pipe and slopestyle course getting ready for the next competitions so I am sure snowpark will be a busy place for the forseeable future. I will be working on perfecting the run I stuck the other day as trying to add a few new tricks into the mix. I am also hoping to get a few days free riding in on the new snow that fell in the last week. However, the avalanche risk is very high right now so I will have to wait for things to settle down. I spoke to a guide earlier today who told me they dropped 9 charges today and set off 9 avalanches. Scary stuff!!
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.
