In the second semester of ninth grade, I was awarded a free period because my grades were really good in the first semester. They were awarding free periods to over-performing fifteen year olds during the height of the Clash Royale craze. Think about that. Were we going to use that time to study? Become better citizens? Productive in a hybrid workforce? All I knew was I could leave campus and walk 0.2 miles to the nearest McDonalds which was the proverbial ‘desert spring’ in the wifi-barren block of Bozeman High School. At McDonalds, I would order a bacon egg biscuit and a hashbrown, sometimes a coffee, about 10$ a day then go to the counter where there was a charging port, prop up my phone, and watch SLVSH. I watched every game of the first SLVSH Cup Grandvalira (2016) at this counter, drooling over my BECB, a proportionally dubious but delicious piece of food. Razor thin, sharp fake cheese, dry, structurally corrupt biscuit, McDonalds formula bacon, lumped into a handheld flavor bust. Wow. Wash it down with a coffee bev that probably passed into market after it killed a squirrel during the trial period and got signed into law by its power to unify the nation. I would do this and I would watch SLVSH. Every day. At that time in my life, it was arguably my favorite thing about school.

SLVSH has been a constant in my life since then. I’ve definitely watched every game, I’ve watched certain games over 10 or 20 times. I’ve made and remade brackets for every tournament. I’ve invested concerning hours into multiple spreadsheets trying to break down what it takes to win these games, what it takes to win or predict a cup, only to be called ‘maidenless’ on Newschoolers. Joss, Matt, Napes, Woodsy, and crew have concocted a perfect and intoxicating formula. Sometimes, I’ll put it on as white noise. Rails hissing, muffled claps of historic stomps, Henrik dog impersonations. From an entertainment angle, it’s the gift that keeps on giving. It’s your favorite skiers dueling it out with no scores, strategy, or self-importance to insulate very real skiing interactions, the ebb and flow of riding with your friends and encouraging one another to try shit. It’s in our nature.

What’s so powerful about this medium is how it balances relatability with X factor. This has been the key to SLVSH’s long-term success. For example, something like “Unrailistic” or Nine Knights is pure spectacle, a skiing circus performed by Redbull-clad tightrope walkers built by mega corp for the sole purpose of stunt-maxing for an audience that has no investment in the freestyle skiing subculture. With SLVSH taking place in public parks and showcasing pro skiers in a more organic setting, the average viewer is engaged at an intimate level. Yes, less than 1% of SLVSH viewers have ever done a switch right 5, let alone a Bio 810 270 out onto a flat down box (the greatest trick in SLVSH history?). But we can still dream and SLVSH lets us do that. It’s a broadcast of skiing that is progressive in structure, collaborative at its core, and so damn consistent in quality.

The SLVSH Cups (and the newly debuted Jib League) form the apex of all of these great qualities and there’s so much we can celebrate about what SLVSH has brought to skiing up until this point. It’s a canon of electric and idiosyncratic jibbing moments that will live much longer in our brains than any slopestyle run from the 2018 Olympics. With each Cup, it seems the level of skiing has been getting higher and higher. A steep curve with exhilarating results. If you could quantify the “competitiveness” of these events, you would probably base it on things like game length, letters between both riders, are the skiers trying new tricks, skiing NBDs etc. When you track these indicators up into the reaches of the later rounds and aggregate all this silly data, you would find a general trend of increased competition year on year.

That is until now. 2024. SLVSH CUP Grandvalira. The competition has experienced a true blip in an otherwise faultless track record. A schism among fans and philosophies. Observing this as a fan meant getting down into the muck of Instagram and YouTube comment sections, really swamping around in the takes. I wanted to organize my own reactions and thoughts to this here. We all felt that this SLVSH Cup was a little different, so let’s go through some of the less controversial reasons first.

At SCGV 2024, there were 7 SLVSH rookies, the most of any 16-man tournament in the organization’s recent history (2023: 6, 2019: 2, 2018: 2). As sick as those 7 rookies are, the rookies of SLVSH actually kind of resemble the rookies of other popular sports. If you watch the NBA at all, the raw power and talent of first-year players can be electrifying. In moments. It's extremely rare that that buzz can last a full season or even a few stat lines in a row. Streakiness is the red letter of the rookie. Consistency is the true marker of a superstar. All the NBA fans are probably on their knees, hands up to God, praying that fucker strikes me down and forces me to acknowledge Wemby or Lebron in this piece. And all the SLVSH fans are screaming at me with equal vitriol, saying what about Henrik?! Dollo?! Skiing’s mouthpiece for New York boom-bap??? He won it all! It's simple: Henrik is just different. Lebron is different. Wemby is different. They are outliers. Inside the field of understanding, we know that the more rookies or second-year players make up a team, the worse a team is likely to be compared to more generationally-diverse groups. It’s the same concept. Having more rookies in a SLVSH tournament will make for a more unbalanced tournament, not from a talent standpoint but from an endurance one. You simply get an IQ buff from being in multiple SLVSH Cups or playing a few SLVSH games, making for more dialogic, longer games between competitors.

Thus, I do think the inexperience of the rookie riders set a sanity bar for the tournament which fell under the insanity of years previous. Also, everyone looked and sounded hungover to the max in every game, I don’t know what kind of Andorran elixir Joss was siphoning them in the apres hours. Had to have been strong. No jump too, let’s bring that back. Minor reasons aside, the real meat of this post is on the cost of competition. What does it take to win? What does sportsmanship look like in SLVSH? How do you manage a competition that's built its brand on friendships and progression versus a format that forefronts the basic structural rewards of competition: winning and losing?

In last year’s edition of Grandvalira, what it took to win was simply the deepest bag. That bag was slung over the shoulder of Ferdinand Dahl, freeskiing’s beloved fashionista and Norwegian small business owner. Ferdi went the distance after tasting the bronze in the previous Grandvalira edition (2019) and no matter what your bracket looked like this time last year, I think most were probably a little pleased to see Ferdi win. The matter in which he won was entertaining too. Over the four games, Ferdi was not perfect, not even close. There were 10 times where Ferdi lost his own set including 3 “Revenge” letters going the wrong way about a quarter of all his sets. The remaining 75.3% translates to landed sets, his offensive rating. They say defense wins championships and that’s usually accurate; Ferdi put up a valiant defensive rating (includes “Revenge” letters awarded to opponents) of 62%, completing ⅗ of his opponents tricks. Out of 43 total sets, he had 22 “style repeats,” a category I came up with to track similar types of tricks across the competition. For example, the two styles of tricks Ferdi did most were forward lip on rotations (lip 2, lip 4, etc) and nosebutter, tailbutter, or tokyo cork/bio rotations. He did variations of these two categories 6 times each, 12 times total, around half of the total style repeats he did. Style repeats were 51% of his total bag and 50% of the letters he gave out. He only did one repeat trick (same trick, same feature) in the entire competition, only repeating it to avenge his own mistake earlier in the game. In fact, it was this Lip 4, FWD to OW Lip 4, SW that took down Canadian hopeful Max Moffatt in an epic finale containing 5 set changes, 9 letters, and 20 sets. 1 trick in 43 sets, that’s about 5%. A SLVSH gold based on creativity, variety, and dogged professionalism.

Fast forward to this year and the stats paint a much different picture of our current champion, home-turf boss Noah Albaladejo. His bag? Much shallower. If Ferdi cozied up in a man-sized duffy, Noah was crammed in a coin purse. If you watched any of the games, you don’t need to be told this. You were likely lulled to sleep by the lullaby of safety land holding calls. However, I think it's important to employ some stats to ground us in reality. The comment section on all these games is full of extreme, reactionary nonsense you get in any comment section. Shit like “This dude is ruining SLVSH,” “Get Noah out of the games,” and “Holy shit Noah's games suck so much ass” qualify as unproductive drivel. This post is not to platform these people even if I understand the fuel behind the fire. I want to give context to what we just saw and what it means for SLVSH moving forward. So back to the stats.

Of Noah’s 38 total sets, he had 28 style repeats and 13 direct repeat tricks, accounting for 85.5% and 65% of all the tricks or lines he attempted. This strategy of repetition, shallow bag full over deep bag empty, sharpened his offensive rating at 85%. Noah’s defense was noticeably worse at only 41.6%. Noah awarded 17 of 20 letters on style repeats, 13 of those tricks directly ripped from past games on the same features (85% of all letters awarded). Apart from 2 red hot revenges in the semifinal against Ryan Stevenson, Noah only had 1 trick (5%) he got someone on that didn’t mimic or pull from a trick he had already done. Watching that semifinal, I was red hot too. The resting emotion for me while watching SLVSH is usually thrill or dumbfoundedness, how the fuck did they do that, uhhhhh so sick, etc. This semi-final game had stakes in the way an NBA playoff game did, it felt like 2016 Game 7, Bron vs the Warriors, and I’m showing out for the Land. I wanted Noah to lose, I really did. And then I started to question that impulse.

Is it “wrong” that Noah keeps winning on safety grab land holding, three games in a row? Is it “wrong” to use your strongest trait against your opponent who you know probably can’t do it? Is the SLVSH framework, designed to prove one skill set against another in a way that is actually objective and completion-based, flawed? Would we rather have something more subjective but somehow more mechanized like FIS? No! The answer to all these questions is no. Doing the same trick over and over again is within the rules and in 10 years of SLVSH, it’s not been an issue. But despite it being legal, Noah’s approach does raise some philosophical questions and unintended consequences.

First of all, it makes for extremely predictable viewing. That’s not what SLVSH is about. Other head-to-head extreme sport games have actually had this same problem before. A level-headed commenter made the point that skateboarding’s once hallowed "Battle Of The Berrics” …added “No boneless, no grabs” rules because the ones able to do it were abusing it and the games were done in like 2 minutes.” Noah was channeling the “spirit of competition”, but the kind that would haunt you in the form of starchy XXL Harlaut Apparel snowpants hovering over your bed like a sleep paralysis demon. It’s a spirit of competition that leans away from the type of collaborative and sportsmanlike middle ground that most other SLVSH games achieve. It’s hard to know what’s going on in between shots but from what the viewer sees, Noah goes ahead on a lot of these tricks with little to no discussion and then refuses to reciprocate the same effort on defense. That’s not really the SLVSH way either. The first game, fine, pretty sick when done so proper. The second game, questionable. The semifinal? Eye-rolling. Arriving at the final, the outcome was already predetermined based on the rock-paper-scissors. If Noah lost it, Seb would have front three swapped his ass into a hysteric episode. That would have been lame too. So, what does all this mean for SLVSH’s future?

Some want this future discourse-free. For people commenting “Damn skiing don’t need this much hate everyone gotta chill,” I can appreciate the intention. But you’re missing the point. It’s ok to take issue with a thing, if you want the thing you love to last. It’s probably not everyone in the comments, but I love SLVSH. And you can’t hate something till you love it. But just to hate is stupid, I want to give SLVSH a few ideas that they could implement into the next Cup. One, under 7 rookies is probably smart. Or go all rookies, let them cook! Two, niche tricks specific to players don’t need to go away but a disclaimer about trick spam at the start of a game, 1 safety slide, 1 goalie grind, 1 hippy killer, etc. wouldn’t hurt. Third, the trivia crack rule could use an update. In the rare event of a back to back trivia crack, I say keep the fun going, have the set switch back after letter 4. All in the name of getting SLVSH back to its Steve Stepp glory days. It may not seem like it, but I’m already looking forward to Grandvalira 2025. I’ll never stop.