No, this does NOT require its own thread. Anyways: I initially had the same reaction as all y'all as to how he held himself, and to his defense, he had no idea he was on camera so who the fuck actually cares. Was he mad at the judges? At himself? Besides what we think, he is just a person who both lives skiing and always wants to do better. Hell, even A Hall showed a moment of unsportsmanlike behavior in Big Air - the whole idea that the park community for both skiing and snowboarding must always be friendly isn't true to reality. Yes our community is fucking amazing, but shit, humans are emotional.
In the early days of park skiing 'we' removed ourselves from FIS and attempted to create our own world of competition. A world where style is a factor and there are no strict regulations. We don't need to be preauthorised for tricks - let alone call our tricks in advance, and there are no limits set on which tricks are allowed.
Style is very much still a very integral aspect of our sport within competition. Bringing up A Hall again: his Buick grab IMO doesn't feel extremely hard (compared to say a seatbelt Japan), but he gets points for it simply because it is different. It is hard to explain in layman's terms what makes a certain style good or bad, but for those of us in the sport, we just know.
Now. Figure skating.
I don't follow figure skating, nor have I ever really. My whole life figure skating has always had an aura of controversy, scandal, abuse, and overall the legitimacy of the sport has always felt like its on the edge of implosion due to corruption from both the athletes, coaches and whispers of bought judges.
Point is: since I have been involved with park skiing back when it started I have always had this bad feeling in the back of my head where a judged sport that relies heavily on style (artistic impression if you will) is always at risk of falling into the same issues that plague figure skating.
While I didn't watch any of the woman's figure skating in these Olympics, I sure as shit am aware of the chaos that resulted. From my perspective as someone who, while isn't involved in figure skating, is deeply ingrained in skiing I think we all need to be aware of the lessons that can be learned from what happened AGAIN in figure skating.
In closing, I am not only aware of the distaste towards Andri (and all those that came before him), I agree with the sentiment, but I think how we focus those emotions can make or break our sport. A Halls Buick grab gets him points, but if the judges decide that they are over it and start docking him points on run 2 of the finals at X Games without warning because they don't like it anymore there is nothing within the rulebook to say otherwise. Similarly, Antoine Adelisse with his pre nose switch trick.
Shit - Goepper got silver with a switch 1260 and two forward 1440s in the jumps. On paper that's not great.
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