In recent years snowboarding has become one of the most technically demanding sports on the planet thanks to its exceptional professionals, but the stars of the future are working hard to keep up. A performance camp could well be the way forward…
“It’s just like a video game right now, watching some of these kids,” says Polish snowboarder Wojtek Pawlusiak. “They have such self-confidence.”
“They make it look so easy,” agrees Marc Swoboda from Austria. “They throw down a Double and they don’t even think about it. They just do it. There are guys like Travis Rice out there doing really big, messed-up stuff, but when it comes to slopestyle, these kids are right up there.”
Some of the kids are in the next room, where English rider Jamie Nicholls and Canadian Sebastien Toutant, both 17 years old, and 16-year-old Mark McMorris, also from Canada, are sitting on the couch with their Apple Mac laptops comparing video clips from the Red Bull Snowboard Performance Camp.
The camp, in August, brought together some of the top professional and junior snowboarders from around the world for two weeks’ intensive training at Snow Park, New Zealand’s premier terrain park.
According to Andy Walshe, co-ordinator of the performance crew, the idea was, “to set up a world-class training environment with world-class coaches where the riders could practise things with a little bit of risk, but mostly a lot of reward”.
He adds, “In terms of progression, we had to set the bar really high, because both the juniors and the pros were already really good but all of them did something new on the bag and almost everyone brought that to the snow.”
For the full story pick up the September Red Bulletin Magazine.
Comments
Add a comment