Ireland’s Seamus O’Connor has produced the best slopestyle performance of his career so far and in doing so has qualified ( with the second highest score – 90.33 ) for the final of the Snowborad Slopestyle World Championship in Kreischberg .
Prior to the event O’Connor’s coach Sam Wilkinson said ” In this post Olympic year Seamus has been working on developing a new routine. I am looking forward to seeing the results when this new run is fully developed.”
On this performance it seems to be working well as O’Connor is second highest qualifier for Wednesday’s Final. http://www.fis-ski.com/kreischberg2015/events-and-places/results/
Finals schedule can be accessed here:
http://data.fis-ski.com/pdf/2015/SB/7030/2015SB7030PROG.pdf
Slopestyle is a form of competition that comes from snowboarding and free-skiing. An obstacle course with various obstacles has to be overcome. The course can be compared to a giant skate park – there are big jumps and rails in different variations. It is constructed in a way the riders have a lot of possibilities to combine all the different elements. Three to six judges evaluate the execution of the different jumps and tricks. They award each run of each athlete with 1 to 100 points. The highest and the lowest ratings will not be taken in consideration. The best of two runs counts. The best 20 riders qualify for the finals and have again two runs of which the better one counts.
Slopestyle tricks can be roughly divided into four categories: spins (rotation around the vertical axis of the body), grabs (grabbing the board), grinds (a trick on the rail), flips (rotation around the horizontal axis of the body, similar to a summersault). The goal in Slopestyle is to use and to combine as many different elements as possible, showing difficult tricks as well as high and long jumps – and all that with style. A lot of variety pays off in any case.
