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So long X Games, hello World Cup.
After the “Super Bowl” of action sports wrapped up on Saturday evening, many of the athletes are sticking around for the FIS World Cup U.S. Grand Prix, starting competition on Thursday.
But before then is training, starting on Tuesday. It’s a quick turnaround for the athletes, but it’s even quicker for the course and venue staff, and like an episode of “24,” they’re watching the clock — starting as soon as the women’s ski Slopestyle wrapped up on Saturday afternoon.
“Our last rider drops at like 2:15 on Saturday in the X Games Slopestyle, and then we’re going up immediately to start making changes and turning things over,” Aspen Skiing Co. Senior Manager of Events and Marketing Tyler Lindsay said last week. “And we’ve basically got two and a half days.”
SkiCo took the reins on design and maintenance of the course this year in preparation for months of event hosting at Buttermilk, starting with the X Games, then the Grand Prix, plus the Revolution Tour starting on Feb. 8 and the debut of Shaun White’s Snow League in March. Previously, X Games used third-party contractor Snow Park Technologies, Lindsay said, but with weeks of events coming up, the local team took a crack at it.
“X Games has gone through a lot of changes this year … they’ve been looking to streamline and find efficiencies,” Lindsay said. “One of the things that we were able to offer this year was like, ‘Hey, we have a lot of experience on the X Games course specifically and on this piece of land that it sits on. … We felt confident we would be able to take that design/build work in-house. I think we’re going to have a really awesome show not only in X Games this week but also next week in the Grand Prix.”
This year they brought in some of the best in the business in terms of course creation and maintenance, like Australian Charles Beckinsale and Frank Wells, one of only a handful of top-tier pipe cutters in the world. The work of the course builders is the canvas for the finest athletes in the world to push the limits of physics and art — this X Games manifesting in feats like the first-ever 2340 Hiroto Ogiwara in any competition in Big Air and Zoi Sadowski-Synnott’s first triple cork by a woman in a Slopestyle competition.
The Grand Prix, touted by FIS as “the biggest week in Park and Pipe World Cup history at Aspen,” will feature competitions in Slopestyle, Halfpipe and Big Air.
Roddy Williams II takes down X Games logos after the conclusion of Slopestyle competition in the X Games on Saturday afternoon. The Aspen Skiing Co. parks-and-terrain team faced a 70-hour window between the conclusion of the X Games slope events to the beginning of training for the FIS World Cup U.S. Grand Prix on Tuesday.
Jason Charme/Aspen Daily News
It’s leading to a lot of work for the park tech crew — a scope of work they’re not unused to, though the timeframe this weekend is unique.
The X Games Slopestyle event ended around 2:15 p.m. on Saturday, with first Grand Prix training at 12:30 p.m. on Tuesday — a time span of 70 hours flat.
“We get all guys on deck and it’ll be a pretty big mission,” SkiCo’s Dom DiGiovanni said. “I’ll probably have about I’d say close to 10 guys out here for at least 10 hours of actually building.”
They’ve faced tight deadlines before, like when Aspen offered to host World Championships on short notice during COVID-19, but Lindsay noted that that was “several dozen weeks vs. several dozen hours.”
The focus will be the Slopestyle course, specifically the rail section — DiGiovanni’s specialty. He said that he “installed every rail that’s on this course and I’ll install every rail that’s going into the Grand Prix.”
The Street Style course won’t be used in the Grand Prix, and the halfpipe is a push for consistency rather than features.
The rails will get a full repainting, replacing colors from X Games sponsors that aren’t involved in the Grand Prix or other events. That requires putting up some tents and lugging some heaters up the mountain. They’ll also pull out a couple features and add others. In the second rail section, all four rails are being replaced. Some other tweaks also were slated after watching X Games competition.
Jump one might be tweaked, while the second and third jumps will remain the same.
There will be some differences, but the short turnaround on the same venue is unique for the athletes, as well.
“We don’t really get that too much in Slopestyle where it’s going to be pretty similar, so I kind of feel like the Slope riders are a little bit of an advantage,” Silverthorne native Red Gerard — who won his second consecutive X Games Slopestyle gold medal on Saturday — said in Wednesday’s event-opening press conference.
The mockups of the course were “substantially” handed down by SPT but the terrain parks team led by Matt Cordts, Mark Pinter, Lindsay and DiGiovanni sculpted their own take — including a pipe feature bent into a rainbow with a flat downbar inspired by a feature in Geilo Park in Norway. Andreas Hatveit, competing in X Games for the first time in 11 years in Street Style, said he was responsible for the original feature in Norway.
In a field where progression of the tricks is the standard, the course — and the machines that build them — has to accommodate that push forward.
“Twenty years ago, you were lucky to get a landing that was more than 28 degrees because that’s all the machines could really handle,” Beckinsale said in a marketing video posted to SkiCo social media. “Nowadays we’re looking at landings of around 38, 39 degrees. … They’re going to have enough air time to do whatever they can think of.”
Lindsay described the terrain team as the “unsung heroes” of the events. DiGiovanni said that the team feels the gravity of building a park that is safe but also allows the athletes to express their art.
“It’s finding that happy medium that everybody is OK with and everybody enjoys,” DiGiovanni said. “You’ve got to have guys that are passionate and that goes a super long way with us. … The events are more exciting to change up the course and just make it that much better for the progression of snowboarding and skiing. That’s what really what a lot of us do it for, just seeing the progression in the next generation.”
Lindsay said the work going into the course design was unique because they had to account for three weeks of potentially diverse kinds of weather and temperatures. The cold week leading into X Games helped keep the course in good shape ahead of the event.
Now, they’re estimating they’ve got probably 10-hour days ahead the next few days before men’s and women’s ski Slopestyle trains on the course early Tuesday afternoon.
U.S Grand Prix competition runs from Thursday through Feb. 6. Qualifiers on the revamped Slopestyle course starts on Thursday with men’s and women’s skiing with the finals on Feb. 1. Snowboarding qualifiers are the next day with finals on Feb. 2.