ASPEN, Colo.—Kelly Clark burst out of the superpipe as if she had springs in her legs, sailing more than 13 feet above the rim.
Torah Bright floated through the air with graceful ease, making technically difficult tricks look impossibly easy.
Gretchen Bleiler whirled and twirled off the walls like a tumbling corkscrew, pulling off tricks few women would even consider attempting.
And that was just the first round. It only got better from there.
“That might have been the best night in the history of women’s snowboarding,” Bleiler said.
No one was better than the hometown favorite.
Bleiler won her third Winter X Games gold in the superpipe Friday night, capping a spectacular show of grace and athleticism with a near-flawless run.
The night started a gravity-defying run by Clark that included an enormous frontside 900 and ended with a victory lap for Bleiler, who celebrated with family and friends just as she did after winning the same title in 2003 and 2005.
“Just watching these two, I felt, OK, this is not a threat anymore, this is a challenge, step it up,” Bleiler said. “Tonight was a good night for women’s snowboarding.”
Clark started the show off on the night’s third run, landing the frontside 900 on her first trick for 90 points. Bright followed with a flowing run that included a switch, backside 720 that earned her 89.66 points. Bleiler seemed to be in position to pass them both with a frontside 900 and a massive Crippler—an inverted 540—but sat down on the landing on her final trick for 89.33 points.
Bleiler got it right the second time around, hitting the first two tricks again and finishing with consecutive 720s to grab the lead with a 93.33-point run she said was close to perfect.
But it was far from over.
Clark was the 2002 Olympic halfpipe gold medalist and a two-time X Games champ, so she clearly had the chops to take a run at Bleiler, particularly since she had been close to landing 1080s in practice. Her chances ended early with a fall, but without much disappointment after being part of such a spectacular show.
“If we didn’t have this three-run format, we wouldn’t have seen the level of competition,” Clark said.
That left Bright, the defending X Games champ, with the only chance to best Bleiler. She nearly pulled it off.
The 21-year-old Aussie wowed the crowd with a soaring McTwist (a backside 540 with the front hand grabbing the toe side of the board) on her first hit, landing dozens of feet down the pipe from where she started. More technically difficult tricks followed, finishing off a superb run that probably would have won any other year. It just wasn’t enough to beat Bleiler this year.
“We keep pushing each other,” said Bright, who earned 92.66 points on her final run. “One person steps it up, the next year the other person steps it up. It’s fun. We’re all pushing each other and having fun with it.”
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SPIN LESS:@ It’s no longer spin to win in the halfpipe.
After several years of rapid innovation, the progression of snowboarding tricks has taken a new, smoother turn. Instead of riders trying to outdo each other by spinning as many times as they can, they’ve gone back to smaller tricks like 540s and 720s, using extra combinations and grabs to impress the judges.
“There was a heavy, heavy push of new trickery within the last couple of years, and now that’s kind of leveled off,” said Steve Fisher, the defending Winter X Games superpipe champ.
The change has to do with style.
When riders try big spins, like a 1260 (3 1/2 revolutions) or a 1440 (four times around), the tricks look forced, an almost unnatural motion as they torque their bodies to get all the way around. Style has always been a big part of snowboarding, so now riders are going back to some of their older tricks to get some of that flow back.
“I think tricks are taking a step back in some ways, back to the alley-oops, the 540s, the 360s,” said Mike Jankowski, halfpipe coach for the U.S. Snowboarding Team. “They’ll do different types of combinations, get more amplitude, sometimes even slow a spin down or hold a grab a little longer.”
More than style, there’s a fear that snowboarding will become standardized, that the free-flowing nature of the sport will be diminished. Continue down the same can-you-top-this path and there’s the chance big spins could become a requirement for every run.
“We really don’t want to see this become figure skating where there becomes a standard and you have to do a certain amount of rotations, and the person who does the most rotations wins,” Jankowski said. “That’s not what snowboarding is about at all.”
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BURKE REPEATS:@ Sarah Burke needed a big second run to end Grete Eliassen’s run as ski superpipe champion a year ago. A fall on her first run left her in the same position this year.
Burke pulled it off again, shaking off her early wipeout with a stellar second run that included a 900 and earned her 92 points—more than 10 ahead of silver medalist Mirjam Jaeger.
“I thought I better get the second run,” the 25-year-old Canadian said Friday. “There’s definitely a lot of pressure. I just listened to some music and relaxed.”
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ODD ENDING:@ The night ended on an odd note in a new event.
The event was skiing big air, which features riders doing one trick off a huge ramp in head-to-head competition.
The judging was done in “American Idol” format with a judge sitting on a carved-out log bench telling the competitors what he thought of their run. The other part of the judging was done by fans who text-messaged their votes.
To top it off, the two finalists, Jon Olsson and Charles Gagnier, had to decide who would go first in an awkward game of rock, paper, scissors.
Olsson ended up winning, getting the vote from the judge and 70 percent from the fans with a spectacular trick called the Kangaroo Flip, which is essentially an off-axis double flip.
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QUICK HITS:@ It wasn’t much of a surprise when three-time slopestyle champion Shaun White put together a 95-point run to lead qualifying. What did catch everyone offguard was the poor performance of Danny Kass. The 2001 superpipe champion and three-time slopestyle medalist finished last out of 20 riders, bobbling the landing on his first run and missing one of the course features on the second for 38.33 points. … Cheryl Maas of the Netherlands led women’s slopestyle qualifying with 87.66 points.
