Verbier

The currently unclear situation and the question of how the pandemic will develop in the coming weeks and months also poses major challenges for the organization of freeride contests. Will there be a shortened tour for the elite? Will qualifier events be held and how will they be scored? Answers to these and other questions still need to be found.

A reliable avalanche bulletin requires up-to-date information from the terrain. To this end, the SLF maintains its own network of around 200 observers in the Swiss Alps and the Jura. On the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the avalanche bulletin, the SLF presents some of them in short portraits.

The legendary US magazine Powder is being discontinued after almost 50 years - both the print magazine as well as the online magazine and social media channels. The publisher A360 Media is also closing the related action sports magazines Surfer, Bike and the print version of Snowboarder.

There are freeriders, not only you and me from the German speaking parts of the Alps, but also Japanese freeriders, like Yu Sasaki. He is familiar to us from FWT competitions. I watched Kicking Horse and Yu's run i.m.h.o. would have been the winning line if he hadn't screwed up the drop from the wind lip on top of the face, which was penalized by the judges. ContestHappening didn't mention his run, thus, in order to let justice and mercy prevail, we honor Yu's great line and big drop here!

Children and young people are still heavily underrepresented in the Videos of the Week. We would like to counteract this. This is an episode with overly cute children and their overly proud fathers, and with incomprehensibly good young skiers.

Freeride World Tour: Marion Haerty, Arianna Tricomi, Markus Eder and Victor De Le Rue crowned Tour winners! Elisabeth Gerritzen, Marion Haerty, Wadeck Gorak and Jonathan Penfield took the day's victory at the Xtreme Verbier.

The FJT starts the new season with up to 3000 young athletes who want to gain experience in contest freeriding. The young U-14 riders are now also taking part in some events. In addition, the participants will be divided into the U-16 and U-18 categories for the first time. New venues are on the agenda in Iceland and Japan and efforts are being made to make contest freeriding more popular in these locations too. The season finale returns to Verbier.

The winners of the 2018 Freeride World Tour (FWT) have been announced. At the Xtreme Verbier on the relatively snow-covered Bec des Rosses in Valais, Manuela Mandl (AUT) from Vienna came third and thus won the women's snowboard tour. Victory in Verbier went to Marion Haerty (FRA). The snowboarder winner was Sammy Luebke (USA), who also came first in the overall standings for the third time in a row.

Ullr wants to say goodbye to the Freeride World Tour with top conditions and is sending snow to the north and west of the Alps. It has been snowing from time to time recently - now we're finally getting alarming amounts again!

With the last ContestHappening for the 2016/17 season, we take another brief look at the FWT Final in Verbier and the winners of the overall FWT ranking, and take a look at who has won the qualifier categories and qualified for next year's tour. Finally, it's all about the Open Faces final event in Gastein! I'd like to thank the readers, am open to criticism and would like nothing more than snowier winters and safer conditions at the competitions in the future. Then reporting would be more fun than constantly writing about difficulties and bad snow conditions...

The season is also drawing to a close for the contests: the penultimate contest in the Alps was held on the Kitzsteinhorn in very spring-like conditions (followed by the 2* FWQ in Gastein next weekend). The Freeride World Tour has just confirmed that the final on the Bec des Rosses will take place tomorrow, Monday, April 3, 2017.

The contest season has begun. Six competitions have already taken place in the past week: Hakuba, Verbier and Kappl kicked things off. While it was difficult to find a suitable weather and time window in Hakuba due to the constant snowfall, the snow cover in the Alps is still thin, but apparently it is already good enough for contests. Hopefully also for the planned start of the FWT in Chamonix next weekend!