Halfpipe is gnarly, highly technical and extremely difficult. It's also dying. You might disagree on that point, and I'm interested to hear your arguments but to you I put the following: Less and less resorts have pipes, the tricks are increasingly incomprehensible to the layman and altogether things aren't going so well for the 'sport'. Sure the Olympics are a big deal and yes, X-Games and Dew Tour roll around each year but in terms of the general perception of pipe skiing/skiers, that's pretty much it. You could argue that slopestyle is the same but plenty of slope guys still make edits, some even still shoot movie parts. But you almost never hear of a pipe skier or indeed anything about halfpipe aside from at the times of those events.
https://www.newschoolers.com/videos/watch/791844/Joffrey-Pollet-Villard---Saas-Fee-2015
And then this guy appears. He doesn't dub, rarely if ever spins more than 9s and still manages to just about hang with the top guys in the comps. He does so by going fucking massive, and this edit is no exception. He also has something which, aside from a few exceptions, most pipe skiers seem to lack: a persona. It's all very well being good at skiing, but if people only care once or twice a year and then you disappear, that's going to be hard to market for sponsors. And thus even a lot of the top pipe guys struggle for sponsorship and rely on the federations, kickstarters etc which continues the downward spiral towards aerials obscurity.
We are still a fair way from that stage at this point in time, but I challenge you to refute the claim that pipe is on the way. When was the last time you even saw a predominantly pipe edit, let alone one with this much character? It's been a while, that's for sure. Yet this new JPV edit unquestionably awesome. If you don't like it, where's your soul? And by 'it', I mean the general idea not the little details like the music or the clothes he's wearing, because 'it' might just inspire something of a comeback. And Halfpipe can be pretty rad so that'd be awesome to see.
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