Judging set for 2014 Olympics

It doesn't sound like the mandatory straight air is going anywhere, but a number of other changes have been made to snowboarding's Olympic judging system since Shaun White and Torah Bright won halfpipe gold in 2010. Those changes, as well as the system as a whole, were discussed at last week's annual International Ski Federation (FIS) fall meetings in Zurich, Switzerland, as the sport creeps ever closer to the 2014 Sochi Olympics.

The mandatory straight air has long been a (controversial) staple of FIS halfpipe competitions, but in an interview conducted after last week's meetings, FIS snowboard judging chairman Ola Sundequist said he doesn't anticipate FIS nations will vote for its removal before the Olympics, which is the only way it'd be eliminated. Read More

Shaking Hands With The Devil: Final Throw

The truly frustrating thing about the way the Olympic slopestyle qualification debacle has unfolded over the last eighteen months is that we really can’t say we weren’t warned. After all, this entire thing has already been played out once before, when halfpipe and slalom snowboarding were introduced into the 1998 Nagano Games. At least that time, we had naivety and disorganization as an excuse.

This time around, we don’t even have that. Since the Vancouver halfpipe final snagged some of NBC’s highest 2010 viewing figures, certain far-sighted snowboarders have been warning that another hostile takeover was on the cards. The recent controversy about tennis underlined once more how fundamentally ridiculous it is that a ski federation looks set to control the way snowboarding is represented and organized on the biggest sporting platform on the planet. Read More