Big Air at the Beijing Olympics

By Krystal Hu

BEIJING (Reuters) – Give attention to snowboard and freeski Huge Air on the 2022 Beijing Olympics:

THE ABSOLUTE BASICS

It’s about taking part in large within the air. Gamers slide down a 60-metre excessive ramp that curls up on the finish and shoot themselves into the sky the place they carry out gravity-defying methods and twists.

Huge Air athletes win by incomes as many factors as potential by every leap, combining the best scores from two of their three runs.

Factors are scored by problem, execution, amplitude and touchdown. Grabbing the skis as mid-flip methods within the air is as necessary as sticking the touchdown.

HOW MANY MEDALS?

There are 4 gold medals up for grabs, one every within the males’s and girls’s freeski and snowboard Huge Air occasions.

WHAT HAPPENED IN PYEONGCHANG?

Snowboard Huge Air made its Olympic debut at Pyeongchang 2018. Canada’s Sebastien Toutant nabbed the primary males’s snowboard Huge Air gold medal. Austria’s Anna Gasser received the ladies’s occasion after nailing her cab double cork 1080 trick.

WHAT CAN WE EXPECT IN BEIJING?

In freeski Huge Air’s Olympic debut, China’s newest nationwide darling Eileen Gu is seen as a gold medal hopeful within the ladies’s occasion together with French freestyle skier Tess Ledeux, who shook the world along with her new methods within the X Video games final month.

Alex Corridor, the slopestyle and freeski Huge Air specialist from Workforce USA is a agency podium risk within the males’s occasions.

Su Yiming, the one Chinese language snowboarder to win a World Cup Huge Air title, is predicted to make a breakthrough for the hosts.

WHAT’S NEW?

Freeski Huge Air is one among seven disciplines debuting on the 2022 Olympics with the purpose of constructing the Video games extra interesting to a youthful viewers. The game has been gaining in recognition at excessive competitions, together with the X Video games, for years.

WHEN IS IT HAPPENING?

The freeski competitors takes place from Feb. 7-9 and snowboarding runs from Feb. 14-15.

WHERE IS IT HAPPENING?

Huge Air Shougang within the Shijingshan District of Beijing has been constructed to host the Huge Air occasions. Positioned in a former metal mill, it’s the world’s first everlasting Huge Air venue and the one snow occasion venue in downtown Beijing.

HOW DID WE GET HERE?

Huge Air has been an FIS World Cup occasion since 2003 and has been on the X Video games far longer. It’s the excessive model of slopestyle, an Olympic self-discipline that itself debuted in 2014.

WELL FANCY THAT

Within the 1977 film “The Spy Who Cherished Me”, James Bond famously escapes assassins by snowboarding off a cliff and opening a parachute, a scene which impressed trailblazing Huge Air skiers just like the late Canadian Shane McConkey.

(Reporting by Krystal Hu; Enhancing by Ken Ferris)