Young Guns Open: Mt Seymour, BC

The unofficial recap thread. Note: I left before the awards ceremony. So someone could probably add to this.

Okay, so before I say anything else, let me point out how much praise and so forth is owed to Mike Nick, Iannick B., J lev, Jeff Schmuck, Mt. Seymour and others involved in putting this thing on. There are so many ways this could've gone wrong or not gone on at all, from the snow to the fog to the lift situation to... hell, the walkie talkies not working, and it's downright amazing that this whole deal went off as smoothly and as well as it did.

Now as for the comp... I got up at just after 10 am when the prelims were supposed to start expecting to get rained on. Instead, the 90+ km/h gusting winds were there as expected, but instead of the rain, a hail-like substance was pelting from the sky at a nearly horizontal angle and a stream of skiers could be seen migrating towards... the lodge. Thanks to the winds, the lifts were closed, and the qualifiers had been postponed until sometime around noon. So we ended up sitting in the lodge and having a beer. Which was a lot nicer than sitting outside would've been.

But eventually the comp had to get under way... so it did, sometime around noon. The lifts still weren't open, so we had to hike up to the park in the torrential blizzard of hail and wind and... okay, it pretty much sucked is what I'm trying to say. Watching the prelims while trying not to freeze my hands off and taking shelter in the trees, it looked like the day was going to be more or less a disaster just because of factors out of everyone's control... like say weather. It got bad enough that while eating a hot dog and watching kids eat it on the soft landing and attempt to jib the painfully slow rails, Iannick B. was heard to remark as he removed his sandwich from the barbecue, "One of you kids is going to earn your sponsorship after today." And damn was he right.

So anyway, skip ahead skip ahead skip ahead. To be honest I went in after heat 1 of qualifiers, apparently heat 3 was the strongest. After skiing a few laps up a really slow chair which seems even slower in the dark finals started. And they kicked all ass. Start with the girls. At one point Mike Nick pointed out how incredibly close the finalists were... Sasha Chernenkoff, Emily... last name escapes me, and Maude Ramone (sp?). Sasha dropped a styled sw 3 and greased the dub kink (dfd) nicely, and Maude nailed a sw 3 of her own and a huge 5, and possibly most impressively of all gapped the down and flat sections of the dub kink going for a disaster... though she didn't stick it, it drew applause, and the guy standing next to me expressed no small amount of shock that that was a girl he'd just seen.

As for the guys' side, there was plenty of good skiing going down in extremely marginal conditions. The landing was soft and a lot of people were sinking in, and speed judgment seemed to be an issue, some going bigger than they might've expected and casing, others hitting the knuckle. Notables were Witt Foster, making a comeback from being hospitalized with a rib injury a few weeks ago, who threw what may have been a sw 7, I couldn't see thanks to the fog, but the impressive part was he went way off to one side and landed in the untracked part of the landing, essentially a switch powder in park landing... he didn't stick it, but it was pretty damn cool. I don't know how old Andrew Pool is, but he stuck a massive cork 9 in fog so thick the judges could barely make him out and had to ask what he did, there's no way he could've seen the landing, and was holding it down on the rails as well, kid fucking rips. Coby Trudell went absolutely huge tossing out 9s, and there were even some rodeos tossed in to the delight of whoever the fuck it was who had the mic... the hits that most impressed me were Joe Schuster's: A sw cork 7 truck driver on his first hit (smooth, huge, styled) and a no-grab switch cork 9 on the 2nd hit to 180 on the step up right past the judges. On the rail section, Stu stuck back to back switchups on some of the slowest jibs ever, and Coby impressed with a 450 disaster on the dub kink, which Joe tried to match, but he fell the one time I saw him try it... not sure if he got it later. AJ from Bend, OR, basically made the bottom flat bar his bitch with switch 27s on and switch on to switch up when most of the finalists were having trouble just getting to the end of the fucking thing.

All in all it started out basically shitty because of weather, but the final was sick. If Joe did win it, he deserved it. But there were at least a few riders there who would've deserved it as well. Hard to imagine how good it could've gone if the weather had cooperated.