Quote:
Originally Posted by bossy22
The issue (or non-issue) we had here was that the athletes who compete on the world tour and are never judged by FIS judges. They came in expecting what the x-games and dew tour want. Big jumps and progression, as it relates to those jumps. It was thought that the winner would have to do at minimum two triple corks, maybe three.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by bossy22
Sage, who has never won a gold on the world tour, just did what he does best. It's his thing to be the creative, out-there guy, and that is what the FIS judges wanted.
Personally, this is one of the few times I've agreed with FIS. I liked that the rails were given some weight instead of just a lead up to the jumps.
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1000% correct, with a major caveat: this is all an attempt to rationalize how the judges did things. We don't really know if this is what the judges were thinking when they scored SNB slope. It's just a justification for how things turned out. Everyone was guessing what they wanted, including the riders, as you pointed out. It's possible they weren't trying to reward style or grab variety, and simply didn't have a clue what they were doing. Maybe they legitimately thought that a 1620 was a more technical trick than a triple 14. Maybe they don't even understand what makes rail tricks more or less difficult. It's totally possible that this was just a crap shoot.
(The other caveat is of course that regardless of what they were doing, these guys won't be judging the ski slope and it's possible that none of this carries over into skiing.)
Now, if you're correct, and they were rewarding style, creativity, grab variety, and putting extra weight on the rails, well congratulations Olympics judges: you have just single-handedly solved a major problem with competitive slopestyle events.
Slopestyle is probably a unique case because of the transition to olympic status but it's a good example of some of the problems with judged sports. I look at this from the skiing perspective, because that's what I know, but it's not terribly different in snowboarding - everyone complains that these events have become too "check the box". If you don't have linked triples, you have zero chance. It's like figure skating with the quad. That is bad, because it stifles creativity and makes people go train on water ramps to learn one money trick that's exactly the same as everyone else's one money trick.
A related issue is that whoever is leading the game dictates the style that you need to win. For example, right now Nick Goepper is on top of competitive slopestyle. The more your run looks like Goepper's run, the higher you'll get scored, because it's relatively easy to compare Bobby Brown's triple cork with a mute grab to Goepper's triple cork with a mute grab and decide whose was better executed. It's not as simple to compare Henrik Harlaut's nose butter double shifty blunt to Goepper's triple, and the practical result is that Henrik suffers. Consequently, you see guys trying to adapt to ski similarly to the dudes who are scoring the best and the contest starts looking very monotonous. They hit the same features and do more or less the same tricks because that's what scores well. It also minimizes the rail features, because if you don't do the triples on the jumps the rails are meaningless anyway. Basically, the contenders are decided on the jumps and the rails may bump one guy up or down 3 or 4 points.
National teams know this is how scoring works, and that's why Tom Wallisch doesn't get an invite for the US (and Joss Christensen, who skis more like Brown and Goepper, does) and Vinnie Gagnier doesn't get to go for Canada. This is a problem, because slopestyle courses are supposed to be about variety and how each rider sees the course and what's possible on the features, rather than trying to copy the favourites and do what they do as well as them. As a result, regardless of country, a lot of the freeskiing community is pulling for Harlaut because we all know he's going ski the course his way and to hell with what the other guys do.
Now, if rails are worth half the score, that changes the game COMPLETELY, because the Russ Henshaws and Bobby Browns of the world tend to keep it pretty safe and stock on the rails, because they know the contest will be won or lost on the jumps. There's no point in taking a risk on the rail features, you basically just have to get through them. Thing is, some of the second tier guys, including Alex Beaulieu Marchand and ESPECIALLY Henrik Harlaut, are better at rails than those guys. If there's a ten point swing because Bobby Brown does a stock 270 on, 270 off of a rail and the other guys do actually cool ####, this gets interesting in a hurry.
Further, if STYLE is actually weighted equally to technical difficulty, you don't need triples to win anymore. The field is now wide, wide open. Who does this benefit? I'm not sure exactly, but it makes for a better contest. And that's true even if Goepper still wins, which he probably should - his genie grab double is the best trick in competitive skiing right now, imo. But if everyone thinks they don't have to do what he does better than he does it in order to knock him out of first, and we see 8 different tricks off the bottom jump, it doesn't even matter who takes gold; the sport wins.