COPPER MOUNTAIN — In the relatively short history of snowboard halfpipe competition, Bud Keene has seen it all.
He was there, at the top of the Olympic halfpipe, when Ross Powers, Danny Kass and J.J. Thomas swept the podium at the 2002 Salt Lake City Games.
Keene was the guy who helped Shaun White find his “place of peace” with a freeriding session between runs after the eventual gold medalist at Turin in 2006 stumbled and nearly failed to qualify for the Olympic finals.
And as an anchor on the U.S. Snowboarding Team’s coaching staff on the eve of another Olympic qualifying cycle, Keene is the first to admit he hasn’t seen anything quite like this before.
“Snowboarding really has experienced its biggest push forward in the past five months than ever in the history of the sport,” Keene said from the Copper Mountain superpipe that will host the first of five U.S. Olympic Team qualifying contests later this week. “This new breed of trick — the double cork — is much more spectacular to watch, more risky in terms of competition and more dangerous if you fail to execute it. And there is a whole slew of them coming out, a lot of them as ‘must do’ tricks.”
After several years of the “spin to win” standard pushing progression of the sport from now run-of-the-mill 360s to exponentially more demanding 1260-degree rotations (3 1/2 spins) performed high above the halfpipe walls, double corks have introduced a bold aspect on par with proving what is thought to be a flat Earth is round. And it rotates off-axis.
Where a big snowboard trick such as a 1080 in the pipe might include two aerial spins combined with one flip (for a total of three revolutions), Keene describes double-cork variations as including two flips and at least one spin. It’s that additional inverted move — and the airtime needed to complete it — that makes the tricks so hard.
And while many of the world’s top snowboarders have a difficult time landing the tricks even once, elite riders such as White and reigning U.S. Snowboarding Grand Prix champion Louie Vito are linking the stunning stunts as back-to-back tricks mixed into complete superpipe runs.
Keene, among others, believes Olympic gold in Vancouver in February will demand multiple double corks this time around.
“(At the 2006 Olympics) it was back-to-back 1080s that were the ‘must do’ tricks in order to win the gold,” said Keene, working as White’s personal coach during this Olympic season. “This time around, some sort of double cork is going to be mandatory, and maybe even back-to-back double corks.”
The concept of the double cork is not entirely new, with riders such as Travis Rice from Jackson, Wyo., landing double-cork 1080s for a couple of years now.
What’s new is integrating a typically one-off stunt into a complete halfpipe contest run that might include as many as seven other big aerial moves off opposing walls while a rider makes his way down the pipe. The demands of such a sudden burst of energy in the middle of an already difficult run require a level of strength and conditioning snowboarding has never known.
As has so often been the case in recent years, 23-year-old Olympic champion White established the new standard of back-to-back double corks in a contest run, winning the Burton New Zealand Open and the first FIS World Cup snowboard contest of the season when he tested out the tricks last month.
“I feel like I just got pushed to a place where I knew I wanted to be and I knew I could be,” White told reporters in New Zealand. “To do it in front of people for the first time ever is pretty wild. I’m excited just to get it done and to start working on even more.”
With the benefit of a personal Olympic-sized superpipe (22-foot walls) stashed away at Colorado’s Silverton Mountain last winter, the Carlsbad, Calif., native with a second residence in Breckenridge spent a couple of weeks working on his new moves in relative seclusion. White’s sponsors at Red Bull built the private pipe, going so far as to build a foam-block landing pit into one wall so he could learn the trick without the ramifications of crashing in the icy ditch.
“Because of that Red Bull pipe, Shaun was able to launch off the pipe wall and do the double cork into the foam pit. When he felt like he had it down, he could move up the wall and do it on that perfect pipe. He was able to jump start the whole world with that,” Keene said. “Snowboarding is a very visual sport, and after seeing Shaun do it on videotape and at contests, some of the other riders studied up and copied those tricks and have had some success landing them in competition.
“It’s more difficult doing it that way, but the cat’s out of the bag now and rest of world is struggling to keep up with Shaun doing back-to-back double corks.
“Shaun hasn’t changed the sport single-handedly, but he’s been the catalyst.”
Copper Mountain has provided similarly exclusive training time to U.S. Snowboarding athletes every morning since opening its superpipe Nov. 28. And as the first Olympic halfpipe qualifier lands in Copper this Thursday-Saturday, Keene expects a showcase of the sport unlike anything ever seen — including the debut of White’s new double-McTwist 1260.
With so many strong American riders vying for only four spots on the U.S. Olympic Team, the level of riding is likely to trump the actual Olympics.
“It’s wild,” White said at the New Zealand Open. “I can’t believe that all these guys are just going for these tricks. I had a hard time even attempting them when I first learned it, and to see guys just going for it, it takes a lot of guts to do that sort of thing. Your risk of injury on the outcome is very high. It’s not something you just go and do.”
U.S. Snowboarding Grand Prix
What: U.S. Olympic Snowboard Team qualifying contest
Where: Copper Mountain Superpipe
Who: Top halfpipe riders from around the world, including Olympic gold medalist Shaun White, silver medalist Gretchen Bleiler from Aspen, Grand Prix champion Louie Vito and X Games champion Steve Fisher from Breckenridge.
Schedule
THURSDAY
10:30-11:30 a.m.: Women’s heat No. 1 qualifiers
11:45 a.m.-12:45 p.m.: Women’s heat No. 2 qualifiers
FRIDAY
9-10:30 a.m.: Men’s heat No. 1 qualifiers
11 a.m.-12:30 p.m.: Men’s heat No. 2 qualifiers
1-2:30 p.m.: Men’s heat No. 3 qualifiers
SATURDAY
11 a.m.-12:30 p.m.: Halfpipe finals
1-2:30 p.m.: Xbox Junior Jam (Copper Plaza)
7-8:30 p.m.: Paul Mitchell Progression Session
